Tutor LMS vs Masteriyo: Which Free LMS Wins in 2026?

So you’ve decided to build your online course on WordPress. Smart move. Now comes the tricky part: picking the plugin that actually runs it.

That plugin is called an LMS, short for Learning Management System. It handles your lessons, quizzes, students, and payments. And if you’re shopping the free tier in 2026, two names keep coming up: Tutor LMS, the established heavyweight, and Masteriyo, the newer challenger.

Both let you build and sell courses without WooCommerce, and both are genuinely free to start. But they make very different trade-offs, and picking the wrong one means migrating your whole course later. Nobody enjoys that. 😅

In this guide, we compare Tutor LMS vs Masteriyo round by round: free features, course building, quizzes, selling, ecosystem, and pricing. Each round gets a declared winner. No fence-sitting.

Let’s jump right in! 🚀

⚖️ DISCLAIMER: Masteriyo is a member of the Themeisle family of products, the same family behind this blog. You’ll get the straight story anyway: Tutor LMS wins several rounds below, and we say so every time it does.

In a rush? Here’s the scorecard:

Keep reading for the full breakdown, or jump to the final verdict. 👇

The contenders at a glance

Tutor LMS (by Themeum) is the veteran. WordPress.org shows 100,000+ active installs and a 4.4 out of 5 rating, and the big version 4.0 update landed in July 2026 with a redesigned student experience. It’s a complete LMS: course builder, quizzes, native eCommerce, subscriptions, and a multi-instructor system that can power full course marketplaces.

Its homepage has the confidence you’d expect from the category incumbent:

Masteriyo is the newer option. WordPress.org shows 5,000+ active installs and a 4.8 out of 5 rating. Yes, that’s a much smaller install base, and there’s no point pretending otherwise. But the free plugin punches above its weight on monetization: a built-in order system, free payment gateways, and free certificates are all included from day one. 💪

Both plugins made our list of the best free LMS plugins for WordPress, so there’s no bad choice here. It’s about fit. Let’s break it down.

Free features

This is where the two plugins’ philosophies split.

Masteriyo’s free tier is built to transact. For $0, you get:

• Unlimited courses, lessons, and quizzes, with no caps anywhere
• Course certificates: a visual builder plus one starter template, with QR-code validation
• SCORM import (free add-on), handy if you’re moving existing eLearning content over
• H5P support (free add-on) for interactive content
• Google Meet and Google Classroom integrations (free add-ons)
• Course reviews, Q&A, wishlist, groups, and built-in email notifications

One honesty note on certificates: the free plugin includes the builder and one template. The full template gallery you see below requires Masteriyo Pro ($149/year intro, renews at $299; more on pricing later):

Tutor LMS free covers the basics well: unlimited courses and learners, the course builder, quizzes, and a native checkout. But several features you might assume are free actually sit behind Tutor LMS Pro:

• Certificates → Pro add-on
• H5P → Pro add-on
• Content drip → Pro add-on
• Assignments → Pro add-on

To be fair, Tutor gives you something valuable for free that Masteriyo doesn’t have at all: front-end dashboards. Every student and instructor gets a proper front-end dashboard with enrolled courses, progress, results, and announcements. Masteriyo has a student account area and a distraction-free learning page, but no front-end instructor dashboard.

Also worth knowing: Tutor’s plugin description name-drops SCORM under its attachments feature, but no SCORM add-on appears anywhere in its documentation. If SCORM compliance matters to you, Masteriyo’s free import add-on is the safer bet.

Winner: Masteriyo. 🏆 Free certificates + SCORM + H5P is a combination Tutor’s free tier simply doesn’t match.

Course building

Both plugins use a drag-and-drop course builder: create a course, add sections, then drop lessons and quizzes inside. If you’ve used any LMS before, you’ll feel at home in either.

Masteriyo’s builder is clean and quick. Three tabs (Overview, Builder, Settings), and you drag lessons and quizzes between modules, like so:

Free lesson types cover text, video, and live stream via YouTube Live, while Zoom lessons, assignments, and PDF/audio lessons are paid. If you want the full walkthrough, there’s a whole guide on creating an online course with WordPress using it.

Tutor’s builder is the more mature of the two, fair’s fair. There’s a “spotlight mode” that hides your site’s header and footer while you build, and the 4.0 redesign gave students a genuinely modern learning area, with light/dark mode and an app-like mobile layout. Combined with those front-end dashboards, the day-to-day experience feels more complete.

On page builders, Masteriyo has the edge: free integrations for Elementor, Divi, Bricks, Beaver Builder, and Oxygen, plus Gutenberg blocks. Tutor covers Elementor (via a dedicated add-ons plugin), Divi, and Oxygen, per its WordPress.org listing. If your site runs on Bricks or Beaver, that’s a real point for Masteriyo.

One more thing, because both companies market it hard: AI course building. Both plugins have it, and both require your own OpenAI API key. Masteriyo’s “Create with AI” works in the free plugin once you add your key, while Tutor’s AI Studio ships with its paid plans under the same BYO-key requirement. Neither is “free AI,” whatever the landing pages imply. 🤖

Winner: Tutor LMS. 🏆 The 4.0 redesign plus front-end dashboards makes for a better day-to-day experience, for you and your students. Masteriyo’s builder is perfectly capable; Tutor’s is more polished.

Quizzes & assessment

Here’s a round where our own product can’t take the win.

Free Masteriyo ships three question types: True/False, Single Choice, and Multiple Choice. That’s… thin. Here’s the full question picker; everything beyond those first three needs Masteriyo Pro ($149/year intro):

Upgrading unlocks six more (Text Answer, Match the Following, Fill in the Blanks, Audio, Video, and Sortable) for nine total.

Free Tutor LMS ships five question types: True/False, Single Choice, Multiple Choice, Matching, and Fill in the Blanks. Tutor Pro adds essay, short answer, and image-based types, and version 4.0 introduced five interactive types (draw image, pin image, graph, puzzle, and range), also marked Pro in the changelog.

Both plugins handle quiz timers, attempt limits, and passing grades in free. Masteriyo’s free tier also includes an AI quiz generator (with your OpenAI key), though it only generates the three free question types. Assignments are paid on both sides, as is Masteriyo’s gradebook.

Winner: Tutor LMS. 🏆 Five free question types beats three, and Matching + Fill in the Blanks are exactly the types you’ll miss first when you outgrow basic multiple choice.

Selling & payments

First, the good news: both plugins let you sell courses without WooCommerce, and neither takes a cut of your revenue. Zero percent transaction fees on both (Tutor confirms this in its pricing FAQ; Masteriyo states it on its pricing page). 🎉

The real difference is which payment gateways you can use for free.

Masteriyo free:

• PayPal and offline payments built in
• Stripe, Mollie, and Lemon Squeezy as free add-ons
• Multiple currency support (free)
• WooCommerce and SureCart integrations (free)

Tutor LMS free:

• PayPal built in, plus manual payment methods (bank transfer and the like)
• Stripe requires an active Tutor LMS Pro subscription, and that’s straight from Tutor’s own documentation

That last point matters more than it might seem. For most course sellers, Stripe is the gateway, the one your customers expect to pay with. Getting Stripe for $0 is one of Masteriyo’s biggest practical advantages.

Worth disclosing while we’re here: coupons, subscriptions/recurring pricing, and course bundles are all Masteriyo Pro features ($149/year intro). Tutor advertises built-in subscriptions and memberships too, so check its current free/pro split if that’s a must-have, because version 4.0 reshuffled the lineup.

Winner: Masteriyo. 🏆 Free Stripe + Mollie + Lemon Squeezy, multiple currency, 0% fees. For a free selling stack, it’s not close.

Ecosystem & support

This round is Tutor’s, comfortably. Here’s why:

• Install base: 100,000+ vs 5,000+ active installs on WordPress.org. More users means more tutorials, more third-party answers, and more battle-testing.
• Reviews: Tutor holds 4.4/5 across 580+ ratings, a big, battle-tested sample. Masteriyo’s 4.8/5 is higher, but from a much smaller pool of 177 ratings.
• Add-ons and themes: Tutor has a mature add-on ecosystem and its own LMS themes. Masteriyo is one unified plugin, simpler to manage but a smaller universe, and it ships no theme of its own (it works with any properly coded theme; Neve and Astra are named-compatible).
• Languages: Tutor lists 39 language packs on WordPress.org. Masteriyo lists three. If you’re building a non-English course site, that alone might decide this for you.
• Guarantees: Tutor offers a 30-day money-back guarantee; Masteriyo’s is 14 days.

💡 Worth knowing: If you start on Tutor LMS and later switch, Masteriyo’s free migration tool imports courses, lessons, quizzes, orders, and students from Tutor LMS, plus LearnDash, LearnPress, LifterLMS, and MasterStudy. You’re less locked in than you think.

Winner: Tutor LMS. 🏆 Not close, and it’s better to tell you that than pretend otherwise.

Pricing when you go Pro

Both free plugins are genuinely usable on their own. But if you upgrade, here’s what you’re looking at. 💵

Tutor LMS keeps it simple: every paid plan includes all pro add-ons.

• Individual: $199/year (1 site)
• Business: $399/year (10 sites)
• Agency: $799/year (unlimited sites)
• Lifetime: $499 / $999 / $1,999 one-time

A 15%-off promo banner has been running on the pricing page, and there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee. 💰

Masteriyo goes lower on entry pricing:

• Basic: $99/year intro, renews at $199
• Pro: $149/year intro, renews at $299
• Elite: $399/year intro, renews at $799 (10 sites)
• Elite lifetime: $499 one-time

Here’s the catch, stated plainly: Masteriyo’s headline prices are introductory. ⚠️ Annual renewals jump to the “Normally” rate, double what you pay in year one. So in year one, Masteriyo Basic at $99 is half of Tutor Individual at $199. From year two, they’re both $199. Budget for the renewal, not the intro.

The lifetime math is interesting, though. Masteriyo’s $499 Elite lifetime covers 10 sites; Tutor’s $499 lifetime covers one. If you hate subscriptions, Masteriyo gives you more for the same money.

Winner: Masteriyo, narrowly. 🏆 Cheaper entry ($99 vs $199) and better lifetime value. But credit where it’s due: Tutor’s flat pricing has no renewal surprises, which is worth real money to some people.

Final verdict

The scorecard:

Three rounds each. But this is not a tie, because the rounds don’t carry equal weight.

Choose Masteriyo if you’re a solo creator selling your first courses and you want the most capable free stack available: free Stripe, free certificates, SCORM and H5P, 0% transaction fees. Start free, then upgrade when the advanced quiz types, content drip, or subscriptions become worth $149/year to you. It also stacks up well against paid-only tools; see how it compares in our Masteriyo vs LearnDash breakdown.

Choose Tutor LMS if you’re building something bigger: a multi-instructor school or marketplace, a non-English site, or you simply want the plugin with 100,000+ installs and a mature ecosystem behind it. Just budget for Pro sooner, because certificates, content drip, assignments, and Stripe are all paid there.

The bottom line: for most people reading this (first course, tight budget, want to sell from day one), Masteriyo’s free tier is the better fit. For a multi-instructor school, Tutor LMS is the pick, and there’s no looking back.

Wrapping things up…

Quick recap: Tutor LMS wins on maturity, quizzes, and ecosystem. Masteriyo wins on free features, selling, and entry pricing. Both are free to install, both charge 0% transaction fees, and both will let you build a real course business on WordPress.

The rest is up to you: install the one that fits, and get your first lesson online.

Have you tried either plugin? Which one did you pick, and how’s it going? Let us know in the comments section below! 💬

FREE GUIDE

4 Essential Steps to Speed Up Your WordPress Website

Follow the simple steps in our 4-part mini series and reduce your loading times by 50-80%. 🚀

Site Speed Guide - Below Post

Your Email *

Subscribe to our newsletter

Subscribe to our newsletter

FREE ACCESS

If you are human, leave this field blank.

Δ