An outstanding tool for teaching and learning in aviation
By 
continuoussafety2018 on February 17, 2025
As a safety professional in the aviation industry, I've been using this tool for over a year to educate others on aviation safety. I've discovered Tutor LMS, which stands out as an exceptional Learning Management System (LMS) for both teaching and learning. I highly recommend Tutor LMS to anyone looking for an effective, user-friendly platform to conduct online training. It simplifies the process while delivering powerful results.
Looks good...and hopelessly broken.
By 
kidznc (wsp-kk) on February 19, 2025
TutorLMS appears promising on the face of it, with a list of great features and integrations. It even looks reasonably good when installed. It’s only when you’ve gone down the rabbit hole that you realize that it fails on so many levels.
Perhaps the most obvious – as it affects the front-end UI that every user experiences – is that TutorLMS requires manual “Mark as Complete” on every lesson that isn’t a quiz or video. Not only that, said “Mark as Complete” button is located at the top of each lesson and is not on a sticky header.
I’ve spoken with support multiple times over – this is not a bug, this is intentional, and they don’t seem to be concerned about having an option for the “Next” button to serve this function as per the standard operation of every other normal LMS out there.
Less critical, but equally frustrating for users is the lack of an obvious button to save and exit one's course progress - save for an ambiguous circular "X" button on the top right of the course header. There's no intuitive "Save progress and exit" button, no "Exit course" button, just a lone "X" taunting users to find out if that's the button to exit the course, and if so, whether their progress will be saved. That's not how good UI works.
Adding to the confusion is the progress box on the main course page, which might seem to work normally, but try exiting an entire course after completing all lessons and attempting all quizzes but with at least one quiz failed, pending a passing grade. Guess what the course completion reads on the course page? "100% Complete." A warning box below will note "You will have to pass X quiz/quizzes to complete this course," but why should this be accompanied by a misleading "100% Complete" notice when it is far more intuitive for this scenario to be marked as "Quiz pending?"
These UI issues seem simple by explanation, but they are not easy to overcome unless you're willing to do some serious customization to the template PHP files (even as far as PHP customization goes) with a myriad of conditional settings and some variables that you'll have to discover - not all variables work the same depending on the file, so be prepared to do some serious detective work.
There's also a possibility you'll have to redo this work on major updates of the plugin as well; many v2.0+ template files were changed significantly when v3.0 was released.
These should be reasons alone not to use TutorLMS, but it gets better.
This is one of those plugins where the authors try as hard as possible not to integrate with other popular plugins to force-feed their built-in version. TutorLMS has its own login system, and while you can deactivate it if you want integration with another popular plugin - say, Ultimate Member – get ready to set your alternate login system to take over every possible wp-login.php modal, because TutorLMS has login-enabled buttons everywhere that do not use standard filter hooks. While they could provide an alternate login URL that could change these en-masse, they don't - this would allow someone out of the TutorLMS ecosystem, and they clearly aren't interested in supporting anything of the kind.
This goes for the instructor pages as well; all pages are designed to look the way TutorLMS wants them to, separated from any conventional Wordpress Custom Post Type system where you have actual control over styling. Speaking of styling, none of Tutor’s forward-facing code is based in anything sensible like Bootstrap. They’ve established all their own CSS styling to ensure more stylesheet bloat and lock you into their breakpoints. Thankfully, the plugin does allow the theme file templates to be modified via one's own theme (which they’ll admonish you for if you happen to contact their tech support), but beware that the Tutor templates are numerous and aren't always straightforward, so trying to match Tutor's styling to your site can be tricky.
This attempt to make TutorLMS the center of your Wordpress installation only becomes worse with the v3.0+ visual refresh, which is very much that: A visual refresh that tries to disassociate TutorLMS even further from the Wordpress core, thus making it even more difficult to use conventional options. Want to add some custom post meta? Nope. Post type order? Forget it. To their credit - if you dig for it - you’ll find there’s a “Legacy Mode,” but expect it to be bare-bones. If you want to do anything remotely custom, you'll have to force-feed these options into functions.php. It's a LMS that wants to be a Squarespace WYSIWYG knockoff on the Wordpress platform.
This extends to the manner that TutorLMS renders content as well. Case in point, while the standard WP Editor is used inside quizzes, the front-end output lacks srcset support. This applies to the quiz templates as well; we had to revise choice-box.php to remove the 'full' size attribute from wp_get_attachment_image_url. Additionally, we had to wrap the quizzes in a Bootstrap container to prevent them from expanding in excess of the browser width (scrollbars and all) when images are used as part of the multiple choice questions.
You’ll also find poor/broken English all throughout the often-surprise dialogue warning boxes (they’re not clearly listed on the backend and not all of them are editable), and these boxes are not available to edit except through the theme files. This would be excusable if this plugin had been translated, but it is English first. If you’re going to get it wrong, at least make it easy to fix!
Plus, if you try to use Wordpress’ XML file to migrate your course from site to site, expect to find all your quiz questions missing. The free version does not allow you to import/export, so good luck restoring it all!
There is also a MASSIVE security bug currently in v3.2.3 (and older versions) which allow the site’s admin to delete their own account directly from the wp_users table. We've reported the details to TutorLMS and Wordpress, but there needs to be a Sloppy Coding Award of the Month to TutorLMS for not doing a simple check-on-delete to prevent unintended bricking of the site's main admin account:
$is_admin = current_user_can( 'manage_options' );Speaking of sloppy, their responses are terrible. They don’t listen, they’re patronizing, and TutorLMS is generally above fault - all three of these tropes can be found right here in this support thread started by @chelseacarson08. Even if you present issues in pure PHP, they’ll act as if you have no coding experience whatsoever and talk down to you. Compatibility issues with another plugin? Not their fault, just deactivate the other “lesser” plugin. Particularly infuriating was their response to the security bug above. Instead of properly reading our steps to replicate the problem, they asked us to clarify which page it was happening on - despite providing all necessary steps for replication in our initial email.
We think TutorLMS is buggy, overrated, and an embarrassment to its developers who aren't particularly concerned about the needs of their users. It's the Adobe principle in full effect: Don't fix what's broken, just add more useless features, and ignore community feedback.
Don’t take our word for it, go install it on a test Wordpress site in XAMPP and put our comments to the test – you won’t be disappointed…except at TutorLMS.
Easy to Use
By 
Mohsin Alam (mohsinworld) on January 31, 2025
Recommended for LMS website. Easy to setup and has all the necessary features.
great customer service
By 
ignacioeb on January 21, 2025
The platform is easy to use and I've had a good experience with customer service
Great update!
By 
sourabh29 on January 20, 2025
Thank you for resolving several bugs in your new update 3.2. 👍
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Tutor LMS was once a cornerstone of efficiency and reliability, but the release of version 3.0 till 3.1.0 has been deeply disappointing. The update is riddled with critical bugs, severely disrupting its functionality and causing significant challenges.
With the new update even no course can be added nor the old ones can be edited.
What’s more disheartening is the lack of responsiveness from the support team despite repeated attempts to seek assistance.😞
Urgent action is required to resolve these issues or revert to a stable version, as the current state is untenable for professional use.
Just Outstanding!
By 
dofalex on January 14, 2025
Great plugin, great tech support. It doesn't matter what kind of issue your website is dealing with, Tutor LMS staff always find the best solution for you in no time! The staff is very pleasant to work with!
very basic lms but claims most advanced
By 
oumz99 on December 4, 2024
This is a very very basic LMS and does a good job. But promoting itself as advanced LMS is really not justified. It is just a course builder, good for building documents and free courses.
Top-Notch Support, Amazing Plugin
By 
leoceles1987 on December 3, 2024
After sales support is crucial in any purchase and Tutor Team always delivers. They have an amazing team. I can understand some users pointing out bugs--which also happens even to Apple among others! What separates Tutor from others is their patience in resolving issues as long as you are able to describe it to them.
I am. Thankful :) 5 star!
Very best LMS plugin I have experienced out there!
By 
TJ (taqwamasjid) on December 3, 2024
In my opinion one of the very best LMS plugins out there, for anyone seriously looking to create an LMS website. I have had great assistance and support from their team, it would be great to be able to have 24/7 support or even be able to speak to someone on the line but I really can't complain. I was initially disappointed when they removed the lifetime plan option, but I am glad they brought it back and I plan to invest in it at some point soon; I have used their services for a year now and it has been top-notch, upwards and onwards!
Tutor 3.0: Stop changing flows and usability and broke things!
By 
flaviusv on November 28, 2024
That's a great initiative to upgrade Tutor from time to time, but IS NOT SO GREAT when you change the flow, the user interface, and especially the new upgrade BROKE down things that previously worked fine. There is a rule: don't touch things that work well! Now we have to do a lot of work with testing the new flow, new courses, new things… and I hate that! If I bought one thing, let that thing as I bought it, don't change anything because I bought it because I need it as it initially was! Hope this makes sense to you.
