Why I’m Switching from WooCommerce Memberships to LearnDash Groups

Last week on the (hopefully) weekly Live Stream, I explored LearnDash Memberships through groups. And while I struggled a bit – I went in totally cold – towards the end I discovered a fantastic integration with WooCommerce Subscriptions that solved one of my problems. That solution allows me to eliminate custom code and lighten my website quite a bit.

LearnDash + WooCommerce Memberships

When I set up my membership site in July of 2019, I wanted what I thought would be the easiest solution. Since I was selling courses through WooCommerce, I picked WooCommerce Memberships and WooCommerce Subscriptions. You set the subscription up with the former by connect it to a product, and then you associate a membership level with a subscription. There’s one problem though: There is no native integration between LearnDash and WooCommerce Memberships.

Because of that, I needed to write some custom code that added a user to a LearnDash group when they were added to a membership. And as mentioned earlier, they are added to a membership when they are added to a subscription, when they purchase a product.

I also need to account for churn (non-renewals) and changes in status, which my code currently does not…it’s manual. This is less than ideal and definitely doesn’t scale.

Now this would be fine if I used WooCommerce Memberships for something other than managing course access, but I don’t. And I can’t stress this enough: WooCommerce Memberships is a fantastic plugin by an amazing team. But it doesn’t do anything I need it to do.

Enter LearnDash Memberships

When LearnDash announced that the Groups feature pivoted to more of a membership feature, I was so stoked. I knew that this would let me do exactly what I needed to do, and possibly eliminate $400 per year in expenses.

Well after exploring the features on the live stream last week, I was not disappointed. Some things I discovered I can:

1. Sell group access directly, just like you can with courses.
2. Integrate with WooCommerce Subscriptions by associating a group with a subscription.
3. Grant members of a group access to specific posts and pages

This is everything I wanted – and as an added bonus I don’t need to migrate subscriptions. I just add the group access to the Subscription section of the product and I’m good to go. Users will be added when they subscribed, and removed when the cancel.

The Transition Process

The best part is the transition process for me is 3 steps:

1. Add the “Membership” LearnDash group to both Yearly and Monthly subscription levels.
2. Remove the custom code
3. Remove WooCommerce Memberships

That’s it as far as moving from WooCommerce Memberships to LearnDash Memberships, thanks to WooCommerce Subscriptions being the middle man.

That said, the cost reduction is only $200, not $400. I’ll take it for not having to get all of my members to resubscribe though!

Changes Are Live!

These changes are live right now. If you notice anything amiss over at Creator Courses, please let me know!