Training Your Team on Learnomy: Which Use Cases Are Free, and Which Need Pro

Most companies do not need a different learning platform. They need the same handful of things: onboard new hires, keep everyone compliant, train a team on a process, and prove that the training happened. The features have familiar names across every tool, so the real question a company owner asks is not “what does this plugin do.” It is “which of the jobs I actually have can I run without paying, and which ones require the paid tier.”

This guide answers that question for Learnomy. It is organized around the use cases an owner recognizes, not around a feature list. Find the situation that matches yours, and you will know whether Learnomy Free covers it or whether you need Learnomy Pro, and why.

The short version is unusual, so it is worth stating up front. Learnomy Free is not a trial or a crippled sample. It runs unlimited courses and unlimited students, takes real payments through Stripe and PayPal, issues verifiable certificates, and exposes a full REST API. For a large share of internal team training, the free tier is the whole answer. Learnomy Pro exists for a specific and different set of jobs: selling training to other companies, importing standards-based courseware, formal assessment, portable credentials, and running academies for clients. This guide draws that line use case by use case.

How to read the tiers

Before the use cases, here is the honest boundary between the two tiers, stated plainly.

Learnomy Free costs nothing, forever, with no credit card. It includes unlimited courses and students, direct Stripe and PayPal checkout, membership plans, certificates with PDF output and verification, instructor commissions with an application and earnings split, six quiz question types, a drag-and-drop course builder, tab-switch proctoring, and a full REST API with webhooks.

Learnomy Pro is a paid licence. Personal is 149 dollars per year or 399 dollars for a lifetime licence on one site, Professional is 249 dollars per year for up to five sites, and Agency is 399 dollars per year for unlimited sites. All three Pro tiers include the same features, and the only difference between them is how many sites the licence covers. Pro adds seat selling to companies through Spaces, a gradebook with assignments and rubrics, standards support for SCORM, xAPI, LTI, QTI, and H5P, drip scheduling with learning paths and cohorts, subscription upgrades, pauses and retries, Stripe Connect payouts to instructors, Open Badges 3.0 and Credly credentials, white labelling, WP Fusion, advanced analytics, a frontend course builder, AI authoring tools, five more quiz types, and learner notes and bookmarks.

Keep that split in mind. Free is complete for running training. Pro is for selling it externally, meeting formal standards, and grading at scale.

The free use cases: what most internal training needs

These are the jobs a company owner can run on Learnomy Free, with no upgrade required.

1. Onboard every new hire in an internal academy

This is the most common request, and it is fully covered by the free tier. You create the onboarding courses once, assign them to new employees, and track who has finished. Because Free places no cap on the number of students, it does not matter whether you hire five people a year or five hundred. The cost does not rise with headcount, which is the opposite of how most hosted training platforms price the same job.

What to do: build the courses, enrol staff, and use certificates to mark completion. You will not hit a paid wall for growing the team.

2. Run training at no charge internally, or sell a course

If your training is internal and free to employees, you never touch a payment feature at all. If you want to sell a course, either to the public or to a partner, Learnomy Free includes direct Stripe and PayPal checkout. There is no separate payment add-on to buy and no transaction surcharge from the plugin.

This matters more than it sounds. On some competing WordPress platforms, taking a live card payment is a paid extension rather than a core feature. LifterLMS, for example, ships a free core plugin but sells the Stripe and PayPal gateway add-ons in a paid bundle, so a truly free LifterLMS site can only take manual or offline payments. With Learnomy, the gateway is in the free tier.

3. Compliance training with completion certificates

Compliance is a certificate problem first: you need to prove that a named employee completed a required course on a given date, and you need that proof to be verifiable. Learnomy Free issues certificates as PDFs with verification, which covers the core of the job.

The line to Pro appears when compliance gets formal. If an auditor needs a graded record, assignments with rubrics, or an audit trail across cohorts, that is the Pro gradebook, covered in the Pro section below. Start on Free, and upgrade only when the evidence you must produce goes past a completion certificate.

4. Instructor-led internal training with a revenue split

If subject-matter experts inside your company deliver training, or you bring in outside instructors and share revenue with them, Learnomy Free includes instructor commissions, an instructor application flow, and an earnings split. You can run a small internal teaching program, or a modest paid one, without upgrading.

The upgrade line here is automated payouts. Paying instructors automatically through Stripe Connect is a Pro feature. Calculating and tracking the split is free; sending the money out automatically is Pro.

5. Pull completion data into your HR or BI systems

Larger companies rarely want training data trapped in one tool. They want completion and enrolment records flowing into an HR system, a data warehouse, or a dashboard. Learnomy Free exposes a full REST API with webhooks, so a developer can read course and completion data and push it wherever it needs to go.

A full API in the free tier is rare. It means the “own your data” promise is real on day one, not a paid upsell, and it makes Learnomy a sensible base even for a company that expects to integrate heavily later.

The Pro use cases: selling, standards, and formal assessment

These jobs need Learnomy Pro. Each one is a genuine capability jump, not a paywalled version of something free.

6. Sell training seats to other companies

The moment your training becomes a product you sell to other organizations, rather than something you run for your own staff, you need Spaces. Selling seats means a client company buys a block of enrolments and assigns them to their own employees, and each buyer needs their own managed group. Learnomy Pro provides this through Spaces.

This is the classic path from internal academy to training business. Course creators regularly sell bulk seats to group buyers once the content is proven internally. Free runs the academy; Pro turns it into something you can sell to other companies.

7. Structured programs with drip, learning paths, and cohorts

A single course is fine on Free. A structured program is a Pro job. If you need to release content on a schedule, sequence courses into a learning path, or move a group of learners through together as a cohort with shared timing, those controls are in Learnomy Pro.

The signal that you have crossed this line is timing and grouping. When the question shifts from “is the course available” to “who is at which stage, and what unlocks next,” you are describing drip, paths, and cohorts, and that is Pro.

8. Import existing corporate courseware

Many companies already own training content built to a standard, or bought from a vendor that ships standard packages. If you need to import SCORM, xAPI, LTI, QTI, or H5P material, that support is in Learnomy Pro. Free does not read those formats.

This is a clean either-or. If your content is authored inside Learnomy with its own builder, Free handles it. If you are bringing in standards-based packages from an existing corporate library, you need Pro.

9. Formal grading: assignments, rubrics, and a gradebook

Marking completion is free. Grading is not. When training requires submitted assignments, marking against rubrics, and a gradebook that records scores rather than just completion, that is the Learnomy Pro gradebook.

This is the upgrade line for serious compliance and for any program where a pass or fail has consequences. A certificate says someone finished; a gradebook says how well they did and leaves an auditable record. If your training needs the second, budget for Pro.

10. Issue portable credentials

A certificate PDF is enough for internal records, and it is free. A portable, verifiable credential that a learner can carry to other platforms is a different standard. Learnomy Pro issues Open Badges 3.0 and integrates with Credly, which is what you need when your credential is meant to travel and be independently verified.

Choose based on where the credential lives. If it stays in your records, Free covers it. If your learners need to display it on a professional profile or a badge wallet, that is Pro.

11. Run a white-labeled academy for clients

Agencies and consultancies that build and operate training academies on behalf of clients need two Pro capabilities: white labelling, so the platform carries the client brand rather than Learnomy branding, and enough site coverage to run several academies at once. White labelling is a Pro feature, and the Agency tier at 399 dollars per year covers unlimited sites, which is the tier that fits an agency model.

This is squarely a Pro use case. The free tier is built to run your own training; running training as a branded service for other companies is what the Agency licence is for.

12. Advanced analytics, learner journey tracking, and AI authoring

Basic completion tracking is free. When you need advanced analytics, learner journey tracking to see where people stall, and AI authoring tools to draft courses faster, those are Pro. A frontend course builder, which lets non-admin instructors build courses without entering the WordPress dashboard, is also Pro.

These are efficiency and depth features. You do not need them to run training, so start without them, and add Pro when the volume of content or the need for insight justifies the investment.

A typical company’s path from free to paid

It helps to see how these use cases stack up in practice, because most companies do not arrive needing everything at once. They grow into the paid features one real need at a time.

Consider a services company with forty employees. It starts with a single problem: new hires take too long to get productive, and the same questions get answered in person every month. The owner builds an onboarding academy in Learnomy Free, records the core process courses once, and enrols every new hire automatically. There is no cost, and there is no student cap to worry about as the company hires. Completion certificates give managers a simple record that each person finished. At this stage the free tier is the entire solution, and it stays that way for as long as the training is internal.

A year later the same company faces an audit. Now completion alone is not enough, because the auditor wants graded assessments and an evidence trail, not just a certificate that says a course was opened and finished. This is the first genuine upgrade trigger. The owner moves to Learnomy Pro for the gradebook, assignments, and rubrics, and the compliance program now produces the records an auditor accepts. Notice that the upgrade was driven by a specific requirement, not by a feature the company was pushed to buy before it was needed.

Later still, a partner company asks to buy the onboarding program for its own staff. The training has quietly become a product. That is the point where Spaces earns its place, because the partner needs a managed block of seats to assign to their own people. The company is now running the same content in three modes at once: free for its own staff, graded for compliance, and sold to another business. Each step was a clear decision tied to a real job, and each was affordable because the base was free.

That progression is the intended shape of the platform. Start on Free, prove the training works, and pay for Pro only when a concrete need appears.

The decision table

Here is the whole guide in one view. Find your use case, read the tier.

Use case (the job you have)	Learnomy tier	Why
Onboard new hires, unlimited employees	Free	No student cap
Run internal training at no charge	Free	No payment needed
Sell a course with Stripe or PayPal	Free	Gateways included
Compliance with completion certificates	Free	Verifiable PDF certificates
Instructor-led training with a revenue split	Free	Instructor commissions
Send completion data to HR or BI tools	Free	Full REST API and webhooks
Sell training seats to other companies	Pro	Spaces (seat selling)
Drip schedules, learning paths, cohorts	Pro	Program sequencing
Import SCORM, xAPI, or H5P courseware	Pro	Standards support
Assignments, rubrics, gradebook, audit trail	Pro	Formal assessment
Portable credentials (Open Badges, Credly)	Pro	External verification
Automated instructor payouts	Pro	Stripe Connect
White-labeled academy for clients	Pro (Agency for many sites)	White label
Advanced analytics and AI authoring	Pro	Depth and efficiency

Start free, upgrade when the job changes

A sensible path for most companies is to start on Free and move to Pro only when a specific need appears. The upgrade triggers are concrete, so you can watch for them:

• You want to sell training seats to another company, not just your own staff. Upgrade for Spaces.
• Your compliance or certification program needs graded assignments and an audit trail, not just completion. Upgrade for the gradebook.
• You need to import existing SCORM or H5P content. Upgrade for standards support.
• Your credentials must be portable and independently verifiable. Upgrade for Open Badges and Credly.
• You are an agency running branded academies for clients. Upgrade to the Agency tier for white labelling and unlimited sites.
• You want to pay instructors automatically. Upgrade for Stripe Connect payouts.

If none of those describe you, Free is very likely the complete answer, and you can run real team training on it indefinitely.

Why the free tier is this generous

It is fair to be skeptical of a free tier this complete, so it helps to compare how other WordPress learning tools draw the line. LearnDash has no free version at all and starts at around 199 dollars per year, with group management for teams sold as a separate add-on from roughly 99 dollars per year. LifterLMS ships a free core plugin but, as noted above, places the Stripe and PayPal gateways in a paid bundle. Tutor LMS offers a free version but puts certificates and advanced features behind Pro.

Against that backdrop, the Learnomy line is drawn differently on purpose. The features a company needs to actually run internal training, including unlimited students, real payment gateways, certificates, and an API, are free. The paid tier is reserved for the jobs that turn training into an external product or a formal, standards-based program. For a company owner, that means the risk of starting is close to zero: you can build and run your team training first, and only pay when your needs grow into the territory Pro is built for.

For teams weighing where a learning platform fits alongside the rest of their site, our guide to the best LMS with community features and our roundup of the best WordPress plugins for course creators provide wider context on how these pieces work together.

Frequently asked questions

Can I really train my whole company on the free version? For internal training, in most cases yes. Learnomy Free places no limit on the number of students or courses, issues completion certificates, and takes payments if you need them. The free tier is designed to run real team training, not to act as a time-limited trial.

When do I actually need to pay for Pro? When the job changes from running training to selling it externally, meeting a formal standard, or grading at scale. The clearest triggers are selling seats to other companies (Spaces), importing SCORM or H5P content, needing a gradebook with assignments and rubrics, issuing portable credentials, or white labelling for clients.

Does the free version limit how many employees I can enrol? No. Learnomy Free supports unlimited courses and unlimited students, so the cost does not rise as your team grows. This is the main reason it suits internal onboarding for companies of any size.

Is compliance training possible on the free tier? The core of it, yes. Free issues verifiable completion certificates, which covers proof that a required course was finished. If your compliance program needs graded assessment, rubrics, and an audit trail rather than completion alone, that is the Pro gradebook.

What is the difference between the three Pro tiers? Only the number of sites. Personal covers one site, Professional up to five, and Agency unlimited. Every Pro feature is present in all three tiers, so you choose the tier based on how many sites you run, not on which features you need.

Can an agency run separate academies for several clients? Yes, with Learnomy Pro. White labelling lets each academy carry the client brand, and the Agency tier covers unlimited sites, which is the arrangement that fits running training as a service for multiple clients.

How does Learnomy compare to LearnDash, LifterLMS, and Tutor LMS on cost to get started? The starting cost is where the difference shows. LearnDash has no free version and begins at a paid licence, with group management sold separately. LifterLMS offers a free core plugin but sells the live payment gateways as a paid add-on. Tutor LMS has a free version but places certificates and several core training features in Pro. Learnomy includes unlimited students, live payment gateways, certificates, and a full API in the free tier, so a company can run real training before spending anything.

If I start on Free and later upgrade, do I lose my courses or data? No. Pro is the same platform with more capabilities switched on, not a separate product. Your courses, students, enrolments, and records carry forward, and the upgrade adds the paid features on top of what you already built. This is why starting on Free carries so little risk: nothing you create has to be rebuilt when your needs grow.

We only need internal onboarding. Is there any reason to pay? For pure internal onboarding with completion tracking, usually not. Free covers unlimited employees, course building, certificates, and progress tracking. The reasons to pay all sit outside that job: selling to other companies, formal graded assessment, importing standards-based content, portable credentials, or running branded academies for clients.