LearnWorlds VS Shopify
Choosing the right platform to build and grow your business in the creator economy is not an easy task to perform on your own. In the following article, we’re comparing two popular platforms for course creators - LearnWorlds and Shopify - to help you choose the right platform for you.
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What does LearnWorlds do?
LearnWorlds is a digital-first training platform that enables you to create, market, and sell digital goods like courses, memberships, and subscriptions.
What does Shopify do?
Shopify is an eCommerce solution for individuals who want to easily set up an online store to sell both physical and digital products.
Key takeaways
An online training platform like LearnWorlds is the right choice if you want to:
- Create and sell digital goods like courses, subscriptions, and memberships.
- Build your own branded online academy where users can also consume your content.
- Skip the costs of hiring developers to take care of your website.
- Own a full blown mobile app for your knowledge business.
- Customize your website easily on your own instead of hiring a designer.
An eCommerce solution like Shopify will be a good fit for you only if:
- You are selling physical products or own a retail store.
- You are primarily interested in the broader eCommerce capabilities of Shopify that are not related to online courses.
- You can afford the extra costs of the apps you'll need as your business grows.
- You can bear with an inflexible exit strategy if you decide to use another platform.
Create Interactive Courses
Shopify is an eCommerce platform designed to help you create and manage an online store. As soon as your store is in place, you can easily sell your digital products like eBooks or any other type of downloadable content. For delivering any other type of knowledge goods, like courses, memberships, and subscriptions, you will need another solution, like an online course platform, that your users should access to consume your content.
LearnWorlds, on the other hand, is a purpose-built platform for creating and selling online courses and other types of knowledge products. As soon as you join LearnWorlds, you reap the benefits of a powerful authoring tool, a learning management system, and a built-in marketing and sales tool.
The Course Builder allows you to create interactive courses from scratch, add multiple learning activities like videos, quizzes, eBooks and edit them within the platform, as you would typically do with a content editor. This saves you tons of time from post-production, not to mention that you can refurbish your content anytime.
On the other hand, with Shopify, you can sell courses and digital products that you've created with other tools. Although there are many course creation platforms that play well with Shopify, you do realize that this adds additional costs to your course creation business.
Course creation |
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Shopify
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|---|---|---|
| Online Courses |  |
 |
| Memberships | |
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| Live Classes with Zoom | |
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| Unlimited video hosting | |
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| Built-in Content Editor | |
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| SCORM & HTML5 | |
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Assessment |
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|---|---|---|
| Quizzes | |
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| Certificates | |
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| Gradebooks | |
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| Questionbanks | |
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| Text / File Assignments | |
|
Key takeaway:
While Shopify allows you to sell ready-made courses and digital products, LearnWorlds offers you the most advanced authoring tools so you can create engaging courses right on the platform. So with LearnWorlds, if you want to offer a new course to your users, you won't have to look for another tool for course production, as you'll have everything you need - and even more - in one place.
Build professional websites
Both LearnWorlds and Shopify offer a marketplace where you can sell your digital products. What Shopify does not offer you is a hosting environment where your users can consume the content that you're offering. For example, if you are selling online courses, coaching, or live webinars, you will need an online training platform that will facilitate the role of the academy for your users.
LearnWorlds' authoring, marketplace, and learning management tools are built by LearnWorlds from the ground up. The result is a unified user experience where all your business functions -production, promotion, purchasing, and consumption- work in concert.
By uniting everything under one roof, you gain more control over your knowledge business, leading to more flexibility and less friction. With Shopify, you may find yourself trapped in hunting for third-party apps that will work well with your business. When your systems are less integrated, your data, channels, and users become disjointed.
|
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Shopify
|
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|---|---|---|
| White-labelling | |
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| Page templates & widgets |
400+
|
|
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Device Authoring
Adjust how your school looks based on user's device
|
|
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Student Info Sections
Allows your students to see core metrics about their interaction with your school.
|
|
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| User Roles |
Advanced
|
Basic
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| Custom code editor |
Advanced
|
Limited
|
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Site Flavors
Create an alternative version of your school's site in just a few clicks.
|
|
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| Communities | |
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| Testimonials & Quotes | |
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Key takeaway:
Shopify allows you to set up an online store where you can sell your courses. LearnWorlds, on the other hand, comes packed with a drag-and-drop website builder, which enables you to build an entire online academy with zero coding skills and customize it according to your needs.
Measure Success & Optimize
Building your online academy is half the battle. As your business grows, assessing performance and optimizing your products will be a necessity. LearnWorlds' Reporting and Analytics show you exactly how your academy is performing with deep insights into your courses and your users' progress, so you can constantly improve and gain more customers. Everything you need to drive your business growth is outlined through state-of-the-art graphs and visualizations, so you can easily understand the peaks and valleys of your business without an analyst degree. For example, you can see your most engaging courses, your best learning activities, and key metrics about your students' interaction with your school. All these pieces of data are presented in a structured manner and can be easily exported, so you can share them with your team or use them in your own systems.
Shopify offers a breadth of sales analytics tools, allowing you to focus on better understanding the commercial metrics of your business, like orders, transactions, and store speed. These pieces of data come in handy for eCommerce optimization. In the knowledge business, assessing how your users interact with your products is a crucial success indicator to make or break your business.
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Shopify
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|---|---|---|
| User Engagement | |
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| Course Insights | |
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| Video Analytics | |
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| User Progress | |
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| Assessments & Grades | |
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| Sales Analytics | |
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| Automated Reports | |
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"The data we can pull from our courses is above and beyond. Learnworlds has given us everything we need to create innovative, engaging online courses that people LOVE taking."
Alicia S.
Key takeaway:
LearnWorlds Analytics provides you with reports on your learner's behavior and school performance right on your dashboard, so you can keep growing your business and providing educational excellence to your audience. Shopify doesn't include a built-in analytics tool, so getting insights about your users requires integration with a third-party app.
Build a Mobile App
Instead of creating a school that is simply responsive to mobile devices -like with most platforms out there- LearnWorlds enables you to skyrocket your school's success with a native mobile app. This will help you offer the added value that your learners are seeking, and also add another powerful channel to your marketing toolbox.
With the LearnWorlds Mobile App Builder, you can create your own white-labeled app for both iOS and Android, at an extra fee, and take your business mobile.
Setting up your app is quite easy, as you can leverage the click-and-edit visual builder functionality to bring your brand to life, without a line of code needed. Also, you can keep your course curriculum consistent without feeling overwhelmed. Your school's content is automatically synchronized with your school's web and mobile versions at once.
The Mobile App Builder comes packed with awesome features to boost your business and enhance your students' engagement. You can harness the power of push notifications to keep your users engaged and prompt them to take action. But also, you can provide learners with a quick and easy way to purchase your online courses via in-app purchases and supercharge your school's growth.
Shopify does not offer a native mobile app that allows you to build your branded app to deliver your knowledge products. Their mobile solution helps you manage your store on-the-go so you can keep track of your orders, payments, and other commercial operations of your business.
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Shopify
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|---|---|---|
| White-labeled app | |
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| Push notifications | |
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| In-app purchases | |
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| Customization | |
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Key takeaway:
LearnWorlds enables you to own a fully-branded native mobile app and have complete control over it without coding skills. With Shopify, you can't deliver your content through a mobile app, but you can use their app to manage your online store.
Integrate with powerful tools
Both LearnWorlds and Shopify support building an ecosystem of third-party apps via integrations. Through Shopify App Store you can choose between thousands of add-ons so you can expand the functionality of your online store.
LearnWorlds offers more than 30 native integrations with the most popular tools for email marketing (MailChimp, Active Campaign, etc.), CRM, tax management, video calls, webinars including Zoom, HubSpot, and Zapier. For custom integrations, LearnWorlds has the most extended and complete API amongst online training platforms, with 54 API calls and 15 webhooks, so you can embed any event that occurs within your academy, in your own system.
Although Shopify's extensive app store includes a variety of options for plug-ins, this comes with some downsides. Evaluating and picking the right apps for your online store will be a time-consuming process, as chances are that some apps will not work for you. Another drawback is that as long as your online store will be highly dependent on external apps and plug-ins, you'll have to deal with updates and bugs from multiple sources that may affect your school's performance. This fact adds up to the maintenance cost of your platform.
|
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Shopify
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Integrations |
31
|
|
| Zaps on Zapier |
4,000+
|
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| API |
54 Calls
|
|
| Webhooks |
15
|
|
Key takeaway:
LearnWorlds supports a wide range of premium integrations with third-party apps that play perfectly with your online academy. With Shopify's App Store, the options for external plug-ins are numerous, though you'll have to deal with higher maintenance costs.
Market & Sell your expertise
Shopify, as an eCommerce platform, has a deep understanding of how users can promote and sell their products through their online store. Like LearnWorlds, Shopify enables you to build a blog for your business and optimize your product titles and descriptions for search engines, so you can increase organic traffic to your store.
LearnWorlds comes packed with a marketing stack that is built to work together with your online academy, seamlessly. You can easily create landing pages, pop-ups, and forms so you'll never miss an opportunity to turn visitors into leads.
As for payment flexibility, LearnWords supports Stripe, Paypal, Shopify and more than 6 local payment gateways that are popular in large markets across the world. For example, PagSeguro is widely used in South America, whereas Giropay, iDeal, and Sofort are favored in European countries. If the above payment gateways are included in your target markets, then you're definitely getting an edge over your competitors.
Shopify supports only Stripe and Paypal, which are the major payment processors in the world.
|
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Shopify
|
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|---|---|---|
| SEO-friendly pages |
All website
|
Product content only
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| Offers & Coupons | |
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| Memberships & bundles | |
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| Pop-ups | |
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| Funnels | |
|
| Global Payment Gateways |
Stripe PayPal Shopify PagSeguro |
Stripe PayPal Shopify |
| Local Payment Gateways |
iDeal (Netherlands) Bancontact (Belgium) Giropay (Germany) Przelewy24 (Poland) Sofort (6 EU countries) |
|
| Email Notifications | |
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| Email Campaigns | Integration with Mailchimp, Active Campaign, AWeber, ConvertKit | |
Key takeaway:
When it comes to marketing and selling your courses, Shopify helps you to optimize your conversions with up-sells, offers and cart abandonment campaigns. On the other hand, LearnWorlds offers you a bunch of advanced built-in tools that are integrated with your online training academy, so you can build up your brand and expand your audience.
Compare pricing
Now that you have seen the main differences between LearnWorlds vs. Shopify, let's compare the pricing, to give you a better understanding of where it's worth investing your money.
Both platforms offer 3 different plans to choose from and a free trial to allow you to test the grounds. Shopify's plans include features that will make you feel like setting up an eCommerce store is a cakewalk.
For growing an online course business, though, owning a platform where your users can both purchase and consume what you sell is the bottom line.
Here's what LearnWorlds makes possible for online course creators like you:
- Create unlimited courses and landing pages
- Build professional websites, blogs and communities
- Make your videos and eBooks interactive and engaging
- Strengthen your brand with full white-labeling
- Own a fully-blown mobile app
- Enhance collaboration with your team
- Optimize your school's performance with deep insights into your courses and users
All these come with:
- Premium, top-class support, and customer onboarding
- Integrations with 40+ premium software platforms
- A stable and secure platform that will support your goals on the road to success
Are you a hands-on person when it comes to choosing your next business tool?
Just try it! LearnWorlds offers a 30-day free trial, giving you the chance to see firsthand and real-time how you can scale your own online business.
Compare LearnWorlds
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LearnWorlds is the best course sales software that provide the students with on time courses and manages the issues related to course handling. It has a demo that can make the user to feel easy in working.
- Ayesha Nasee
I took a long time for me to find a great platform for my online schools. LearnWorlds is a robust platform that is very easy to use and setup and it is also affordable for those that are just getting started.
- D’Andrea Bolden Ministries
The TEAM behind LearnWorlds is what makes the difference and the support they offer.
- Ariane G
I am in love with this platform and I would never change them for another. I feel cared for by the amazing support team that know my name, my work, my problems and needs. They offered me the attention and personalized tips. All that gave a big boost to my online school.
- Teya B.
LearnWorlds will soon be recognised as the GLOBAL authority in online teaching... they stand out above the rest and their promises are REAL.
- AAW
The confidence I’ve gained in my business is priceless. No matter what issue I might have with my platform, the LearnWorlds Support Squad has my answer. When they say “customer service is their #1 goal” they truly mean it. I’ve never been disappointed.
- Missy C.
I have used few others providers and wasn't satisfied until I found LearnWorlds. They have all the tools and easy to use interface to build your online school.
- Jonas K.
I'd like to say that the support that we've been getting from LW since I got to know the platform is, until this moment, without any doubts one of the best customer services that I've experienced.
- Samir A.
Extremely easy to use their in house video hosting platform, so there’s no need to get a platform like vimeo which ultimately saves you money.
- Kenneth John
I can recommend LearnWorlds as a great tool to manage an online course, academy, accelerator or anything similar. The platform works well and has many adjustable features. The support is super fast and always helpful! 5/5
- Alona Belinska
LearnWorlds is likely the most interactive learning system I have encountered. Thanks to greatly integrated video functionalities, gamification and personal notes/library there are immense opportunities to enhance the learning experience by creating engaging content.
- Epp Krusenvald
Before I committed, I decided to contact every elearning platform but honestly, no one beats what they offer. They are always on top of things and all the best features are always being added. The creators are so amazing, I can tell they work so so hard!
- Corine C.
Easy to use, good support from the team (very responsive) and costs less than many course platforms
- Tany Williams
I was looking at maybe 5-7 different platforms before I decided to go with LearnWorlds. It is easy to use (intuitive) and there are the features that you need. I am happy I found it!
- Martin B.
Definitely the best option on the market. I like to compare my options and LW was the clear winner. The amazing, friendly and well trained support team that replies within a few minutes is also extremely impressive.
- Teya Bozhilova
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