What Happened to LearnDash And the 5 Migration Paths Off It in 2026

Cubite is one of these options and publishes this guide. Cubite LMS costs $290 a month or $2,900 a year per site, with unlimited learners and courses.

Short answer (updated November 11, 2026): LearnDash is still sold and updated, so staying is a real option. If you leave, the paths are another WordPress plugin, a hosted course platform, Moodle or Open edX, or Cubite LMS. Starting prices, checked on each vendor's own site on November 11, 2026 for LearnDash, Kajabi, LearnPress, LearnWorlds and Thinkific, and on September 30, 2026 for the others:

• Stay on LearnDash: $350 a year for 1 site, up to $999 a year for 100 sites, now sold through Liquid Web (the Essentials, Pro and Elite tiers, $259, $399 and $599 a year on September 30, 2026, are no longer listed), plus WordPress hosting and any add-ons. Liquid Web still updates it: LearnDash 5.3.0 shipped on November 4, 2026.
• Another WordPress plugin: each has a free core; paid plans start at $199 a year for Tutor LMS, $199 for the first year of LifterLMS (then $398 a year) and $299 for the LearnPress Pro Bundle, which renews at $209.30 (single add-ons from $19).
• A hosted course platform: entry plans billed annually start at $29 a month for Teachable, $42 for Podia, $44 for LearnWorlds, $82 for Thinkific and $143 for Kajabi; on those entry plans LearnWorlds, Teachable and Podia also take a fee per sale, and in select countries Thinkific adds a gateway fee if you take payments through Stripe or PayPal instead of Thinkific Payments; where Kajabi Payments is offered, Kajabi adds 2% on its entry plan if you use an outside processor other than PayPal.
• Moodle or Open edX: free, open-source software that you host yourself or pay someone to run (see our Moodle hosting and Open edX hosting guides). Cubite runs managed Moodle from $690 a month for up to 500 concurrent learners and managed Open edX from $1,260 a month for up to 1,000.
• Cubite LMS: $290 a month or $2,900 a year per site, fully hosted, with unlimited learners and courses and native SCORM, xAPI and a built-in LRS. SSO with Google, GitHub or Facebook sign-in is included at $290; SAML SSO and SCIM are Enterprise.

Updated November 11, 2026: LearnDash's prices refreshed (Liquid Web now sells it by number of sites), and LearnWorlds' and Thinkific's entry prices updated; the same day, LearnPress's bundle prices, Kajabi's fee for outside payment processors, WPML's price line and the cost table's plugin and self-hosted rows were corrected. Updated September 30, 2026: vendor prices re-checked on each vendor's own site, LearnWorlds added, a dated timeline built from Liquid Web's own announcement, and the April 2027 date corrected (it applies to tools Liquid Web is retiring, not to LearnDash). The June 23, 2026 update added the login-portal change and our May 2026 scan of 174 live LearnDash sites.

On April 22, 2026, Liquid Web, which has owned LearnDash since 2021, announced that it was concentrating its WordPress software into four core products: Kadence, LearnDash, The Events Calendar and Give. The StellarWP brand that sat above them is gone, learndash.com now redirects to Liquid Web, and MemberDash's membership tools now ship inside LearnDash. LearnDash itself is still sold and updated: version 5.3.0 shipped on November 4, 2026. The April 2027 date in the announcement is when critical security patches end for the older tools Liquid Web is retiring, and it lists no LearnDash tools among them.

If you run a LearnDash site, this is a good moment to review your options, not an emergency. LearnDash is not shutting down, and Liquid Web says existing customers keep their plan and pricing while the subscription stays active. What changed is the company structure around it and how it is sold. Whether that matters depends on what your LMS does for your business.

The dissolution is not actually the news. The news is what's already running.

In May 2026 we scanned 174 production LearnDash sites visible on the open web. 75 of them (43%) were carrying at least one critical (CVSS ≥ 9) CVE the day we checked. Half (50%) were running an outdated WordPress core. Three out of four of the sites that disclosed a PHP version were running a PHP release the PHP team itself stopped patching. Zero of the 174 sites published a security.txt.

So the question is not whether Liquid Web keeps shipping LearnDash updates; it does. It is whether your site installs them, along with WordPress core, PHP and every add-on. The median site in our scan was not keeping up, and no vendor announcement changes that.

This guide does three things:

1. Lays out what actually happened with dated sources
2. Compares all five realistic LearnDash alternative 2026 paths honestly - including the WordPress plugins, the SaaS platforms, and open-source self-hosting
3. Gives you the migration mechanics for moving courses, learners and progress off LearnDash without losing data.

The all-in alternative: Cubite is a fully hosted LMS at a flat $290/mo ($2,900/yr billed annually) - courses, quizzes, certificates and hosting in one price, with no plugin stack to patch or secure. Before you weigh the five paths below, get a free LearnDash migration assessment that maps what carries over for your specific site; the migration is included at no extra cost with every paid Cubite LMS plan. What Cubite LMS plays natively (SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004 and xAPI with a built-in LRS) and how eleven vendors price SCORM and xAPI is on the SCORM, xAPI and built-in LRS page.

What Actually Happened to LearnDash in April 2026

Here is the dated record, from Liquid Web's and LearnDash's own pages where they exist, each checked on September 30, 2026.

Within a month of the rollout, a fleet-wide scan of 174 live LearnDash sites found 96 of them (55%) carrying at least one publicly-reported CVE - averaging 62 CVEs per affected host. These are not new findings caused by the dissolution. They are pre-existing exposure that the dissolution makes harder to fix.

GiveWP co-founder Devin Walker summarized the mood publicly

The May 2026 rollout itself went badly. Independent reporting from The Repository and Search Engine Journal documented login failures, missing invoices, and lifetime-deal customers unable to confirm what they still owned. A Nexcess product lead (Nexcess is Liquid Web's hosting brand) acknowledged the login issues and missing invoices, and confirmed that lifetime customers keep what they already had.

Is LearnDash shutting down?

No. On April 22, 2026, Liquid Web wound down the StellarWP brand and made LearnDash one of its four core WordPress products. LearnDash is still sold and updated (version 5.3.0 shipped on November 4, 2026). The April 2027 date in Liquid Web's announcement is when critical security patches end for the older tools it is retiring, and it lists no LearnDash tools among them.

What happened to LearnDash?

Liquid Web, which has owned LearnDash since 2021, wound down its StellarWP brand on April 22, 2026 and reorganized its WordPress software into four core products, LearnDash among them. MemberDash's membership tools moved into LearnDash, learndash.com now redirects to Liquid Web, and as of November 11, 2026 LearnDash is sold there by number of sites, from $350 a year for 1 site to $999 a year for 100 (on September 30, 2026 it was sold in three yearly tiers: Essentials $259, Pro $399 and Elite $599). The plugin still ships updates; the April 2027 security-patch date covers only the tools Liquid Web is retiring.

Confirmed facts vs open questions about the LearnDash wind-down

Most coverage of the dissolution blurs what is documented with what is feared. Here is the clean split, with sources, because your decision should rest on the left column, not the right one.

Sources: Liquid Web's announcement and its 2021 press release, LearnDash's pricing page and changelog, and WisdmLabs' dated summary, each read on September 30, 2026. LearnDash is not shut down or discontinued; what changed is the company structure around it and how it is sold.

How Do I Log In to LearnDash Now That It Redirects to Liquid Web?

If you typed learndash.com and landed on Liquid Web, nothing is broken and nothing was stolen. Since May 2026, learndash.com redirects to liquidweb.com. To manage your LearnDash license, invoices and downloads, log in to Liquid Web's software portal at software.liquidweb.com, where older portal links now redirect; LearnDash Cloud customers keep using account.learndash.com.

A few things worth knowing while you are in there: your installed LearnDash plugin keeps working, because the redirect changed where you manage your account, not whether your site runs. As of LearnDash 4.18, licensing is built into the core plugin, so the separate licensing plugin is no longer required. On your first login to the new portal, Liquid Web emails a password reset link to your account address; if it does not arrive, choose Request a new password on the portal's login page. Record your license keys and invoices in your own files now, so you are not dependent on the portal being perfect.

If the redirect has you wondering whether to stay on LearnDash at all, that is the right question. The migration paths above lay out your options, and the next sections cover exactly what each path costs and what data comes with you.

Why This Hits Some LearnDash Users Harder Than Others

LearnDash is not one market. It's two and they need very different responses to the dissolution.

A 2026 study of 240,000 WordPress LMS websites found LearnDash held 34.8% market share overall, powering 83,415 sites. But among sites with high tech spend - the premium segment - LearnDash's share jumps to 60.3%. Customers in that segment include the University of Florida, Yoast, and DigitalMarketer.

"About 70% of LearnDash sites belong to teams of 1–10 people, and the conventional advice for them is 'be patient and plan over 12 months.' Our scan of 174 live LearnDash sites complicates that advice. Among the small-operator segment we sampled:

• 50% were running a WordPress core that's already out of support
• 77% of those exposing a PHP version were running an end-of-life PHP release
• 90% had no HSTS, 87% had no Content-Security-Policy, 81% had no X-Frame-Options
• Average 7.5 third-party plugins detected per site - each one its own patch-cadence problem

The 'wait and see' position assumes someone is keeping the stack patched. For most of the fleet, nobody was patching even before the 2026 consolidation. Patience is a viable strategy if your LearnDash site is genuinely a hobby project; it is not a viable strategy if it processes payments, stores learner PII, or carries a credential."

Should You Migrate Off LearnDash Now, or Wait?

Whether to move now or hold depends almost entirely on your license state. Panic and complacency are both wrong defaults. Here is the honest segmentation. If you are weighing the plugin against the hosted option, see LearnDash self-hosted vs SaaS.

If you have an active LearnDash subscription

You are not on a clock. LearnDash is still maintained, and Liquid Web says your plan and pricing stay the same while the subscription stays active, so plan calmly rather than reacting. Use the time to evaluate alternatives, run a real migration test on staging, and move deliberately if you move at all.

If your renewal is coming up

Decide before auto-renew fires. A lapsed LearnDash subscription forces you to buy a new plan at current pricing ($350 a year for 1 site, up to $999 for 100 sites, as of November 11, 2026) to regain access, so an accidental lapse is the expensive outcome. If you are even considering a move, this is the moment to choose: renew intentionally for another planned year, or migrate before the renewal and redirect that spend into the new platform.

If you are on a lifetime or legacy license

You are grandfathered and your install keeps working, but adopt an exit-ready posture so you move on your timeline, not theirs: keep tested backups, record your license keys and invoices in your own files (account management moved to Liquid Web during the 2026 rollout), and document every integration and add-on. Grandfathered pricing holds while auto-renew stays active; whether it survives indefinitely is not guaranteed in writing.

What We Found When We Scanned 174 Live LearnDash Sites in May 2026

The patch debt is fleet-wide, not edge-case

• WP outdated 50%
• EOL PHP 77%
• Apache/nginx versions with known CVEs.

These numbers describe the median LearnDash site, not the worst one. Read the full 174-site security scan and methodology.

The 'LearnDash stack' is actually a dozen vendors

• Uncanny Owl Toolkit 25%
• LD Visual Customizer 24%
• Uncanny Pro 11%
• Wisdm 3%
• course-grid 11%

Liquid Web consolidated its own products in April 2026, but the dozen add-on vendors around LearnDash did not consolidate too. Every one of them is a separate roadmap risk.

Self-check checklist

"Tick three or more boxes? You're in the 43%."

Every LearnDash Alternative in 2026, at a Glance

Before the five paths in detail, here is the whole field on one screen: type, real 2026 starting price, whether it taxes your sales, whether it speaks SCORM natively, whether it drags WordPress along with it, and who it is actually for. Prices were checked on each vendor's own site on September 30, 2026, and LearnDash's, Kajabi's, LearnPress's, LearnWorlds' and Thinkific's again on November 11, 2026.

Three things this table makes obvious that a license-only comparison hides. First, "free" plugins are not free the moment you monetize or need certificates and drip: their paid plans start at $179 to $299 for the first year at list price (LearnPress also sells single add-ons from $19), against LearnDash's $350 a year for 1 site (all as of November 11, 2026). Second, SCORM is a hard wall: most WordPress plugins and hosted SaaS need a paid add-on or skip it, while open-source platforms and Cubite LMS support it natively (on the hosted side, Thinkific on its Plus plan and LearnWorlds from its Pro Trainer plan; among the plugins, LearnPress lists SCORM in its free core). If you run compliance or certification training, that one column eliminates most of the field. Third, the transaction-fee column quietly decides the math at scale: a 7.5% cut on six figures of course revenue dwarfs any license-price saving.

Want the head-to-head detail? See our 2026 comparisons of Moodle, LifterLMS, Tutor LMS, LearnPress, and Thinkific vs LearnDash, plus guides to free LearnDash alternatives, LearnDash and SCORM, and the best LearnDash alternative for universities and enterprise.

The Five Migration Paths Off LearnDash in 2026

Every honest learndash alternative 2026 decision lands on one of five paths. The right path depends on your scale, your team, and how much WordPress is helping you versus getting in the way.

What is the best LearnDash replacement in 2026?

It depends on what you sell and to whom. To stay in WordPress, Tutor LMS (its free migration tool imports LearnDash users and course data) or LifterLMS. For a creator business built on funnels and email marketing, a hosted platform such as Kajabi. For compliance or certification training without WordPress, LearnWorlds (SCORM from its Pro Trainer plan) or Cubite LMS, which costs $290 a month or $2,900 a year per site with native SCORM, xAPI and a built-in LRS. For universities with their own IT team, Moodle or Open edX.

What Student Data Actually Transfers When You Leave LearnDash

The number one reason people stall on a LearnDash migration is fear of losing learner data. Here is the honest, cross-platform answer, because "your data is safe" is only true if you know exactly which data and to where. LearnDash stores course structure as WordPress custom post types, quizzes in post meta, and the fragile part, completion, in serialized user meta tied to specific post IDs. What survives the move depends heavily on the destination.

Step 0 is to export from LearnDash itself. Use the built-in Import/Export tool (wp-admin under LearnDash LMS, Settings, Advanced) for site-to-site transfer, and note that WordPress’s own export does not carry quizzes, course-to-lesson links, or progress. For users plus progress plus certificates, a serialization-aware tool (such as Transfer by Honors WP) handles the zipped data that the native export drops. Back up the full database before any of this. For the complete step-by-step, see how to export your LearnDash courses.

The pattern is clear. WordPress-to-WordPress moves preserve the most, because they share a database and post-type model, and free first-party migration tools exist (Tutor LMS ships a one-click LearnDash importer; ThimPress ships a free LearnPress one). Moving to a hosted SaaS preserves the least: content and accounts usually move, but in-progress completion, quiz attempts, and certificates generally do not. Moving to a managed platform like Cubite is content-portable: structure maps cleanly, while enrollments and progress are scripted through the API. Three rules hold regardless of destination: progress is the fragile object (LearnDash embeds post IDs in serialized completion data, so any ID change on import silently breaks it); always stage and back up first (Tutor’s importer deletes the original LearnDash courses after migrating, so a backup is not optional); and preserve your SEO by mapping every old course and lesson URL to its new equivalent with 301 redirects rather than blanket-redirecting to the homepage.

Worried about losing data?

LearnDash's WordPress export carries course content only, so learner data moves from a database export. Cubite moves the whole LearnDash site, including learners, enrollments, progress, quiz attempts and groups, with earned certificates re-issued, as a migration it runs for you from that database export. Your live site is not touched, and you review the record counts and sign off before launch.

Book a free 30-minute migration assessmentLearnDash to Cubite migration guide

How to Migrate Off LearnDash

Cubite runs the migration for you from a copy of your LearnDash database, so you do not rebuild your courses by hand. Here is how it works.

How a migration to Cubite LMS works

LearnDash's WordPress export (WXR) carries course content only; learners, enrollments, progress, quiz scores and certificates live in the database, so a move to a hosted LMS needs a database export. Cubite moves the whole LearnDash site, including learners, enrollments, progress, quiz attempts and groups, with earned certificates re-issued, as a migration it runs for you from that database export. Cubite works from a copy, your live LearnDash site is not touched, and you review the record counts and sign off before launch. Passwords do not move: migrated learners sign in from an invite or an emailed sign-in link. Start with the free LearnDash migration assessment.

Because Cubite is fully managed, that is the end of the work: no devops and no plugin stack to maintain, at $290 a month or $2,900 a year with unlimited learners and courses. The free migration assessment maps exactly what carries over before anything moves. The LearnDash exit matrix lists what nine destinations, Cubite included, import from LearnDash, cell by cell with a dated source each.

What LearnDash Costs in 2026 (the New Liquid Web Pricing)

As of November 11, 2026, LearnDash is sold through Liquid Web by number of sites: $350 a year for 1 site, $599 for 10, $799 for 25, $899 for 50 and $999 for 100, every plan bundled with Give, The Events Calendar and Kadence, and with MemberDash built in. Billing is annual; the page lists no monthly price. LearnDash's pricing has changed more than once in 2026: on September 30, 2026, the same Liquid Web page listed three feature tiers, Essentials $259, Pro $399 and Elite $599 a year, all with unlimited courses and learners and no per-student fees (the table below), and before that LearnDash sold site-count licenses at $199, $399 and $799.

The table shows the tiers as Liquid Web's LearnDash page, where learndash.com/pricing redirects, listed them on September 30, 2026; on November 11, 2026 that page's price list names no Essentials, Pro or Elite tier. Note that a lapsed subscription forces buying a new plan at current pricing, so legacy pricing cannot be reactivated. A hosted option (formerly LearnDash Cloud) still exists in some form, but its current tier names and prices were not confirmable on a first-party page at publish time. And as the next sections show, the license is only part of the real cost once you add the plugins a production site needs. For the full breakdown of every tier and the all-in cost, see our complete guide to LearnDash pricing in 2026.

True Cost of Ownership: LearnDash vs the Alternatives

Here is Cubite's estimate of the total cost of ownership for a mid-sized course operation (up to 5,000 learners and 200 courses), Year 1 + Year 2 combined.

A few honest observations from this table:

• Cubite LMS SaaS is competitive with - and often cheaper than - a WP plugin alternative once you count developer time.
• Self-hosting an open-source LMS is rarely the cheapest path. The license is free; the engineer is not.
• Cubite LMS folds hosting, maintenance, support, and migration into one fixed monthly price, so the 2-year total is predictable with no plugin renewals and no devops hire.

What LearnDash Really Costs Once You Add the Plugins

LearnDash’s license looks cheap until you price the plugins required to build a real course site. Here are the published prices, checked on each vendor's own site on September 30, 2026, for an organization running cohort courses, community, external/xAPI content, future payments, and a global audience. Several of these add-ons use intro pricing that rises or doubles at renewal, so year-two costs are typically higher.

Hosting and maintenance have no single vendor price, so this guide does not add up a total; the dated line items above are the published numbers. The same multi-plugin, multi-vendor stack is also what produces the update breakage, plugin conflicts, and fragmented ownership operators complain about in the first place, none of which shows up in the dollar total. Cubite LMS, at $290 a month or $2,900 a year, is a single bundled price that already includes managed hosting, xAPI external-content analytics, a native discussion forum (or Discourse), reporting, multilingual support, maintenance, security, and patching, plus unlimited learners and courses, with no per-plugin renewals and no transaction-fee surprises.

Will LearnDash still work after 2027?

Yes. The April 2027 date in Liquid Web's announcement is when critical security patches end for the older tools it is retiring, and it lists no LearnDash tools among them; LearnDash itself is still updated (version 5.3.0 shipped on November 4, 2026). What needs a plan is the rest of your stack: WordPress core, PHP, your theme and every add-on, each on its own update schedule.

Why Real LearnDash Users Are Leaving, and What Replaces Each Pain

In conversations with LearnDash users weighing a move, one pattern keeps surfacing. Take a UK-based nonprofit that trains frontline practitioners in the safeguarding space. They run a mix of self-paced and facilitated cohort courses, with some interactive microlearning authored in an external tool. On paper, LearnDash should fit. In practice, the cracks show up everywhere the platform stops being a single product and becomes a pile of plugins.

The discussion board was the first wall they hit. It was hard to navigate between threads, and it kept breaking when it collided with other plugins, so the team fell back to a separate tool just to keep community conversation alive. That is the recurring story: to build the site they actually wanted, they had to stack plugin on plugin, and every routine update risked breaking something else. More on that failure mode: why the LearnDash and BuddyBoss community stack breaks.

Then the analytics gap. Their microlearning lives on the LearnDash site, but the learner data from that embedded content never flows back in, so they cannot report on it in one place. For a nonprofit that has to show outcomes to funders, invisible data is not a minor annoyance. We go deeper on closing that data gap in xAPI tracking for LearnDash content.

On top of that, ownership was fragmented across multiple tech providers, with no single accountable party, and confidence in LearnDash’s long-term direction had eroded after a round of internal restructuring at Liquid Web and StellarWP in November 2025 and the wind-down of the StellarWP brand in April 2026. Add a global, low-bandwidth audience to the mix, and the question stops being "how do we patch this?" and becomes "who owns all of this, end to end?"

Pain by pain: what replaces each LearnDash gap

Why Cubite Is the Path We Recommend (And Who Should Pick What)

Cubite has been building and operating LMS platforms since 2013, supporting enterprise, higher education, and commercial training organizations worldwide. This is the segment most affected by the StellarWP wind-down: organizations whose LMS platforms generate revenue, deliver compliance training, or issue credentials. It is also the segment least able to tolerate risk, especially when 43% of live LearnDash sites were already exposed to a critical CVE at the time of our scan.

For almost everyone in this segment, our recommendation is one platform: Cubite LMS.

Cubite LMS is a fully managed SaaS LMS with unlimited users and courses, SCORM and xAPI, an MCP server for your own AI assistant (Claude or ChatGPT), SSO with Google, GitHub or Facebook sign-in and white-labeling, certificates, analytics, and modern checkout and enrollment automation. It is built for nonprofits, course businesses, higher education, and mid-market training teams that want a real, fully-managed LMS without running one. Hosting, maintenance, security, and migration are included, and custom development and integrations are available at $125 an hour.

At $290/mo, Cubite bundles what LearnDash sells as separate paid plugins, with unlimited users and unlimited courses:

• Native discussion forum (or embedded Discourse), no BuddyBoss/bbPress add-on
• xAPI tracking and analytics for embedded external content, no GrassBlade/Tin Canny add-on plus a separate Learning Record Store
• Advanced reporting dashboard, no ProPanel add-on
• Multilingual support (English, Spanish, Portuguese), no WPML add-on
• Managed, LMS-grade hosting, no separate Kinsta or WP Engine plan
• Security, patching, updates, and maintenance handled for you, no agency retainer
• Zero transaction fees, versus add-ons that layer a 4.9% fee on payments and donations

Cubite also offers discounted terms for nonprofits and NGOs. Ask during a migration assessment.

A simple decision matrix

What to Do Next

The 90-second version of this guide:

• What happened: Liquid Web wound down its StellarWP brand on April 22, 2026 and kept LearnDash as one of its four core products; LearnDash is still sold and updated.
• What was already true: 174 production LearnDash sites scanned in May 2026 - 43% on a critical CVE, 50% on outdated WordPress, 77% (of disclosed) on EOL PHP. Most of the fleet was not keeping up before April. A vendor announcement does not change that.
• No deadline: April 2027 is when patches end for the tools Liquid Web is retiring, not for LearnDash, so you can move on your own timeline.
• For most readers: if your LMS earns revenue, trains compliance, or grants credentials, review your options this quarter. If it's a hobby site, at minimum run the self-check above this week.

LearnDash is still a working, maintained plugin. The consolidation is a good moment to check whether it still fits what your LMS is doing in 2026, and to move if it does not.

Not sure LearnDash still fits?

Tell us about your LearnDash site and we will map exactly what carries over, from courses and quizzes to learner accounts, enrollments and certificates.

Get the free assessmentBook a 30-minute call