In 2024, a set of popular LearnDash add-ons changed hands. The ones WisdmLabs had built and sold for years became part of LearnDash itself. That single change is behind most of the “who owns this now?” confusion.
This isn’t an announcement or news, the sale happened back in May 2024.
It’s the background for anyone trying to trace where these tools came from, or where they are now.
A quick orientation first, because you may have landed here looking for the products themselves rather than their history.
| Looking to buy or download one of these LearnDash add-ons? Since the 2024 acquisition, all six are sold and supported by LearnDash, not by WisdmLabs. You’ll find them on the LearnDash website and manage licenses through your LearnDash account. This page explains their history and what the ownership change means, not where to purchase them.
Need something custom built on top of them? That part still happens here, and there’s more on that below. |
Now coming to your question!
Who built the LearnDash add-ons most course businesses rely on?
WisdmLabs did: Instructor Role, Reports for LearnDash, Group Registration, Ratings/Reviews & Feedback, Content Cloner, and the eLumine theme.
A founder we work with opened her LearnDash admin a few weeks ago and started reading plugin names aloud. She got to “Instructor Role” and asked herself. “Who even makes this one, and is it still safe to rely on?” Fair question. The short answer is: we did.
If you’re curious, let’s deep dive into this for more details.
You’re probably running at least one of our add-ons
If your LearnDash site uses add-ons, there’s a good chance at least one of them started at WisdmLabs. That’s the part worth understanding: not the transaction, but what it means for the tools you already depend on.
WisdmLabs was one of the first companies to build add-ons for LearnDash, working with the platform since its launch in 2013. Over the years, that work became five plugins and a theme, six products in total, several of which are now common fixtures on LearnDash sites.
When they were sold in 2024, the important part for you was this: the tools didn’t change. Only the name on the ownership paperwork did. Same product, new owner, and that difference is what most of the confusion comes down to.
Why we built these in the first place
None of these started as a product idea. They started as the same complaint, heard over and over from people running real course businesses on LearnDash. LearnDash was great at delivering a course. It wasn’t built for the messy reality of running a course business at scale. So the gaps showed up in predictable places, and we built for those.
The pattern was almost always growth. A course site works fine when it’s one person teaching a handful of students. Then it grows, and the founder becomes the bottleneck for everything: every new instructor, every bulk enrolment, every course rebuild, every “how are my students doing?” question.
Back in our 2015 launch note for Instructor Role, we put it plainly: course creation slows down, student support piles up, grading becomes a backlog, and growth gets stuck because you’re busy keeping things running.
That’s the thread running through all six. Each one removed a specific bottleneck that showed up right when a course business started to scale. We weren’t guessing at features. We were watching where course owners kept getting stuck.
It’s worth saying these weren’t niche problems either. The bigger LMS platforms reached the same conclusions independently. Adobe Learning Manager, Oracle, and D2L all built dedicated bulk-enrolment tools for the same reason we built Group Registration: enrolling learners one at a time doesn’t scale. When the whole industry solves the same problem, it’s a real problem, not a preference.
The six add-ons we built (and what each one does)
Here’s the full list, straight from LearnDash’s own acquisition FAQ. Six products moved over. Not five, not seven. People often miscount because the sixth is a theme, not a plugin.
But the list matters less than the reason each one exists. We didn’t build these to fill out a catalogue. Each one came from a wall a real course business kept hitting. So alongside what each add-on does, here’s the problem it was built to solve, because that’s the part that tells you whether it belongs in your stack.
| Add-on | What it does | Who it’s for |
| Instructor Role | Adds real multi-instructor roles, a dedicated dashboard, and front-end course creation | Academies, training teams, course marketplaces |
| Reports for LearnDash | Graphical reports on course engagement, learner performance, and progress | Anyone who needs to see how learners are actually doing |
| Group Registration | Bulk enrolment and group management, so leaders can buy and assign courses | Corporate training, schools, cohort-based programs |
| Ratings, Reviews & Feedback | A full rating and review system across your courses | Course sellers who want social proof on course pages |
| Content Cloner | Duplicates an entire course hierarchy (course, lessons, topics) in a click | Anyone rebuilding or templating courses repeatedly |
| eLumine | A LearnDash-focused theme built for course delivery and layout | Sites that want a course-ready design out of the box |
Instructor Role
The problem it solved: you want other people teaching on your site, but LearnDash makes you choose between giving them full admin access or doing everything yourself. Neither is safe or sustainable once you have more than one instructor.
So we built a real instructor role. Teachers create and manage their own courses from a dedicated dashboard, with front-end course creation, and none of them can touch your settings or see each other’s work. It turns a solo course site into an academy without handing over the keys. LearnDash’s product team singled it out at the sale.
Sound familiar? If you’ve ever hesitated to bring on a second instructor because you didn’t want to be their tech support (or their security risk), this is the add-on that removes that hesitation.
If you want the deeper walkthrough, we keep a full breakdown in our LearnDash Instructor Role guide.
Reports for LearnDash
The problem it solved: LearnDash records a lot, but seeing it means digging through tables or exporting spreadsheets. When someone asks “how are my students actually doing?”, you don’t have a clean answer to give them.
Reports for LearnDash (sometimes listed elsewhere as “Reports Pro,” though that’s the same product) turns that raw activity into graphical reports on engagement, learner performance, and completion. If you sell to organisations, this is often the difference between renewing a contract and losing it, because your buyer wants proof their people are learning.
Group Registration
The problem it solved: a company wants to buy your course for 40 employees, and the only way to enrol them is one account at a time. That’s an afternoon of manual work, and it’s the moment a promising B2B sale starts to feel like a chore for both sides.
Group Registration fixes that. A group leader buys in bulk, enrols their whole team, and manages the group from one place, without you touching a thing. It’s the backbone of most corporate-training and school setups, and often the feature that makes selling to organisations viable at all.
Ratings, Reviews & Feedback
The problem it solved: a first-time visitor has no reason to trust your course. There’s no signal that anyone took it, finished it, or found it worth the money, so they hesitate at exactly the point you need them to buy.
Ratings, Reviews & Feedback adds a full review layer to every course, so that social proof sits right where the buying decision happens. For anyone selling courses to strangers, this is the trust gap it was built to close.
Content Cloner
The problem it solved: you’ve built a course structure you like, and now you need five more just like it. Rebuilding that hierarchy by hand every time (course, lessons, topics, settings) is hours of tedious, error-prone work.
Content Cloner duplicates the whole thing in a click. It’s the unglamorous one that quietly saves the most time, especially if you run cohorts, seasonal courses, or a template you reuse constantly.
eLumine (the theme, and why it’s the sixth people forget)
The problem it solved: a default WordPress theme doesn’t know what a course is. You end up fighting the layout to make lessons, progress, and course pages look right, when you’d rather be building content.
eLumine is a theme built around LearnDash from the start, so course delivery looks right out of the box. It’s also the sixth product, and the only one that isn’t a plugin. That’s why third-party lists so often say “five WisdmLabs add-ons” and miss one. If the count ever comes out short, eLumine is the missing piece.
How the WisdmLabs LearnDash acquisition actually happened
The WisdmLabs – LearnDash acquisition closed in May 2024. StellarWP, the umbrella brand for premium WordPress products at Liquid Web, acquired our six LearnDash add-ons, and they joined the official LearnDash lineup. You can read the announcement in Liquid Web’s own press release if you want the source.
To place it in context: Liquid Web had already acquired LearnDash itself back in September 2021 and put it under the StellarWP brand. So when StellarWP acquires WisdmLabs’ add-ons in 2024, the products were essentially moving next door, into the same family as the plugin they extended.
We won’t re-run the entire ownership timeline here. If you want the year-by-year version, including the 2026 consolidation that folded StellarWP away, our foundational briefing on the wind-down lays it all out cleanly.
What the sale means if you’re running these add-ons today
Here’s the part that actually matters to you. The ownership change was a change of owner, not a change of function. The add-ons still work. Your licenses still hold. Updates and support continue, now through LearnDash’s systems rather than ours.
That’s not just our read. WooNinjas, a separate LearnDash agency ,reached the same conclusion independently: the add-ons function, licenses are valid, and the structural changes don’t force any site owner to act.
The reassurance most owners are actually looking for
The worry underneath “who built this?” is usually “is it going to disappear?” That’s fair when products change hands. It’s the same energy as the widely shared “Is Restrict Content Pro dead?” Reddit thread: the fear that a rebrand quietly means a shutdown. In this case it doesn’t. The products are still sold, still updated, still supported.
That said, it’s reasonable to ask precise questions when ownership shifts. A competing LMS, WPLMS, published a sensible checklist for long-term license holders: does your license cover future major versions, are security fixes still included, what happens if licensing systems get consolidated. The answers are usually reassuring — but you’re entitled to hear them out loud.
If you’re weighing whether any of this warrants action on your specific site, the practical first step is mapping what you actually rely on. Our LearnDash transition support walks through exactly that, before any bigger decision.
If your stack leans on other pieces too, like Restrict Content Pro, MemberDash, or ProPanel, our clear-eyed add-on inventory tells you exactly which ones need a check this week.
What this background means for the advice you’ll get here
Here’s why any of that matters to you rather than to us. Selling the products didn’t hand over the knowledge of how they work. WisdmLabs still works on LearnDash daily as an agency, customising it, migrating businesses onto it, and helping people move off it when that’s the right call.
Practically, that means when you read something here about how the consolidation affects the add-on layer, it’s coming from people who worked inside these tools, not from a summary of a press release. It also means there’s no product to sell you on this topic, so there’s no reason to steer you toward a particular decision.
You can see the tools in real use, too. When School Ninja built a collaborative teaching platform, that build ran on Group Registration and Instructor Role, two of the six covered here.
Need one of these add-ons to do something it doesn't do out of the box?
We still customize LearnDash for course businesses. If your setup needs functionality the standard add-ons don't cover, we can help you build around how your business actually works
- Custom LearnDash plugin development
- Reporting & enrolment workflow customisation
- Integrations with your CRM, payments
- Upgrade-safe builds that survive new updates
If you’re still deciding whether LearnDash is the right home for your course business at all, our 5-factor decision guide and our 2026 LearnDash review both take the question head-on.
Frequently asked questions
Who owns the WisdmLabs LearnDash add-ons now?
LearnDash owns them. We at WisdmLabs built and sold the six products to StellarWP in May 2024, and after the 2026 consolidation they sit directly under the LearnDash brand at Liquid Web. You buy, license, and get support for them through LearnDash.
Are the WisdmLabs add-ons still being updated?
Yes. They remained fully functional through the ownership change and have continued to receive updates under LearnDash, including maintenance releases after the 2026 consolidation. Ownership changed; active maintenance did not stop.
Is eLumine one of the acquired products?
Yes. eLumine is the sixth product and the only one that’s a theme rather than a plugin, which is why it’s the one most third-party lists forget. It was part of the same 2024 sale to StellarWP.
Does WisdmLabs still work on LearnDash?
Yes. We sold the products, not the expertise. We still build custom LearnDash functionality, run migrations, and support course businesses on LearnDash as an independent agency.
Whatever brought you here, whether verifying a plugin, checking on a tool you depend on, or just filling in the backstory behind the recent LearnDash changes, the situation is calmer than the ownership churn makes it look. The tools you rely on still work, and the people who built most of them are still a straightforward conversation away.
