Acadle Review (2024) – Budget LMS on Lifetime Deal

One of the most important things you need in order to create high-quality online courses is a good LMS. I have used a lot of online teaching platforms in the past, including Thinkific and Teachable. And now it’s time for Acadle, an online academy building platform.

So, after testing it out on factors like lessons, assessments, integrations, certifications, etc for a few days and creating some demo courses with it, I am here with the Acadle Review. 

In this review, I am going to walk you through some stunning features of Acadle LMS (It’s unique coupon code generator is priceless!), its customer support, its user interface, its AppSumo lifetime deal, some significant pros and cons, along with suitable alternatives to Acadle.

So, what are we waiting for? Let’s get started!

Acadle Review

Kripesh Adwani

Types of Lessons
User Interface
Landing Page Builder
Pricing
Customer Support

Summary

If you are looking for a budget LMS option on lifetime deal then Acadle can be a good choice to consider right now.

3.5

Disclaimer : I strongly believe in transparency. If you buy using the links on our site, we may earn a small commission without any extra cost to you. This helps me to keep producing honest reviews. Read More >>

What is Acadle?

Acadle is an online teaching and academy building platform developed by Vahmine Technologies Pvt Ltd. It is based in the US, Korea, and India. The founder of Acadle, Mr Nizamudheen V, is based in Bangalore, India.

Acadle image

They store all their users’ data on Indian servers, which is great from the security point! Acadle is a comprehensive learning management software. It lets you create white labeled online academies with unlimited courses and lessons!

When you create an account on Acadle, your academy website is by default a sub-domain of Acadle (E.g. kp.acadle.com). It also comes with a free SSL Certificate protection. 

Acadle Pricing

Acadle’s pricing plans are somewhat similar to that of Thinkific. Let’s check out their regular pricing plans.

PlanPricing/month
Marketing Plan$39
Onboarding Plan$99
Training Plan$399

You won’t find a free plan on Acadle. But it offers a decent 7-days free trial on all its paid plans. As of now, Acadle is available as a lifetime deal on AppSumo starting from $69!

Acadle AppSumo Pricing

I have purchased its Single Plan from AppSumo for $69. Here’s what you get with it:

  • 1 academy
  • Unlimited number of courses and lessons
  • 500 students
  • 10 GB of storage space, and
  • 3 Team members 

I have used my Single Plan to demonstrate all the exciting features of Acadle in this article. Now, let’s quickly dive right into it. 

Acadle Review Video

Acadle Courses

As soon as you create your own academy and log in to it, you get to see a quick overview of user activity like your students’ course status, performance, rating, and analytics.

Creating a new course on Acadle

Acadle lets us create unlimited courses with unlimited lessons. While creating a new course, you can set the duration of your course and even assign it to a user group if you only want it to be available to specific students. 

Acadle course lock timer

What I really liked about Acadle is that you can also set a lock timer on your courses! This means you can specify the number of days after which the course will be locked and become inaccessible to your students. It can be displayed as a countdown timer on the course. 

This technique works as a motivator for students to finish courses as soon as possible to prevent missing the content!

Live course on Acadle

But the best thing about Acadle is its Live Courses. I have not seen this feature on other popular course creators like Teachable and Thinkific. So, if you wish to do video streaming, Acadle is the one for you.

It lets you schedule your live videos by setting the date and time of your live session and adding the video link. Your students see a scheduled message on the course and a ‘Notify me’ button to inform them 1 hour before it goes live. I think this is a really cool feature if you wish to conduct Q&A sessions, etc.

Types of Lessons

With Acadle, you get a variety of interactive lessons to create in-depth courses for your students. Let us check out the lesson types available on Acadle.

Video Lessons

Acadle Learning Management Software lets you upload your videos in MP4 format. These videos can be downloaded and watched on local devices.

Video lessons on Acadle

However, it does not support the online playback functionality as of now. I hope they bring this feature soon!

PDF Lessons

 PDF lessons are very important if you intend to offer text based content to your students. Acadle lets you upload PDF files that can be easily previewed and downloaded. 

PDF lessons on Acadle

However, I was a little disappointed that there were no options to view the PDF on full screen or zoom into it! 

Quiz Lessons

If you regularly conduct tests and quiz sessions with your students, you would love the advanced Quiz Lessons on Acadle. It lets you create customized quizzes with loads of features!

Quiz Lessons on Acadle

For every question, you can set the marks awarded for the correct answer, as well as the marks deducted for the wrong ones. It lets you upload images within your questions, which is great for photo-based questions. 

You can even experiment with additional settings like:

  • Setting a passing percentage
  • Allowing quiz retakes
  • Displaying the right answer after quiz submission
Quiz results on Acadle

The results of the quizzes, along with the status, score, and number of attempts, can be viewed in the Results tab.

Coding lessons

 Acadle offers basic coding blocks within its lessons where you can paste your code. But they are not color coded as per the language used. 

coding lessons in Acadle

So, I guess it wouldn’t be right to call them Coding Lessons. They look something like this on the student interface.

coding lessons preview

If you wish to create coding related courses online, then Teachable would be a perfect solution. It offers color-coded lessons, which are user friendly and easy to understand for your students.

Embeds

 For all the remaining media files, the Embed option works great. You can embed any content from third parties to display inside the Acadle Lessons effortlessly! 

Embed lessons

I tried to embed my YouTube video, a twitter post, a Vimeo video and a track from SoundCloud in my lesson. All of them were embedded successfully!

Mixed Lessons

Here comes the best part! You can use all the above mentioned lessons together within a single lesson to make it more interactive and comprehensive.

Mixed Lessons

You can insert images, tables, lists, profile cards, PDFs, embed links, code blocks, quotes, profile cards, etc all together to create an interesting combo for your students!

Acadle User Interface

Talking about the user interface of Acadle, we have three different perspectives to consider – the Admin Interface, the Student Interface and the Mobile Interface. 

Admin Interface

The Admin Interface looks quite organized. When you log in to your academy, you get to see the user dashboard displaying the number of users and members on your plan, and the remaining storage space.

Acadle Admin interface

All the options are neatly placed on the top of the screen. This makes it look more spacious and organized. However, I felt the admin interface to be quite slow at times.

Student Interface

When you log in to the Student dashboard, you can see the list of courses the student is enrolled in. Beside every course, you can check their progress percentage and the time remaining for the course to get locked again. 

Acadle Student Interface

Within every lesson, you also get the Private Notes option. Students can take down their personal notes in that space and it wouldn’t be accessible to anyone except them. 

 Finally, the students can also initiate conversations with the instructor and other students through the Discussions tab beside every lesson. Overall, the Student interface looks clean and offers a seamless user experience. But the only downsides are:

  • Uploaded videos cannot be previewed, and
  • PDF files lack full screen or zooming options. 

Mobile Interface

Though Acadle doesn’t feature a mobile app as of now, you can simply log in using your mobile browser! It loads quickly, and I liked how the images and text were displayed.

But honestly, I faced many problems. To name a few,

  • The uploaded videos cannot be played without downloading
  • YouTube video embeds do not scale down as per the screen resolution, which is highly inconvenient. 

Acadle Drip Schedule

Drip Schedule feature basically allows you to plan and offer your courses to your students in a much more organized fashion. 

Drip Schedule in Acadle

The best part is that Acadle lets you drip courses as well as your individual lessons. So you have the control to specify the number of days after which a lesson will be unlocked. 

This feature is helpful for courses that require the student to actually spend time on learning and practicing stuff. For example, meditation courses, coding courses, Photoshop tutorials, etc.

Acadle Student Pricing Options

I found the Student Pricing options to be quite limited in Acadle. You can only create one time payment plans. The EMI and subscription options are not available on their platform as of now. 

Student Pricing options in Acadle

For creating a plan, you need to first give it a name. For example, Silver, Diamond, Gold, etc. Next, we will add a price and the course offered in that plan. 

The best part is that you can also select multiple courses from your academy, and sell them together as a bundled course. This will help you offer more value to your students and boost your sales! 

I hope we get to see more student pricing plans on Acadle soon!

Acadle Payment Integrations

For processing payments, Acadle offers the Stripe Payments option inbuilt into it platform. I really liked the Stripe integration because it is more secure and reliable. 

Payment integrations in Acadle

For connecting your Stripe account with Acadle, all you need to do is enter your Stripe key and your Stripe Secret and then you can accept payments through Stripe!

Because Acadle is an Indian service, I was hoping they would also introduce the RazorPay and UPI Payments options for better convenience of the Indian users. I hope they will work on this in the future. 

 As of now, you can enable their PlugnPaid plugin to use RazorPay or other payment gateways. But that will cost you additional subscription charges. 

Acadle Webhooks and API

To help its users get the most out of their platform, Acadle LMS offers you its webhooks and API functionality.

webhooks in Acadle

Developers can connect numerous third party services with Acadle using API. With its webhooks feature, you can connect automation platforms like Integrately or Pabbly Connect

Webhooks help you automate your tasks. For example, whenever a student enrolls into your course, you can automatically add them to your email list, or send them automated emails. All of this is possible through webhooks.  

I was quite impressed with the fact that advanced functions like webhooks and API are available in all the plans of Acadle!

Bulk Coupons in Acadle 

 This is the most impressive feature of the Acadle LMS tool. It not only lets you generate unique coupons, but you can generate as many unique coupons as you want at a time! 

Bulk coupons in Acadle

All you need to do is 

  • Enter the number of coupons you need
  • Enter the length of code
  • Specify a custom prefix and a user group. 
  • Click on Generate

Your coupons will be automatically generated in a matter of seconds! Unique coupons are helpful for offering discounts to individual students.

Acadle Login Page Builder

Acadle’s Page Builder is quite basic and only lets you edit the Login page. You can choose from 4 pre-designed templates for the login page. 

Page Builder in Acadle

It lets you customize the design and color elements of the text, buttons, and the background. You can also add a custom logo, title, and description. Unfortunately, the Basic plan doesn’t allow you to edit other pages including the Course page, Sales page, etc.

In case you’re interested, you can check out my Academy’s login page on kp.acadle.com.

Acadle Custom Domain

With Acadle course creator, you can easily whitelist your academy! This essentially means that you can shift your entire academy to your own domain by entering your domain’s DNS Records.

Custom domain in Acadle

For example, I can shift my academy from kp.academy.com to courses.kripesh.com in a matter of minutes!

This feature is useful for professionals and established brands who want to offer courses to their students without sacrificing their brand’s identity.

Acadle Certificates

 Certifications are very effective at boosting the confidence of your online students. Acadle lets you issue certificates to your students as soon as they complete a course.

Certificates in Acadle

You can select a template of your choice from their collection of 20+ pre-built certificate templates. 

It also lets you upload your signature and brand logo to add a more professional touch! However, if you wish to upload custom templates, you’ll have to upgrade to its Pro plan!

Acadle Student Affiliates

The Student Affiliates feature is a powerful marketing feature found in all popular online course creators. It lets you add your students as affiliates, so they can earn a percentage of the revenue by referring people to your course! This practice benefits the students as well as the instructors.

Sadly, Acadle does not support the Affiliates function at present. I would like to see this in their future updates. 

Acadle Integrations

Apart from webhooks, you can also find integrations for 15 different services on Acadle ranging from live chat support, customer help desk, email automations, and more! 

Here is a table displaying all the integrations supported by Acadle.

Live Chat ServiceIntercom
Freshchat
Gist
Customerly
Tawk.to
Crisp
Chatbot ServiceContinually
QuiroBot
ChatBot
Customer SupportZendesk
LiveAgent
FreshChat
Payment ProcessingPlugnPaid
Video HostingSwarmify
Email AutomationEncharge

All these services would be beneficial for instructors wanting to build a healthy and growing community of students. 

Acadle Community

The latest feature addition to Acadle is live now! They have recently introduced the Acadle Community feature.

Acadle Community

It would be beneficial for instructors and students for conducting discussions and sharing information more effectively. However, it is only available on their Training Plan. 

You can enable the Community feature from the Configurations tab. It helps you create a variety of topics, for example, Blog, Q&A, Feedbacks, Ideas, etc. 

Create new post in Acadle Community

You can create quick posts by clicking on the ‘Create New Post’ button and then share them with your students’ community. It offers decent formatting options as well.

Acadle Community Settings

Finally, Acadle also allows you to adjust permissions for your students like:

  • Who can post in the community?
  • Who can reply in the community?
  • Who can access posts?
  • Enable rating, voting, and pinned posts
  • Display number of views on posts

Overall, I think the Community feature is a significant upgrade in Acadle LMS. I hope to see them implementing even more advanced features soon! 

Acadle Customer Support

Talking about support, you will find helpful and polite Live Chat support in Acadle. In my experience, their replies were quick and knowledgeable. 

Live chat in Acadle

Their responses to my queries arrived in under 5 minutes and I even got replies on weekends. Cool, right?

They also have a Help Center with a decent number of informative articles that can be accessed from within the chat box itself. The FAQ section of Acadle comprises short and to-the-point answers or video tutorials to help you solve general queries. 

Acadle Training page

Additionally, they also have a Training page that offers 3 hours of content divided into 8 courses. Beginners can use them to learn the basics of Acadle. It covers topics like how to manage your courses, integrate with third parties, invite users, best practices for your academy, etc. 

Acadle Roadmap

I browsed through their Roadmap and found the updates to be quite old. But, I really liked that they are working on the ThriveCart integration. 

Acadle Roadmap

This means we will get to see installments and EMI options for student payments soon! It would be great for the Indian users if they also plan on including the RazorPay payment gateway. 

Pros of Acadle

Easy to Use

Acadle offers a friendly and easy-to-use interface for both instructors and students. All the options are arranged on the header bar which gives it a cleaner and more spacious look!

Supports Webhooks, API, and Integrations

Acadle offers in-built integrations with 15 services covering Live Chat, Help Desk, Email Automation, Payment Gateways, etc. You can also use webhooks and API to achieve additional functionality by connecting a variety of third party apps and services.

Unique Coupon Codes

You can create unique coupon codes in bulk, which is really useful for offering discounts to specific students. 

Fast Customer Support

Acadle offers fast and helpful live chat support. I even received replies on weekends, which was impressive!

White Labeling

You can easily shift your academy created through Acadle to a custom domain and boost your brand identity!

Cons of Acadle

No RazorPay Support

Acadle, being an Indian company, should have provided RazorPay payment support for Indian users. I hope they integrate it into their platform soon. 

Basic Page Builder

You cannot customize their Login page much. Also, there are no options for customizing specific pages like course page, sales page, etc.

No Video Playback

You need to download videos for viewing them. Acadle does not support video playbacks. However, you can embed YouTube links effortlessly!

No Coding Lessons

Acadle offers coding blocks, but does not support color coding according to the programming language used. This makes it a poor option for creating coding related courses. 

No Subscription Options

As of now, they do not have any in-built options for Student Pricing. However, their ThriveCart integration is in progress, which will implement features like EMI payment, subscriptions, etc.

Should you buy Acadle?

Honestly, I don’t think Acadle is as powerful or efficient as Teachable or Thinkific. It lets you create online academies and offers an interactive learning experience. However, it lacks some major features essential for an online course creator. 

But in case you were planning to use WordPress LMS plugins (E.g. LearnDash), Acadle would be an easy-to-use replacement for those!

Beginners who have fewer students and are tight on their budget would also find Acadle to be an interesting option. Once you start gaining more audience, you can shift to other course creators and enjoy advanced features. 

But, if you already are an established instructor with lots of students and a high marketing budget, you can look at other popular platforms for better services.

Let’s have a look at some established LMS platforms.

Acadle Alternatives

Acadle offers decent features In my opinion, the following online course creation platforms would be the best alternatives to Acadle.

1.) Thinkific

Thinkific is an affordable and easy-to-use course creator. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t charge a transaction fee on any of its plans. You can also find support for Stripe Payments, which is useful for the Indian users!

However, the only downside is that you cannot create coding lessons with it. For more details, you can check out my Thinkific Review.

2.) Teachable

Teachable is an LMS platform where you can find a variety of in-built marketing tools for your courses. It also offers impressive coding lessons and a bulk coupon generator too! 

Teachable can be useful if you are more focused on selling and marketing your courses. However, the downside is that they charge a higher transaction fee.To know more about its unique features, check out my Teachable Review.

3.) Learnyst

Learnyst is another popular LMS platform that offers a variety of Indian payment options and a 0% transaction fee. Along with that, it also offers secure DRM Encryption to safeguard your online courses from piracy and a feature-rich free plan for beginners.

However, the lack of coding lessons along with a complex and buggy interface are some of its downsides. The pricing plans of Learnyst start from ₹3499/month. By using my link, you can get a 25% off on all paid plans of Learnyst. (Use coupon code: KRIPESH25)

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed reading this review. Acadle looks like a decent learning management software with sufficient features. However, it does lack some important features at present. 

So, if you are planning to get Acadle, I suggest you carefully weigh its pros and cons before making the purchase, especially if you have never created an online course before.

Professionals in the LTD (lifetime deals) community already have subscriptions to a lot of other LTD services. Therefore, they integrate those tools with each other and create a smooth workflow. 

 For example, they use tools like

  • Swipe Pages for creating landing pages,
  • SendFox or Encharge for email marketing
  • Pabbly Connect for automations.

Purchasing Acadle LMS would be easier for them because they have a variety of tools already stacked up for integration.

Beginners who wish to get started with a budget-friendly and basic platform can check out Acadle’s AppSumo deal. Otherwise, you can find other more efficient tools in the market as well. 

If you have any doubts regarding Acadle or course creation platforms, shoot them in the comments section below. I will try to answer all your queries as soon as possible! 

And, if you find my content helpful, you can join my Newsletter and stay in touch with the latest articles. This is Kripesh signing off. Cheers!

FAQ

 Is Acadle a good platform to host and build your online courses?

Acadle is a good platform for beginners who have never created an online course. But it lacks major functions like video playback, coding lessons, student pricing options, etc. 
So, if you are an established organization or individual, you can look at Teachable or Thinkific for building your online courses. 

What is the Acadle lifetime deal?

Acadle LMS is available as a lifetime deal on AppSumo right now. It starts from $69 where you can create 1 academy with unlimited courses. You get 10 GB of storage, along with 3 team members and 500 students.
AppSumo also offers a 60-days money-back guarantee on all its offers. So you can easily test out Acadle to see if it suits your needs. 

Does Acadle provide an API?

 Yes, Acadle offers an API service for its users. So, if you are a developer, you can use it to connect lots of third party apps with Acadle. 

What are the top alternatives for Acadle?

It all depends on your requirements. If you want an affordable and easy-to-use course creator, then Thinkific would do the job. But, if you are an established organization who wants advanced marketing features, then you can look at Teachable

Does Acadle offer a free plan?

Acadle does not offer a free plan. But you can get a 7-days free trial on all its paid plans. If you go with its AppSumo Lifetime deal, you can get a 60-days money-back guarantee as well!

acadle

 Acadle Pros (+)

  • Easy to Use
  • Good Integrations
  • Unique Coupon Codes
  • Fast Customer Support
  • White Labeling

 Acadle Cons (-)

  • No RazorPay Support
  • Basic Page Builder
  • No Video Playback
  • No Coding Lessons

Photo of author

Kripesh Adwani

Kripesh Adwani is a digital tool expert who buys, tests, and reviews SAAS tools for small businesses. Based on 10+ years of experience in tech he provides insightful reviews. His content is widely consumed, serving millions of users each month. Kripesh has also been featured in more than 50 publications, including The Economic Times, The Free Press Journal & Cloudways.

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