Should You Build or Buy LMS Software in a World of AI 2026?

Build or buy LMS software? Compare costs, timelines & features to choose the right path for your training needs. Get expert insights now.

In this informative video, we delve into the crucial decision of whether to build or buy your Learning Management System (LMS) software. Explore the pros and cons of each option, highlighting key factors like cost, customization, and scalability. By the end of the video, you’ll have the insights needed to make an informed choice for your organization.

Here are 6 sharp, discussion-ready questions for that episode:

#1 – The AI cost curve — With AI coding tools making custom builds faster and cheaper than ever, at what point does “build” actually beat “buy” in 2026 — and has that tipping point moved in the last year?

#2 – Vendor lock-in vs. control — If AI features become the main battleground for LMS vendors, are schools and companies risking getting locked into a roadmap they don’t control by buying instead of building?

#3 – The maintenance trap — Everyone talks about build cost, but who’s actually budgeting for the ongoing cost of keeping an AI-powered custom LMS updated as models and APIs change every few months?

#4 – Buy now, build later? — Is there a hybrid path — buying a core LMS but building custom AI layers on top — that beats an all-or-nothing decision?

#5 – Data as the real asset** — When an AI tutor or grading engine learns from your learners’ data, who really owns that intelligence if you’re renting it from a SaaS platform versus building it in-house?

#6 – The skills gap question** — Most schools and small orgs don’t have in-house AI engineers — does that reality alone settle the build-vs-buy debate before cost even enters the conversation?

This Week’s Sponsors

Jetpack: LifterLMS

Ninja Forms: Ninja Forms

LifterLMS: LifterLMS

Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro

The Show’s Main Transcript

[00:00:16.660] – Jonathan Denwood

Welcome back to the Membership Machine Show, folks. This is episode 183. In this show, we’re going to discuss whether you should build or buy LMS software. If you’re an organization, university, a college, a school, association, nonprofit, or commercial business, should you build your own learning management system or should you build, or should you purchase one? I think personally the landscape is changing dramatically in mid-2023. 2026, and we’re going to be helping you understand some of the key factors that you have to understand in this decision. I’ve got my co-host Kurt with me. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:01:07.380] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, Jonathan, my name is Kurt, Kurt Von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana No Más, and we do a lot of great work with WP-Tonic. Jonathan, could you repeat what episode we’re on? Because that number was higher than I thought.

[00:01:21.950] – Jonathan Denwood

Oh my God, it’s wrong. I thought it was 1A.

[00:01:24.360] – Kurt von Ahnen

No, no, I’m not, I’m not double-checking you. I’m just surprised we have that many shows in the can.

[00:01:30.220] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s disturbing, isn’t it? All right, um, yeah, we don’t hear much. We’d love you to join us. Um, we attempt to do these on, um, around Thursday, around 2 PM Pacific Standard. And what time is that for you, Kurt?

[00:01:55.300] – Kurt von Ahnen

4 o’clock, sir.

[00:01:56.130] – Jonathan Denwood

4 o’clock. 4 o’clock Central Time. If you’ve got any questions, you can join us on YouTube, and we’ll— or on LinkedIn, and we’ll answer your questions. So do you want to start off with what you think about this topic, and what I think is an interesting topic?

[00:02:18.700] – Kurt von Ahnen

And I think, you know, as you described the landscape changing, I’m going to give you a little leeway there, but I’m going to go in the Wayback Machine to when I was a corporate L&D manager, L&D, learning and development, right? And so what’s so amazing is, like in the professional learning space, the terminologies and things are different, but I was an L&D manager and a couple of the platforms that I was forced to work with, Jonathan, were custom builds. They were like, “Oh, you know you have SCORM; you’re going to need a custom build.” And like, one was like cobbled together on top of some outdated Oracle thing, some kind of database, and it didn’t even work. Like, we would send— it was in such need of rebuilding, rehabilitation, whatever you want to call it. We would have to send the SCORM packages as zip files to the vendor. The vendor would unzip the files, load them up to the system independently, and then try to make it all work, right? Whereas like, you know, if you have a SCORM-compliant website, you’ll upload a zip file and 2 minutes later you’re taking a course.

[00:03:25.250] – Kurt von Ahnen

It used to take us weeks just to load a course. So when someone says, do you want to build a custom LMS or do you want to use something off the shelf? Invariably, I’m going to search for what’s already existing.

[00:03:39.060] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think that’s a great intro. Before we go into the other part of the discussion, um, I’ve got a couple of messages from our sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:03:49.850] – Speaker 4

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[00:04:29.400] – Jonathan Denwood

Wp-tonic.com.

[00:04:30.160] – Speaker 4

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[00:05:10.170] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. Got some great free resources for you. If you’re looking to build a membership website, we’ve got some special offers from the sponsors. Plus we’ve got a really cheap course done by Kirk himself. That will show you how to build a membership or learning management system from beginning to end. To find all these goodies, go over to wp-tonic.com/deals, wp-tonic.com/deals. Well, I think the elephant in the room is AI and I’m not gonna, I’m gonna leave it to the end, the teaser. I think you can build a custom LMS a lot cheaper now using AI, but I’m gonna leave the recommendation to the end, which is a hybrid solution, which I’m the most excited about. I think being— I think there’s a lot of organizations and companies out there that would like a more customized solution, but it was just totally out of their price point. And I actually think the ability to customize solution to the individual organization’s needs to some extent is going to grow. I just think that’s the reality, Kirk. But I think there’s a hybrid solution and I think you know where I’m going with this. So I would be very wary of somebody totally building a custom solution from the ground up because there has to be really good communication and you really have to have experience in this sector to actually guide the customer, the client, because a lot of people, they just don’t— they don’t really understand or really know what is really required to have a system that really works to their satisfaction.

[00:07:33.170] – Jonathan Denwood

How would you respond to what I’ve just said? Who?

[00:07:40.110] – Kurt von Ahnen

I put a comment in and I said, you know, use case. And the timeline is a big driver for me. So, little known fact, I don’t think you even know this, Jonathan. Yesterday I Vibe-coded something and built a website out of a Vibe-coded product, and it was a lead magnet for one of my LMS projects that I felt confident in Vibe-coding in, in using AI because of the simplicity of the project. It’s not going to need, you know, tons of updates and rebuilds, right? It’s, it’s built, it’s static, it uses AI calculates some stuff, gives them an answer. It’s a lead magnet. Um, I felt really confident in that because of the use case. It was, it was simple and I needed it quickly. And I know that I could turn it off in 3 months and, and not really be upset. I think when someone is building a sizable project, you know, something with 5 or 6 courses and each course has 15 lessons and each lesson has 5 videos and, you know, those projects scale, they become large. And that much work takes a lot of labor to build. And I think if you’re going to put that much labor into something, you want to put it on something that’s a known quantity and reliable.

[00:08:58.040] – Kurt von Ahnen

And that’s, that’s why I’m such a fan of, of something off, off the shelf. That said, with the new advancements in WordPress and, you know, integrating AI and some of these plugins and tools being real AI-friendly, you can do a lot with AI but still have the security of the platform.

[00:09:17.270] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. So let’s move on. So I put down vendor locking versus control. I think using SaaS products is great, but you’re locked in, aren’t you? And companies’ requirements change. They find out that they want to integrate it with other systems that they’re using, blah, blah, blah. I think that’s the main thing people didn’t, don’t realize. And then you also got the question, if you’re just buying per a purpose-built solution, a learning management system, is intellectual property control. Um, and what I mean by that is the ability to export courses, exp— you know, if you’ve built a lot of courses, and you want to export them and get them into something else, that’s when you really hit a brick wall. So how would you respond to that?

[00:10:21.270] – Kurt von Ahnen

I have a customer right now that has a course in Kajabi and he is asking me how difficult it’s going to be to move that course into a WordPress property that he has, you know, and going from WordPress to WordPress, you know, it’s a migration.

[00:10:37.190] – Speaker 4

It’s—

[00:10:37.350] – Kurt von Ahnen

or course-wise, you know, it’s an export and import. It’s, it’s done. Moving something from one of these SaaS platforms to another platform in many cases becomes a very manual, you know, copy and paste, reformat, you know, do you have your original files type question. And so I do agree that when you get into the SaaS market, again, use case could be different. Maybe you just need to run something for a fiscal quarter for some kind of business project or something. I totally get that. But if you’re looking for longevity, consistency, reliability, I think you need to own it.

[00:11:14.410] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I would agree. The maintenance trap or the ongoing support fees, and especially if you’re a medium-sized organization, they can be quite hefty, can’t they?

[00:11:33.540] – Kurt von Ahnen

Yeah, yeah, it really adds up over time, especially the platforms where you’re paying per user, like user licensing fees and things like that. It can add up real quickly. I have a lot of corporate exposure to people paying well over 6 figures a year to host and maintain an e-learning website.

[00:11:54.090] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s when they, when they’re paying for each seat, each— it can be active or non-active. Or it could be just the active students. All these different SaaS platforms in the medium size. And it also affects the aimed at the more individual small organization like Kajabi. But when you get into some of the larger SaaS-based learning management systems, it can get very expensive because they’re seat-based, a lot of them. You know, the more students you have active, or they could be even inactive, the cost increase quite substantially, folks. And I put that under maintenance because that’s the only way I can justify how they’re paying that. Um, but they would say it’s you know, because it’s building a custom solution. I just don’t see how these models, um, in the next couple years are going to be defendable, really. I think, you know, organizations that are using them aren’t going to change straight away, but it’s going to be less and less defendable. What do you think?

[00:13:15.870] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, more than just defendable is the outright plagiarism that sometimes exists in the platform. Platforms. I mean, it wasn’t that long ago that Udemy was under a lot of scrutiny because they had a lot of third-party course creators that had copied course material from other courses and then uploaded it to Udemy as their own. And that giant marketplace that they run put them in a position of, you know, recommending plagiarized courses and actually taking sales away from the original course creators. It was, it was a pretty ugly thing. And when we think about Skool, Kajabi, Udemy, they all operate on that same kind of like, hey, you get access to our marketplace. But as much as that seems like a benefit, it’s, it, there’s also cons to that. And so if you don’t have the, the audience or the strength in your brand to direct people properly, if you’re in those SaaS platforms with those marketplaces, you can actually lose audience. By being in those platforms.

[00:14:16.970] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. And, um, the next thing— oh, I think we’ve done that. Um, so, um, I think it’s a good place for us to have our break. And when we come back, we’ve got some other, um, things to discuss that I think you need to know about this decision. And it should be a fabulous second half. We’ll be back in a few moments, folks.

[00:14:38.940] – Speaker 4

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[00:15:16.040] – Speaker 1

This podcast episode is brought to you by LifterLMS, the leading learning management system solution for WordPress. If you or your client are creating any kind of online course, training-based membership website, or any type of e-learning project, LifterLMS is the most secure, stable, well-supported solution on the market. Go to lifterlms.com and save 20% at checkout with coupon code PODCAST20. That’s PODCAST20. Enjoy the rest of your show.

[00:15:53.780] – Jonathan Denwood

We’re coming back, folks. I want to point out I do a great newsletter. It’s normally based on the podcast. Then I add some additional information, links, and other materials that you will find interesting. It’s totally done by me, um, it’s totally free. You can get this by going over to wp-tonic.com/newsletter. wp-tonic.com/newsletter. So let’s go into it. Um, buy now, build later. There’s a hybrid path, buying your core LMS, building it, customizing it. I’m going to leave that to the last because, yeah, and then let’s go on to the next one, data as the real asset. I think this is the other area things are going to change, isn’t it? Because I think corporate training in the next 2, 2 to 3 years is dramatically gonna change. There’s gonna be a lot. You, I’ve saw some adverts. I think the language industry’s starting to change quite dramatically because they’ve got AI tutors and you know, you used to just have kind of a course and they would say phrases and you would repeat them. To yourself. And then you had the industry of group or individual language coaches, and you could learn online, or you could go to a language school, a physical one.

[00:17:38.210] – Jonathan Denwood

But a lot of people will— but now you’ve got AI, haven’t you? You’ve got IA coaches, and that’s dramatically changing the language industry. I see that kind of interaction and training through AI becoming increasingly part of online education. What do you reckon?

[00:18:02.900] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, you know, think about our local friend here, Adam in Hutchinson. He’s got a thing, uh, Sales Leader Pro, or I can’t remember now. Um, and I should— I hear I’m trying to pimp them. Um, He’s got an AI tool and it’s all sales-based. So it, it basically does make-believe role-play phone calls with you, and then AI analyzes, you know, your vocal tone, your, uh, your cadence and speech, the words that you use, your answers, and it grades you and then gives you advice on how you could do better at like overcoming sales objections and things. Um, The group that I do the powersports training for, Hero Hub, they have a thing called DealerPro. And DealerPro is a very similar thing. Sales, service, parts experts, they use— it’s an iPad application. They sign in with the iPad and they do a sample call. And then they talk on that sample call, then AI analyzes that call and gives them feedback on how they could handle customers better. It’s pretty interesting.

[00:19:13.880] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, it’s only area that I can see growing and it’s a clear path on online education. Um, I think the human elements are still going to be important, like group discussions, group support, um, really, um, being led by a real tutor, but these will be areas where you could have more individual coaching, coaching at a price that would be unaffordable for a lot of people. So I don’t see it as a bad thing. I just think it’s all up in the air at the present moment, basically how this is going to work out and what is effective and what isn’t. The skills gap question. I think most organized small to medium organizations won’t be able to afford in-house AI, AI, AI engineers. And this is where the agency will be able to step in and provide those services. I just really see that. And the agencies that don’t adapt, I think, in the next couple of years are going to just be left behind. What do you reckon, Kurt?

[00:20:33.960] – Kurt von Ahnen

I am on the fence. I’ve been on the fence with this AI thing since its inception. I was really reticent to promote AI. I’m not an AI bro by any, any description, but I use it all the time. And I think what I’m seeing, Jonathan, is AI is, is a very integral part of our workflow. I also truly believe that a reasonable agency is going to have a reliable tech stack, like they’re going to know what they’re familiar with, what they’re experts in. At the end of the day, with— let’s call it supplemental software, right? Because you have your, you have your solid tech stack that you use and then you’ve got all these customization requests, these custom CSS, all these things. I think from a supplemental software perspective, that stuff’s free. Like in a day, in the years of AI, this, that, that’s free. That’s— so if software is free, what does the agency actually sell? And I think that’s the expertise, the problem solving, the communication. And that’s— I think agencies need, really need to refocus on how they are identifying clients’ problems and answering the questions to those problems rather than trying to sell, you know, anything.

[00:21:53.800] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think because I think that you do know, you do need to know this, folks. And I think, I think it’s linked to my end point, which is the hybrid. I think using something like LifterLMS that’s had years of build out and using the WordPress platform, you can, could be the bridge between total custom solution, which has its, has its own problems. And the price is going to be reduced by using AI coding. But the consequences that big organizations found themselves will just migrate down. And those consequences of total customization is locking, is actually the coding side of it. Yes, that’s reduced in hours needed, but the amount of consultation, the amount of not ending up with something that is affordable but still useless, there’s a lot of large organizations that have migrated to new learning management systems or, uh, other platforms, and they’ve been a total disaster because the consultation and the planning stage had been rushed or not done correctly. And the consequences is the organization, the large organization, and we’re talking about tens of hundreds of millions of dollars. We’re not talking about small, you know, jobs, small buildouts. We’re talking about massive.

[00:23:51.130] – Jonathan Denwood

And to avoid this, I think building— and I’m much more buoyant about WordPress and about key plugins like LifterLMS because I do think The ability to customize and more to the individual, um, and the need for less plugins. Um, I think there will always be core plugins like Fluent Community, Fluent CMS, because CRM, um, because why would you want to build a total custom solution when it’s already there? It doesn’t make any sense. But a lot of other smaller plugins, um, I just— in the world of AI, I just don’t really think they’re going to be necessary. Um, but where that, where that line is between plugins that will find a position and those that really have no future, um, I don’t know where that line’s going to be. I, I would lie But I do think using a platform that you’re not kind of locked in, that you still have a lot of flexibility. But obviously, if you have a lot of AI customization, it becomes, it becomes really a custom coded solution and you get locked in. It’s finding that happy medium where you’re customizing it to a certain degree, but you’re— that it doesn’t mean that you’re totally locked in.

[00:25:35.740] – Jonathan Denwood

Is this making any sense, or am I waffling?

[00:25:40.140] – Kurt von Ahnen

It’s making some sense, Jonathan. You’re not, you’re not completely in the weeds, but like, I think the choice of the core product is paramount to your success.

[00:25:49.280] – Jonathan Denwood

Yes.

[00:25:49.810] – Kurt von Ahnen

Like you, you mentioned LifterLMS, and obviously I’m biased I work directly for them, but they’re— to your point— well-developed, long in the tooth, still owned by the original owner. Um, you know, not like that Liquid Web episode that happened, right? And so still owned by the original owner, still independently owned, still, still developing, still coming out with new things. I mean, they’re releasing a timer add-on, you know, any day now, right? And so they’re still releasing new features. And so, uh, this is where me and you kind of have a difference of opinion.

[00:26:25.690] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, because— and it’s like fair, because I might be totally wrong.

[00:26:29.380] – Kurt von Ahnen

Lifter has so many features as an LMS that when you look at it— I like, when I look at it, and I’m working with clients and they’re like, well, doesn’t it do this, doesn’t it do that? I’m like, for what? For what’s your purpose?

[00:26:43.220] – Speaker 4

What are you—

[00:26:43.720] – Kurt von Ahnen

What are you trying to drive to? What are you trying to emulate? And it’ll be because they had a Moodle site that did something else, or they had a LearnUpon site that did something else. And as I ask the right questions, I find out, oh, your motivation is to get this. Well, LifterLMS does it this way. And then they go, oh, that makes sense. I find that training people on how the platform actually works usually overcomes the implied requirement for customization. That said, the timer example is perfect. I’ve had lots of corporate clients that needed a timer, and so we had to develop a custom timer as an add-on and add it to the platform. Very easy to do. Uh, Lifter is very friendly in that space, and they’re completely open to it when you add stuff. Um, and it worked really well, but I, I don’t think we had to— I’ve never had a project using Lifter that I had to like customize so much that it didn’t feel like Lifter anymore.

[00:27:44.540] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah, I think, I think that’s what you’ve got to avoid. But I think building custom interfaces that provide more insight into the student’s journey and, and working in what I outlined as the reality of online education and training that’s coming in the next couple of years, being able to build those types of interfaces and also working with other software that the organization might be utilizing as well, which can be very costly. I think it’s about finding that middle ground. There’s a— but there are people on the other side who would disagree with me, Kirk, and say, well, you don’t need LifterLMS; you don’t need WordPress; WordPress is alternate technology. It’s finding that balance, you know, they would say, oh, you can just build it all in AI coding environments, Claude, whatever, Cursor, you know, this is old. And they might be right, but I just, I think what they don’t spell out is the consequence, the pitfalls of totally custom coding. Custom solutions, because they’re not, are they? Because they want to sell you a total custom solution, don’t they? And as the buyer, you’ve got to educate yourself. So hopefully we— I just wanted to give listeners and viewers some things to think about.

[00:29:31.700] – Jonathan Denwood

So I think it’s time to wrap up the show. So Kirk, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to?

[00:29:38.210] – Kurt von Ahnen

Well, on a personal note, I’m available on LinkedIn. I’m the only Kurt Von Ahnen there, and I’m easy to find. Curt Van Onen on LinkedIn. For business, it’s Mañana No Más, and we do work directly with WP-Tonic, so you can always reach me at Curt@WP-Tonic as well.

[00:29:52.980] – Jonathan Denwood

Yeah. If you want to learn more about WP-Tonic, go to the WP-Tonic website. You can book a consultation with us. That’s totally free. Got a ton of resources on the WP-Tonic website and on the WP-Tonic YouTube channel as well. So they’re great free resources. We will be back next week with some more insights. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.

[00:30:18.980] – Speaker 1

Thanks for listening to the Membership Machine Show. Subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes, and leave a rating to support the show. Until next time.

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