Best WordPress LMS Plugins for Yoga, Pilates and Fitness Studios
Here is the arithmetic that decides this category, and it is hiding inside one vendor’s pricing page. Uscreen’s Growth plan is $149 a month plus $1.99 per subscriber. Its App Essentials plan is $449 a month plus $0.99 per subscriber. Run those two lines out and they cross at exactly 300 subscribers, past which the $449 plan is the cheaper one. At 500 members, the plan that looks three times more expensive saves you $200 a month.
Per-subscriber pricing is the thing to understand before you choose anything here, because it is the difference between software that costs a few hundred pounds a year and software that costs several thousand. This article covers what a yoga, Pilates or fitness studio actually needs from course software, why most LMS plugins are the wrong shape for it, and what the video really costs.
Verified August 2026. Prices confirmed against vendor pages.
An LMS sells a course. A studio sells a schedule.
This is the mismatch that sends studio owners round in circles. A learning management system models a course: an ordered set of lessons, completed once, with progress tracked toward an end. That is exactly right for a 200-hour teacher training or a six-week beginners’ programme, and exactly wrong for what most studios sell.
What a studio sells is access: a library somebody dips into forever, plus a timetable they book into. Nobody completes a yoga library. There is no lesson three that must follow lesson two. Progress tracking, quizzes, certificates and gradebooks, the features LMS vendors compete on, are close to irrelevant, and the two things you genuinely need, a class schedule and a recurring subscription, are the two things a course plugin does worst.
So the buying decision splits three ways. If you sell teacher training or structured programmes, buy an LMS, because that is the shape of your product. If you sell on-demand library access, buy membership software and skip the LMS entirely. If you sell classes at times, in a room or on Zoom, you need booking software, and no LMS plugin will substitute for it. Most studios do two of the three, which is why they end up buying two products, and that is a correct outcome rather than a failure to find the right one.
The 6 options compared
1. MemberPress
The closest fit in WordPress for what a studio actually sells, because it is membership software first and course software second. Launch is $199.50 a year, Growth $349.50, and Scale $499.50, and all three include unlimited courses and lessons through the drag-and-drop curriculum builder.
Read the tiers on payment gateways rather than on course features, because that is where they actually differ. Launch is Stripe only. Growth adds PayPal, Square and manual payments; Scale adds Authorize.net and offline payments. For a studio taking recurring monthly memberships, being restricted to a single gateway is a real constraint the day Stripe declines a card and you have no fallback, so Growth is the realistic starting tier for most. Quizzes, assignments and the gradebook also start at Growth, which matters for teacher training and not at all for a class library.
- Price: $199.50, $349.50 or $499.50 a year
- Shape: Membership first, courses included, no per-member fee
- Best for: On-demand libraries sold as a monthly subscription
- Watch out for: Launch restricts you to Stripe alone
2. LearnDash
The right answer when your product genuinely is a course. $199 a year for one site, $399 for ten, $799 for unlimited, and the pricing is flat regardless of how many learners you have, which is the single most important number on this page when you set it against per-subscriber platforms.
Teacher training is where this earns its keep. A 200-hour certification has modules that must be completed in order, assessments that must be passed, and a certificate at the end that a governing body may want to see, and LearnDash does all of that properly. It is also the name a training-school partner is most likely to recognise. Where it fails a studio is the ordinary case: it has no concept of a class on Tuesday at seven, and bolting a schedule onto it means buying a booking plugin anyway.
- Price: $199, $399 or $799 a year, unlimited learners on all tiers
- Shape: Course first, with progress, quizzes and certificates
- Best for: Teacher training and structured multi-week programmes
- Watch out for: No scheduling; a library is not a course
3. Tutor LMS and LifterLMS
The budget course options, and worth pricing before defaulting to LearnDash. Tutor LMS starts at $149 a year; LifterLMS has a free core with paid bundles layered on top, so you can build and sell a first programme without spending anything.
LifterLMS’s free core is the genuinely useful fact for a studio testing whether courses are a business line at all. Build the teacher training, sell a cohort, and only then decide whether the paid bundles are worth it. Tutor LMS’s multi-instructor model is the reason to prefer it if several teachers at your studio each sell their own programmes, since that structure is native rather than an add-on. Both carry the same limitation as LearnDash: they model courses, not timetables, and neither will run your Tuesday evening class.
- Price: Tutor LMS from $149 a year; LifterLMS free core plus bundles
- Shape: Course first, cheaper than LearnDash
- Best for: Testing a programme, or multi-teacher studios
- Watch out for: Same scheduling gap; budget for a booking plugin
4. Amelia, for the half an LMS cannot do
The scheduling layer, and for a studio running actual classes it is not optional. Amelia handles both appointments and events, which maps onto one-to-one sessions and group classes without needing two plugins.
Pro is $149 a year for five domains and Elite $259 for unlimited, with lifetime licences at $299, $349 for five domains and $709 for unlimited, plus a free version to evaluate with. For a studio that will still be a studio in five years, the $349 lifetime tier is the sensible purchase and the last time you think about it. Two features earn their place specifically here: an event waiting list, which fills the cancellations that are a constant in class businesses, and capacity limits per class, so a twelve-mat room sells twelve places. Pair it with MemberPress and you have the library and the timetable, each handled by software designed for it.
- Price: Free version; Pro $149/yr for 5 domains; lifetime from $299
- Shape: Scheduling and capacity, not content
- Best for: Any studio selling classes at fixed times
- Watch out for: It hosts no video; this is the other half only
5. Uscreen
The video-first platform studios most often compare WordPress against, and the one whose pricing needs modelling rather than reading. Starter is $49 a month with a 100 subscriber cap, no per-subscriber fee, a 10% transaction fee on one-time sales and 20 hours of video storage. Growth is $149 a month plus $1.99 per subscriber, unlimited subscribers, 5% transaction fee, 100 hours of storage. App Essentials is $449 a month plus $0.99 per subscriber and includes iOS and Android apps.
Work your own numbers before signing. At 300 subscribers, Growth and App Essentials cost the same $746 a month; above that, the cheaper-looking plan is the more expensive one. At 500 subscribers Growth runs to $1,144 a month, roughly $13,700 a year. What that buys is real: hosting, a Netflix-style catalogue, live streaming, mobile apps at the higher tier, analytics, and nothing to maintain. Whether it is worth eleven times a WordPress stack depends entirely on how much you value the apps and how little you want to think about infrastructure.
- Price: $49/mo capped at 100 subs; $149/mo + $1.99 per sub; $449/mo + $0.99
- Shape: Everything hosted, including video and apps
- Best for: Studios wanting mobile apps and zero maintenance
- Watch out for: Per-subscriber fees; the tiers invert at 300 members
6. Studio management software
The category to consider honestly if the timetable, not the video library, is your actual business. Mindbody, Momence and their competitors run bookings, memberships, class packs, payroll and retail, with on-demand video as a secondary feature rather than the point.
Mindbody’s entry tier is quoted between roughly $79 and $139 a month per location depending on configuration and source, rising to around $279 and $499 for higher tiers, with payment processing charged separately. Momence does not publish pricing at all, and reported figures cluster around $250 a month. Mindbody’s genuine differentiator is its consumer marketplace app, which brings new students who were not looking for you specifically; the trade is that you share that shelf with every competing studio in your postcode, and marketplace-acquired clients can carry their own fees. If discovery is your growth problem rather than delivery, that is worth paying for. If you already fill your classes, you are buying a booking system at four times the price of a plugin.
- Price: Mindbody from roughly $79 to $139/mo; Momence around $250/mo
- Shape: Studio operations first, video as a side feature
- Best for: Physical studios where the timetable is the business
- Watch out for: Pricing is quote-led; marketplace fees are separate
Comparison table
| Option | Price | Per-member fee | Scheduling | Video hosting |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MemberPress | $199.50 to $499.50/yr | None | No | No, bring your own |
| LearnDash | $199 to $799/yr | None | No | No, bring your own |
| Tutor LMS / LifterLMS | From $149/yr; free core | None | No | No, bring your own |
| Amelia | $149/yr; lifetime from $299 | None | Yes, the point | No |
| Uscreen | $49 to $449/mo | $0.99 to $1.99 | Live streaming only | Yes, included |
| Mindbody / Momence | ~$79 to $499/mo | Varies | Yes, the point | Secondary feature |
What the video actually costs
Every WordPress option above says “bring your own video hosting”, which sounds like a hidden cost and turns out to be the opposite. Studio owners routinely assume this is the expensive part and choose a hosted platform to avoid it. The numbers say otherwise.
Take a realistic library: 200 recorded classes at 45 minutes each, which at roughly a gigabyte per hour of 1080p is about 150GB of storage. Now assume 300 members each watching eight classes a month, which is 1.8TB of monthly streaming. On Bunny Stream, at $0.01 per GB stored and $0.005 per GB streamed with encoding free and no monthly minimum, that is $1.50 of storage and $9 of bandwidth. Call it $11 a month.
Set that against Uscreen Growth at the same 300 members: $746 a month. A WordPress stack of MemberPress Growth at $349.50 a year, Amelia’s $349 lifetime licence, video at around $130 a year and decent hosting at perhaps $300 a year comes to roughly $800 in year one and under $500 a year after that.
Three honest caveats before you treat that as settled:
- Mobile apps are the real gap. Uscreen’s $449 tier ships iOS and Android apps. Building equivalents yourself costs far more than the difference, and for a studio whose members practise from a phone on a mat, that is a genuine product advantage rather than a nice-to-have.
- Somebody has to maintain it. Plugin updates, backups, a checkout that breaks on a Sunday. If that somebody is you and your time is worth anything, the saving is smaller than it looks.
- Never serve video from your own web host. Uploading class recordings into the WordPress media library will exhaust your storage, throttle your site, and stream badly. Use a video service, and the numbers above are what it costs.
Related guides
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an LMS at all for a yoga studio?
Only if you sell structured programmes such as teacher training. For an on-demand class library, membership software does the job better, and the LMS features you would be paying for go unused.
How do I sell class packs rather than subscriptions?
Class packs are a booking concept, not a course one, so they live in your scheduling tool. Confirm your chosen plugin supports a credit balance that decrements per booking, since some handle only recurring access.
Can I run live Zoom classes through WordPress?
Yes. Sell access, gate a page, and put the join link behind the login rather than in the event description where anyone can read it. Send it in a reminder close to the class rather than at purchase.
Where should I host the videos?
Anywhere except your web host. A dedicated video service handles encoding, adaptive streaming and delivery for a few pounds a month, and it keeps a 150GB library off the server running your site.
Is Uscreen worth it over a WordPress stack?
If you want branded mobile apps and no maintenance, quite possibly. Model it at your real member count first, and remember the tiers invert at 300 subscribers, so check both before assuming the cheaper plan is cheaper.
What about members who cancel and rejoin?
Normal in this industry and worth designing for. Flat-fee software does not care; per-subscriber platforms bill on active subscribers, so seasonal churn genuinely changes what you pay month to month.
The verdict
For an on-demand class library: MemberPress Growth at $349.50 a year, paired with a proper video service. Take the Growth tier rather than Launch so a Stripe outage is not a business outage, and expect video to cost around ten pounds a month rather than the fortune people assume.
If you run classes at fixed times, add Amelia, ideally the $349 lifetime licence. The waiting list alone pays for it by filling cancellations, and no LMS plugin will ever run your timetable.
If you sell teacher training: LearnDash at $199 a year, because a certification genuinely is a course with an order, assessments and a certificate, and the pricing is flat no matter how many trainees enrol.
And before you sign with a hosted platform, do the per-subscriber multiplication. At 500 members Uscreen Growth is roughly $13,700 a year against a few hundred for the WordPress equivalent. The apps and the absence of maintenance may well be worth some of that gap. They are unlikely to be worth all of it, and the only way to know is to put your own member count into the arithmetic.
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