Creating online courses can be time-consuming and expensive. But not anymore! In this article, I’m going to introduce you to an impressive LMS platform using which you can create, manage, and sell your online courses quickly and easily.
Being a content creator and tech entrepreneur, I have created a few online training programs in the past, like – Cloudways training program, Hostinger Training Program, and Lightning Blogs Blogging Course.
For hosting these courses, I frequently keep on testing LMS platforms. In the past, I have also tested and reviewed many LMS platforms, including Thinkific, Teachable, Graphy, and Acadle.
After recently coming across Learnyst LMS, I purchased it and tested it for a few weeks. This review is a result of my testing and personal experiences with Learnyst in the past weeks.
In today’s Learnyst Review, we are going to talk about its history, interface, major features, pricing plans, customer support, and suitable alternatives to it. Without any further ado, let’s dive right in.
Learnyst Review
Summary
Learnyst is a popular Indian LMS platform that comes with a variety of Indian payment options, a 0% transaction fee, and DRM Encryption. However, the UI is somewhat complex and buggy and can be improved. Overall, Learnyst is a good option for people looking for DRM encryption for their videos.
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 >>
About Learnyst
Learnyst is an online LMS platform jointly founded by Shivaranjan Kumar, Shankar Mahesh, Hitesh Choudhary, and Sridhar Dubbaka in 2015. It is headquartered in Bangalore (India) and has over 2000+ customers at the moment.
The primary aim of the Learnyst platform is to make online teaching simple and scalable for educators. Some of its notable features include powerful DRM encryption, AWS hosting, and no transaction charges.
Learnyst Review Video
If you’re not into written content, here’s the video review of Learnyst in the Hindi language, along with English subtitles. Hope you enjoy it.
Learnyst User Interface
The user interface of Learnyst can be divided into three parts – Admin Interface, Student Interface, and Mobile Interface. Let us discuss each of them in depth.
Admin Interface
The admin interface has a pretty outdated color and design. It looks complex and might be difficult to operate for a first-time user.
You can find all the features laid out on the left panel when you log in. The dashboard tab features the analytics of your online academy.
This includes data about sales, learners, best-selling products, app analytics, etc. The lower right corner has the live chat support button to resolve your queries. Overall, it’s an average interface.
Mobile Interface
Learnyst offers you the ability to build mobile applications for your school. However, if you don’t have a developer account yet, your students can still access your course content from their mobile browser.
The mobile interface is pretty smooth and all the lessons work pretty well. Video lessons play smoothly and it is overall easy to use. It also features a dark mode for users who don’t want to strain their eyes much.
The only problem I found was with the PDF lessons. They don’t fit the screen size well. I think this can be improved.
Learnyst Course Features
Course Editor
Learnyst offers a drag-and-drop course editor which is easy to use. All you need to do is select a type of lesson or quiz from the left panel and drop it into a section in your course.
You can also check out certifications, content dripping, and other settings from the course editor. Although it is average in design, it is sufficient to get the job done.
Lessons Supported
Learnyst supports a variety of lesson types. As you start experimenting with various types of lessons, the support pings you with helpful information and links to make the most out of their platform. Let’s take a look at them.
Video Lessons
The Video Lessons allow you to embed videos in your courses either from your system or from Dropbox, YouTube, or Vimeo.
However, you can only add a single video to the video lesson, and videos from YouTube or Vimeo cannot be encrypted, as they are publicly available. Along with this, it also lets you add short and long descriptions for your lesson, tags, and featured images.
Audio Lesson
Under Audio Lessons, you can upload audio files from your system, Dropbox, or URLs. Along with that, you are also allowed to add descriptions, tags, and a featured image for the audio.
PDF Lessons
Similar to the above lessons, you can also upload PDFs from your system, Dropbox cloud storage, or via URLs. Because the PDFs are encrypted while being uploaded on their platform, the students won’t be able to see the thumbnails or previews of PDF lessons.
Slide Lessons
A slide lesson can have a total of 250 slides. They can be a mixture of images, videos, audio, and PDFs. However, you are only allowed to add up to 5 videos, audios, and PDF files in total. The rest of the slides are images.
Live Video Lessons
With Live Video Lessons, you can schedule Zoom meetings or Zoom webinars with your enrolled students via link/code or even upload a recorded video.
You can also set a start time and the duration of your live meeting. However, this feature has to be activated from the Add-ons.
Article Lesson
Article Lessons may be helpful for providing notes on a topic or creating long-form articles to inform your students. The lesson editor offers basic formatting options, along with the ability to add videos and images.
It doesn’t support drag-and-drop upload for images either. I found the editor to be a little buggy as the formatting bar disappeared from the screen while creating a lesson!
Scorm or Tincan lesson
SCORM or Tincan lessons are specific formats of online lessons in which you can easily create interactive course content like quizzes or ask questions to your students while the video is being played on the screen.
I personally did not test out this feature but if you work with these types of lessons to engage learners, you can check it out.
Quiz Lesson
Learnyst offers two different quiz lessons – Section Quiz and Assignment. Under the Section quiz, you get various question formats, including group questions, numerical, fill-in-the-blanks, MCQs, and essays.
For creating quiz questions, you can either manually add them or import them from MS Word or Excel sheet. For detailed customization of your quizzes, you can specify their difficulty levels, marking scheme, guideline time, enable multiple answers, partial marking, and more.
But the most impressive feature of the Quiz lessons is that you can add a video explanation for your questions, which is super convenient.
On the other hand, Assignment questions comprise essay-type questions. You can specify the evaluation criteria for the essay and delegate a specific percentage of marks to every criterion. Unlike quiz questions, assignments need to be checked and approved separately by the instructor.
However, I found a few bugs while creating a section quiz. The quiz question types stay frozen on the screen even on moving to a different page. I think they can work on fixing these minor bugs.
DRM Encryption
The Essential plan of Learnyst lets you create 10 encrypted courses. The interesting thing about an encrypted course is that it supports DRM encryption, which prevents students from using screen recording tools to illegally record video lectures.
This helps you prevent your content from piracy. However, the encryption-enabled courses cannot be accessed by iOS users at the moment.
Certifications
Learnyst also lets you issue certificates to your students for completing the quizzes or mock tests. All you have to do is select the test for which you wish to issue a certificate and set the passing marks.
Once a student qualifies for this criterion, the certificate would be automatically issued in their name. You can also customize your certificates, for which Learnyst offers 3 templates.
It lets you upload a background image, logo, and signature so you can add a personal touch to your certificates.
Content Dripping
If you want to schedule your lessons to be available in a specific order, the Content Dripping option will be helpful.
It is available under every course and you can specify the drip schedule as per the student’s enrolment date or enter a specific date for the lesson’s release. It’s a powerful feature for controlling the flow of your courses.
Utilities
This is a helpful backup and security feature that lets you create copies of your courses and secure the unencrypted courses with DRM encryption.
Course Settings
Under Course Settings, you can change a lot of features for your course, including branding, SEO, pricing, etc. Following is a list of things that can be customized.
- You can add course branding like course name, description, featured image, video, etc.
- For SEO, you can add a friendly URL, the title of your course page, and an SEO description.
- You can add instructors by entering their names and email addresses.
- Days of course validity, course pricing, mobile pricing, and discounted prices can be specified.
- Sub-schools can be created under your main school.
Learnyst Test Features
Mock Tests
Mock Tests are a compelling feature of Learnyst. If you wish to help your students practice for a specific examination, Learnyst offers templates of Indian examinations like CAT, UPSC, JEE, CLAT, CMAT, IBPS, etc.
On selecting any of these tests, you can use their question formats and marking schemes on your own questions. For instance, if you opt for the GRE examination, it imports the Analytical Writing, Verbal Reasoning, and Quantitative Reasoning Sections along with their marking schemes.
To add questions, you can either manually create them or import them from the Question Pool as Excel or Word documents. Overall, I really like the Question Creator of Learnyst Mock Tests, especially for Indian audiences.
Test Series
Test Series is simply a compilation of tests that you’ve created. You can group various tests together and offer them as a bundle for a specific price. I really like the fact that Learnyst lets you sell your test series separately.
Answer Reviews
Here, you will find a list of all the theoretical assignments submitted by your learners. You can easily evaluate and manage assignments from the Answer Reviews tab.
Learnyst Website and App Features
Website Builder
I found the website builder offered by Learnyst to be decent. It has a modern and friendly interface. It offers 256+ beautiful layouts that you can import into your page.
If you already have a domain registered, Learnyst lets you connect to a custom domain. Otherwise, your website is built on its sub-domain. For editing your page, you get dozens of elements that can be dragged and dropped. However, the CTA and upselling options were quite limited.
The Blocks tab features a lot of different blocks for Features, Contact Us, CTA, Pricing, Testimonials, and more.
You can directly click on any block of your choice to insert it into your page. The Left Panel Settings also allows you to create new pages and specify their title, URL slug, and description.
Under Project Settings, you can add detailed information about your website, along with custom CSS, code, translation languages, webhooks, and redirections to other pages. Overall, their page builder is decent, but it can definitely be improved in terms of features.
Mobile Apps
Learnyst gives you the opportunity to offer your courses to your students through a mobile app. If you are a developer, you can build an Android app for your course. The iOS app is currently in the development stage.
Website Branding
To personalize your online school, Learnyst lets you set a logo and a social sharing banner for your website. You can also choose your brand colors, fonts, and button styles for your platform. These changes will be visible on the learner interface.
Language
Learnyst offers an extensive list of 170+ languages to choose from. These include English, Hindi, various international languages, and regional Indian languages.
However, the translation of these languages is not automatically implemented in your online school. You have to manually enter the translation for each phrase. I think they need to add automatic translations to every language.
Custom Fields
When students sign up for your online course, they usually enter their names and email addresses.
However, if you wish to collect some additional information about them, for instance, their mobile number, or who referred to them, you can add custom fields. You can select the type of your custom field and can even mark it as mandatory.
Student Interface
The student interface is much better than the admin interface in terms of colors and design. It looks quite modern and elegant. You can check out the student interface using the following URL: https://kp-school.learnyst.com/learn
Because our course is encrypted, you won’t be able to preview most of the lessons, except for the YouTube or Vimeo embeds. Students can not record their screens while watching your video lessons because it is secured with DRM encryption. This prevents any user from pirating your courses.
The test interface for students is pretty attractive as well! Students may create community posts, mark lessons as favorites, add personal notes, and save bookmarks. If you are on the Pro plan, you can also enable multiple languages and a wallet system for your students. Overall, the student interface is good.
Course Marketing
Messenger
To communicate important information with your students, Learnyst comes with a messenger option. It lets you send push and email notifications to your learners.
To receive push notifications, your learners need to have their mobile numbers added to their accounts. For email notifications, Learnyst lets you send off transitional and marketing emails, which can be personalized.
Coupon Code
For offering interesting discounts to your learners, you can create coupon codes in bulk. You can create two types of discount coupons – fixed amount discount or percentage discount.
For creating a coupon code, all you need to do is set a coupon name, select the discount type, specify the amount or percentage, and choose the products it would apply to. You can also set a coupon expiry date, usage limit, minimum purchase, device limit, etc.
Wallet and Referrals
This is one of the most amazing marketing features I found on Learnyst. Using this feature, students enrolled on your platform can refer it to others and earn points in their wallets. Using these points, they can purchase other courses on your platform.
The number of credits awarded to the referee and the referrer on sign-up can be specified. It also lets you set a limit to the maximum credit a user can have in their wallet and the maximum points they can spend on an order.
You can set the conversion of wallet points into real currency. For instance, if you set 1 point = ₹1, then a student needs to collect 3999 points in order to get access to a course worth ₹3999. That’s a great way to market your courses.
Integrations
If you wish to integrate with third-party platforms, Learnyst provides four different services, including Google Analytics, Code Snippets, Pabbly, and Zapier. Google Analytics would be helpful if you want to get in-depth insights into your website’s performance.
Pabbly and Zapier are automation tools that you can use to automate certain tasks in your online school. And finally, Code Snippets can be used to insert additional tools and elements into your pages.
Adding Learners
If you wish to add new learners to your online courses, you can manually add them through the Users tab.
To add a learner, you simply need to enter their email, select the product you want them to access, choose an access type (trial or paid), and enter the expiry date of their access to the course. You can also import your learners by uploading a .xlsx file.
Additionally, Learnyst also allows you to add sub-admins to your online school and assign them roles and access to different parts of your courses.
Analytics Reports
The Reports tab will help you get a clear idea of how your online school and courses are performing with its detailed analytics reports.
You can view the number of enrolments, list of your learners, sales analytics of your courses, and learning analytics grouped by courses, mock tests, etc.
Apart from this, you can also view created groups, check live class attendance, and digitally evaluate the assignments of your students.
Communities and Discussions
For enabling healthy communication between your learners, you can create a community where your learners can post their thoughts or queries.
Under the Manage tab, you can view the recent discussions, ratings, and reviews left by your learners, leave answers for reviews, and resolve learners’ queries sent via support tickets.
Newsfeed
The Newsfeed tool can create promotional content and publish articles.
For instance, you can use it to post about the latest discounts, offers, and courses you are going to launch in the future. It offers an average text editor with decent formatting options to create your posts.
Learnyst Additional Features
FAQs
If you wish to provide some additional information or instructions to students enrolling in your courses, you can create FAQs and answers. These will be displayed on the main course page under the lesson preview.
Subscriptions
Subscriptions are a convenient way to sell your courses on a recurring charge. On Learnyst, you can sell your courses, mock tests, and test series to your students on a subscription basis.
It lets you specify the pricing of your subscription plan, its validity (in the number of days or fixed date), and discounted price as well. You can also mark it as free to offer your plan free of cost!
Add-ons
These are additional integrations available for free on the paid plans of Learnyst. You basically get the following 7 add-ons:
- Zoom Integration
- Search
- Live Classes
- Certificates
- Anti Piracy Pack
- Watch Time Restriction
- Learner OTP Verification
Once you subscribe to these services, you can implement them in your courses. These features would really prove to be useful if you have enough content and students enrolled in your online courses.
Learnyst Settings
Under the Settings tab, you can tweak the global settings for your entire online school hosted on Learnyst. It includes the following settings:
- General Settings – Here, you can set video quality, language, time zone, OTP verification, and generation of GST invoices.
- Pricing Model Settings – This lets you choose a pricing model from One-time Payments and Subscriptions. This applies to all courses in your school.
- Payment Gateway Settings – Here, you can set a payment gateway and currency for your learners. It supports the following payment gateways for Indian audiences: Razorpay, Instamojo, CCAvenue, PayUMoney, UPI, and HDFC Bank.
- SEO Settings – Here, you can provide your sitemaps data if you have connected a custom domain with Learnyst.
- Billing Settings – It shows your current subscription plan, payment method, and invoice history. You can also cancel your plan if you wish to
- Email Settings and Reset Passwords – It lets you reset your official email and password with which you registered on Learnyst.
I really liked the fact that Indian users can get GST invoices for their purchases, and students can pay for a course via UPI. Both are very convenient options.
Attachments
If you wish to supply additional content to your students, you can make use of attachments. For instance, it can be used to supply extra study material, homework, question banks, test papers, assignments, projects, etc.
Learnyst Pricing
Learnyst offers 3 types of paid plans starting from ₹3499/month. Following is a list of features provided by each plan.
I have purchased its Premium plan, which costs ₹14999/month. It gives you access to advanced features of Learnyst, including SSO, Screen Recording Restriction, Essay Evaluation, Custom Admin Roles, Priority Support, and more.
Learnyst Free Plan
As per the latest update in 2024, Learnyst has discontinued its free plan.
Learnyst Free Trial
Learnyst offers a 14-day free trial of its services. So you can thoroughly test out all its features before subscribing to a premium plan.
Payment Methods
Because Learnyst is an Indian LMS platform, you will find a variety of payment options suited for Indian audiences. It supports payments made through Credit Cards, Debit Cards, Net banking, and even UPI.
Refund Policy
Previously, Learnyst used to offer a 15-day refund policy. But now they have discontinued the refunds and replaced them with a free trial instead. So, if you subscribe to a paid plan, you won’t get any refund upon cancellation.
Learnyst Coupon Code
If you’ve liked the Learnyst LMS so far and are planning to get your hands on it, then I have an exciting discount for you guys! All you have to do is use my link and sign up for its free trial.
Test it out for a while and once you are ready to upgrade to the paid plans, you can enter the coupon code KRIPESH25 to get a 25% discount on your purchase. This applies to both the monthly and annual plans.
Learnyst Customer Support
Learnyst offers customer support via live chat, calls, and emails. Their live chat support is quick to respond, but their replies are not always knowledgeable or helpful.
For instance, when I inquired about simple queries like the number of encrypted courses, or the platform where Learnyst was hosted, they had to check that up with their team!
So, you might have to spend a lot of time trying to get your query resolved with their support team.
Apart from that, they have an extensive knowledge base of 350+ articles and helpful FAQs. They even conduct regular webinars on how to effectively use their platform. Overall, I liked their support, but the quality of live chat support can be improved.
Learnyst Pros
1. Equipped With DRM Encryption
It makes use of DRM encryption on the videos uploaded in your courses. This ensures that nobody can download or use screen recording tools on your content, thus preventing piracy.
2. Indian Payment Options
Learnyst is a platform designed for Indian users, which is why you will find lots of Indian payment options like Razorpay, Instamojo, CCAvenue, UPI, etc.
3. GST Invoices
Indian businesses can get GST invoices for their purchases on Learnyst, which is a super convenient option.
4. 0% Transaction Fee
All the revenue that you earn through selling your courses is completely yours. Learnyst does not impose any transaction charges on them.
5. Good Drip Content
Learnyst also lets you schedule your courses and release them on a specific date or a certain number of days after the student has signed up. This is a powerful feature to take control of your online school.
6. Hosted on AWS
The entire Learnyst platform is hosted on AWS, which is one of the most reliable cloud platforms. Thus, you can rest assured in terms of website speeds and performance.
7. In-depth Analytics
You can get detailed insights into the performance of your online courses, sales, and students. This may help you find areas of improvement and take actionable steps in order to grow your platform.
8. Good Integrations
Learnyst offers integration with Google Analytics for monitoring your viewers, Code Snippets for inserting custom code into your website, and Pabbly and Zapier for automating your tasks.
These third-party integrations are quite effective in accelerating your online platform to the next level.
9. Advanced Quizzes and Mock Tests
You can create multiple types of quizzes on Learnyst, along with video explanations. It also offers mock test templates for Indian examinations, which is great for creating crash courses for national-level exams.
Learnyst Cons
1. No Coding Lessons
Though Learnyst offers a variety of lesson types, I couldn’t find coding lessons on them. They also don’t support surveys or form lessons. I hope they bring these lessons in their future updates.
2. Complex Interface
The interface of Learnyst looks outdated in design and is loaded with dozens of features that make it appear complex. Apart from that, the arrangement of the features and functions is such that it may overwhelm a beginner.
3. No Customization Allowed
At the moment, they do not allow any customizations to be done on their course pages or their payment pages. So, if you wish to upsell your products or personalize the interface as per your brand, that is not possible.
4. Glitches Observed
Their interface is a little buggy. For instance, sometimes elements freeze on the screen, sometimes you get 404 errors, and sometimes it automatically gets logged out after a few minutes of inactivity. I hope they will fix these issues soon.
5. No Translations for Languages
Even though Learnyst supports 100+ languages, it doesn’t offer translations in those languages. You need to manually add translated phrases for your preferred language.
Learnyst Alternatives
If you are looking for some other LMS platforms, the following options are the best alternatives to Learnyst.
Thinkific
Thinkific is a renowned teaching platform that comes at affordable pricing. It also doesn’t charge any translation fee and supports Stripe payments.
However, its lack of coding lessons and live chat support are some downsides. You can also use my link to get a 30-day free trial of Thinkific’s paid plans.
Teachable
Teachable is another popular LMS platform that is focused on marketing and selling online courses.
So, you’ll find a range of marketing tools on Teachable, including bulk coupons generator, upsells, email integrations, and an impressive affiliate program.
It also supports coding lessons. The only downside to Teachable is its high transaction charges. If you want to try it out, use my link to get a 2-month free subscription to the Teachable Pro plan.
Acadle
Acadle is an easy-to-use online course creator that is packed with advanced tools like webhooks, API access, white labeling, lots of integrations, and a bulk coupon code generator.
However, you won’t find coding lessons, student subscription options, and video playback features here. To know more, you can check out my Acadle Review.
Graphy
Graphy is a popular Indian LMS platform owned by Unacademy. It is loaded with excellent marketing features, lots of lesson types, Indian payment options, DRM encryption on videos, and helpful call support.
However, you won’t find coding lessons or in-built emails here. You can use my link to get yearly plans of Graphy at 20% discounted rates. (Use coupon code KRIPESH20).
Conclusion
In this article, we reviewed the Learnyst Learning Management System. In my opinion, the paid plans of Learnyst would be valuable for those instructors, online teachers, and creators who need Indian payment options and DRM Protection on their courses.
It lets you enroll unlimited students and provides Indian payment methods to accept payments from learners. There are no transaction charges applied either, which is another added advantage.
On top of that, you can also use a custom domain, drip content, coupon codes, advanced reports, a student wallet system, and more.
If you are a beginner, the free trial of Learnyst would be an excellent option to understand the features of the platform.
Even though its user interface feels somewhat complex, overwhelming, and buggy, its DRM Encryption and Indian payment options compensate for that. Learnyst is honestly one of the best Indian LMS platforms for security and payments.
If you find Learnyst an interesting option, you can also use my link to get the Learnyst monthly and annual subscriptions at 25% discounted rates. (Use coupon code KRIPESH25)
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed reading this article. Have you used any LMS platforms before? If yes, how was your experience with them? And what are your views about Learnyst? Let me know in the comments section below.
This is Kripesh signing off. I’ll be back with more interesting reviews soon. Till then, keep learning and stay safe. Cheers! 🙂
FAQs
What is the Refund Policy of Learnyst?
As per the latest update, Learnyst does not offer any refunds. You get a 14-day free trial to test out its features though.
Does Learnyst offer a free trial?
Yes, it offers a 14-day free trial. You can use it to get an idea about the basic things you can accomplish with Learnyst LMS.
What are the payment methods supported on Learnyst?
Learnyst is an Indian LMS platform, which is why you will find payment options convenient for Indian users. These include Credit and Debit Cards, Net Banking, and UPI.
Does Learnyst have a Lifetime deal?
Unfortunately, Learnyst does not offer a lifetime deal as of now. You can check out its subscription plans.
Learnyst Pros (+)
- DRM Encryption
- Indian Payment Options
- GST Invoices
- 0% Transaction Fees
Learnyst Cons (-)
- No Coding Lessons
- Complex Interface
- Glitches Observed