LearnDash Pricing in 2026: The New Liquid Web Tiers

Short answer (checked September 30, 2026): LearnDash sells three annual plugin tiers: Essentials $259, Pro $399 and Elite $599 a year, each with unlimited courses and learners and no per-student fees.

Cubite sells Cubite LMS and publishes this guide.

A LearnDash site has to assemble a licence, WordPress hosting, a SCORM or xAPI player plugin, a learning record store, and group, certificate and reporting add-ons; Cubite LMS ships these in one plan at $290 a month or $2,900 a year.

The plugin price is the easy answer. The harder, more expensive answer is what a real production LearnDash stack actually costs once you add the paid add-ons a serious course business needs. This page gives you both: the verified plugin price, then every other line of the total cost of ownership (TCO) with its published price where the vendor publishes one, so you can compare it honestly against an all-in platform. If you have landed here while weighing a switch, you can also compare all the ways off LearnDash on our hub page.

All-in alternative: Cubite LMS is $290/mo, or $2,900/yr billed annually, flat, with hosting, maintenance, support, SCORM and xAPI, white-label, certificates and analytics all included, versus a production LearnDash stack that pays for the plugin, each paid add-on and managed hosting separately (the dated tables below list each published price). SSO with Google, GitHub or Facebook sign-in is included at $290; SAML SSO and SCIM are Enterprise. See every plan on Cubite pricing, get the free LearnDash migration assessment, or book a 30-minute call.

LearnDash pricing 2026 at a glance (the quick answer)

These are the current self-hosted plugin tiers. All are billed annually. There is no monthly option on the self-hosted plugin.

Every tier shares the same baseline that matters most for budgeting: unlimited courses, unlimited learners, and zero per-student or transaction fees on the plugin itself. You are not taxed for growing your audience. The differences between tiers are features, not seat counts.

A quick read on which tier fits:

• Essentials is enough if you sell a handful of courses and do not need cohorts, AI authoring, or deep reporting.
• Pro is the practical floor for most businesses, because weighted grading, structured cohorts and real reporting are table stakes once you have more than a few learners.
• Elite earns its price only if you sell seats to organizations, run multiple instructors or want learners and instructors building courses from the front end.

LearnDash plus BuddyBoss (checked September 30, 2026)

LearnDash and BuddyBoss are separate products with separate annual licenses, and neither license includes hosting. BuddyBoss's pricing page lists no separate LearnDash bundle, and buddyboss.com/bundle redirects to it; the LearnDash integration comes with the BuddyBoss Launch and Scale plans. The table shows what each vendor's own pricing page listed on September 30, 2026, with first-year and renewal prices, and Cubite LMS in the last row for comparison.

So a LearnDash site with a BuddyBoss community needs a LearnDash tier plus BuddyBoss Launch or Scale, because Start does not include the LearnDash integration. BuddyBoss sells the first year at a 50% intro discount, and all renewals are at full price. Hosting and a SCORM or xAPI plugin come on top, and so does the app if you want one; the cost table further down lists each one. Cubite LMS costs $290 a month or $2,900 a year per site, with unlimited learners and courses. For what breaks between the two plugins, see why the LearnDash + BuddyBoss stack breaks for course communities.

What changed in LearnDash pricing in 2026

If you priced LearnDash a couple of years ago, the numbers above will not match your memory, and that is the point. The model changed in two structural ways.

The pricing axis flipped from site count to features. The previous model was roughly $199, $399, and $799, tiered by the number of sites you could activate on. The 2026 model drops site-count tiers in favor of feature tiers: Essentials, Pro, and Elite. Do not budget against the old $199/$399/$799 numbers - they are no longer current, and we list them here only so you can see what moved.

MemberDash is now bundled. Membership and content-protection functionality that you might previously have stitched in separately now ships inside every tier. That genuinely lowers the entry cost for a membership-style course site compared to buying memberships separately - which matters for the TCO math later on.

For decided switchers, the takeaway is simple: the plugin got more capable at the bottom tier, but the price floor moved up, and the structure now rewards staying current rather than locking in a one-time deal.

The lapse trap: legacy pricing does not come back

This is the single most expensive footnote in LearnDash pricing, and it rarely shows up in comparison posts.

If your subscription lapses, you cannot reactivate your old price. A lapsed plan forces you to buy a new plan at current pricing. Legacy and grandfathered rates cannot be reactivated once they expire. So if you are sitting on an older, cheaper renewal locked in years ago, that rate is contingent on never letting the subscription break - not on a one-time purchase.

Why it matters for budgeting:

• A missed renewal, an expired card, or a deliberate pause resets you to today's tiers.
• The "I bought it years ago for less" advantage is fragile. It survives only as long as the auto-renew chain is unbroken.
• When you model multi-year cost, model it at current pricing, not the rate you remember, because one lapse erases the difference.

If price stability over five years is a deciding factor for you, this is the clause to weigh most carefully.

The hosted option: a caveat we will not fake

LearnDash has historically offered a hosted product (formerly known as LearnDash Cloud) that bundles hosting with the plugin so you do not manage WordPress yourself. A hosted option still exists in some form in 2026.

Here is the honest part: we could not confirm the current hosted tier names or prices on a first-party page as of June 2026. Rather than print a number we cannot stand behind, we are flagging it. If a hosted plan is on your shortlist, get the current price directly from Liquid Web before you budget, and confirm what is and is not included (some hosted bundles cap features or add usage limits the self-hosted plugin does not have). Treat any "LearnDash Cloud pricing" figure you see floating around older blog posts as unverified until you check the source page yourself.

The plugin tax: what a real LearnDash stack actually costs

This is where the sticker price and the real price diverge. LearnDash is a plugin, not a platform. The base price buys you a capable core, but a production course business almost always needs paid add-ons that LearnDash does not include - plus LMS-grade managed hosting, because shared budget hosting buckles under quiz traffic and video.

We call this the plugin tax: the recurring, easy-to-underestimate spend that turns a $399 line item into a stack of separate annual bills. Here is a realistic stack with each component's published price (hosting is priced by your host), checked on the vendor's own page on September 30, 2026. Not every site needs every row, but most serious ones need several.

Add the rows your business actually needs and the picture changes fast. A full corporate-training stack (SCORM via an LRS, community, memberships, multilingual, live sessions, premium hosting) pays each of those vendors, several of them at a first-year price that renews higher, and pays a host on top. Every row renews, every year.

Three things make this worse than it looks on a spreadsheet:

• Renewals are not stable. Several add-ons (MemberPress is the clearest example) sell at an intro rate that doubles at renewal, and some layer a percentage fee on payments on top.
• You are the integrator. Every plugin is a separate vendor, a separate update cycle, and a separate thing that can break when WordPress or another plugin updates. Compatibility is your problem, not theirs.
• The costs are recurring and they compound. This is annual spend that grows as you add capability, not a one-time build.

None of this means LearnDash is a bad product. It means the honest price of a real LearnDash deployment is the stack price, not the plugin price - and that is the number you should compare against an all-in platform.

The all-in comparison: Cubite vs a full LearnDash stack

Once you price the whole stack, the comparison stops being "plugin vs plugin" and becomes "assemble-and-maintain vs all-in." That is the comparison that matters for a switcher.

Cubite LMS is $290/mo, or $2,900/yr billed annually, all-in. That single number includes hosting, maintenance, support, SCORM and xAPI, SSO with Google, GitHub or Facebook sign-in, white-label, certificates, and analytics - the exact line items that become separate paid plugins in the LearnDash column. There are unlimited users and unlimited courses, 0% transaction fees, and no plugin renewals to track, because there are no plugins.

The honest read: if your needs are tiny and stay tiny, the LearnDash Essentials plugin at $259/yr can be the cheaper line item, and that is a legitimate choice. But the moment you need SCORM, SSO, community, memberships, multilingual, or genuinely reliable hosting, the stack price climbs into the same range as an all-in platform - except you are now the one assembling, integrating, and maintaining it, and absorbing renewal spikes and per-vendor support. Cubite collapses that stack into one predictable bill and one vendor to call. (For completeness, self-hosted open-source platforms like Open edX exist too, but they shift the maintenance burden onto you, which is the opposite of what most switchers want.)

If you want to see exactly how the move works, here is how to migrate from LearnDash to Cubite without losing data. 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. Start with the free LearnDash migration assessment.

The bottom line on LearnDash pricing in 2026

• Plugin pricing (checked September 30, 2026): Essentials $259/yr, Pro $399/yr, Elite $599/yr, all annual, all with unlimited courses and learners and no per-student fees.
• The model changed: from site-count tiers (old ~$199/$399/$799) to feature tiers, with MemberDash now bundled. Budget against the new numbers.
• The lapse trap is real: legacy pricing cannot be reactivated, so model multi-year cost at current rates.
• The plugin tax is the real cost: a production stack pays for each add-on and for hosting on top of the plugin; BuddyBoss Launch alone is $199 the first year, then $399 a year (checked September 30, 2026).
• All-in changes the math: Cubite at $2,900/yr billed annually ($290/mo monthly) bundles hosting, support, SCORM/xAPI, SSO with Google, GitHub or Facebook sign-in, white-label, certificates, and analytics, with 0% fees, and Cubite runs the move off LearnDash for you from a database export.

Ready to get started?

If your stack is creeping toward four figures and you are tired of being the integrator, price your real LearnDash TCO against one all-in bill. Start with the free LearnDash migration assessment, or book a 30-minute call if you would rather talk it through.

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LearnDash, BuddyBoss and add-on prices checked on each vendor's own page on September 30, 2026; the tables above link each source. Verify current figures before purchase, as vendor pricing changes.