Firstly, let me say the fact that LearnDash includes some membership functionality is great and may be all that some users need.
But LearnDash is not a content restriction plugin. It’s a course plugin, so their content restrictions features are basic.
Essentially you can restrict access to individual pages or posts, one by one.
The way it works is, you go into a page or post, and you enable it for that page or post. The unfortunate side effect is you have this large distracting panel in every page or post regardless if you are protecting it or not.
I think this is why many LearnDash users don’t use the inbuilt content restriction functionality inside of LearnDash as, in my opinion, it negatively effects all your content.
SureMembers is made for content restriction and thus does a better job with it in terms of it being a full and complete solution for it.
SureMembers is different.
- Work off of a centrally managed rules system that is easy to keep track of vs having to remember each page or post you are adding protection to
- Can protect any part of your website, even the system generated pages like archive pages vs only being able to restrict individual user generate pages
- Can restrict entire groups of content, such as all posts in a category vs having to protect content pages one by one
- You can restrict parts of pages
- You have page redirect options vs just showing a message that you can’t customize
- You can control menu item visibility
- You can drip feed content, any content, where LD only can do this for courses
Also add in our entire feature set such as user role sync, page builder integrations, visibility show if not in, login modal on restricted page, digital download protection (coming soon).
Regardless, I don’t want to take anything away from LearnDash. I just want to say that LearnDash is not a content restriction plugin.
