Why We Built EDULMS: A HubSpot LMS Theme for EdTech Startups and Training Businesses

Almost every edtech company we have worked with runs two systems that do not talk to each other.

HubSpot holds the CRM, the marketing, the email, and the pipeline. Something else entirely holds the courses, the students, and the learning experience. Then somebody spends eighteen months trying to join them with Zapier, a spreadsheet, and increasingly desperate custom work.

EDULMS is our HubSpot LMS theme, built for education businesses that would rather not run that project. It is $399 on the HubSpot marketplace and it has been live since January 2025.

This post covers what it is, who it fits, and two subscription limits that will decide whether it works for you before any feature does. Those limits are not in our marketplace listing and they should be.

The two system problem

An edtech startup’s first year usually goes like this.

HubSpot comes in for marketing and CRM, because it is the obvious choice and it works. Courses go on Teachable, Thinkific, or a WordPress LMS plugin, because that is what exists and it is quick.

For a while this is fine. Then the questions start.

Which marketing campaign produced students who actually finished a course? Which leads are already enrolled, so they stop getting the enrolment nurture? When somebody upgrades from a free course to paid, does the CRM know? Can we email everyone who started a course and stalled?

Every one of those questions requires the two systems to share data they were never designed to share. So you build a sync. Then the sync breaks, and now it is somebody’s job.

The alternative is not “use HubSpot for everything.” It is to be deliberate about which half of the problem lives where.

What HubSpot already has and almost nobody activates

Here is the thing most education businesses on HubSpot do not know.

HubSpot has a native Courses object: It ships in every account, switched off, and a super admin activates it from the data model builder. Courses store information about programs such as a series of lessons, trainings, or educational modules, and each course becomes a real CRM record.

It arrives with properties already defined, including hs_course_name, hs_course_id, hs_course_description, and hs_enrollment_capacity. It associates to contacts, so a student is genuinely linked to a course rather than tagged with a text field. It has a full API supporting create, read, update, upsert, merge, and associate operations.

Courses is one of four objects HubSpot pre-builds and leaves dormant: Courses, Listings, Appointments, and Services. None of them require an Enterprise subscription the way a custom object would. You activate them from Data Management > Data Model, click Activate, confirm, and they are live.

We made the same argument for real estate in the HubSpot Listing object guide. The reasoning is identical here. If your business runs on a specific kind of record, and HubSpot already has an object for it, use that object rather than bolting a second platform onto the side of your CRM.

See EDULMS in 60 seconds

Rather than describe the interface, here it is.

What the video covers:

• The course listing page and how course cards are configured
• A single course page with curriculum and instructor sections
• Student login and registration flow
• The drag and drop editor, showing a course card being changed without code

If you would rather read than watch, everything in the video is covered in the sections below.

What EDULMS includes

EDULMS is a HubSpot LMS theme for educational institutions, edtech startups, training providers, online academies, corporate training teams, certification providers, and coaching businesses.

	EDULMS
Price	$399, one-time
Page templates	22
System templates	15
Sections	6
Modules	35
On marketplace since	January 2025
Current version	v12, June 2026
Support	4 hours setup, unlimited email

What ships:

Course architecture: Course listing pages, single course templates, curriculum sections, instructor details, and course cards designed for a catalog rather than adapted from a blog layout.

Student-facing structure: Student profile templates, login and registration pages, and the page architecture a login-driven learning experience needs.

Events listing: Genuinely useful and often overlooked. If you run cohorts, workshops, or in-person training alongside self-paced content, the events feature covers that without a second theme.

Full drag and drop: Every layout is editable in the HubSpot page editor. Your marketing person changes a course card or a landing page without a developer.

The two limits that decide it

This is the section our marketplace listing does not have, and the one you should read before anything else.

Limit 1: memberships need Content Hub Professional

A gated learning experience runs on HubSpot memberships. Per HubSpot’s private content documentation, memberships require Content Hub Professional or Enterprise.

There is a trap in that sentence. Accounts on a legacy CMS Hub Professional subscription do not support memberships at all. If you are on an older plan, check before you buy anything.

Private content also only works on a connected subdomain. Default HubSpot domains such as hs-sites.com are not supported.

Limit 2: Professional gives you two access groups. Only two.

This is the one that catches people, and I have not seen it written about anywhere.

Content Hub Professional accounts can have up to two access groups. Enterprise accounts can have up to 100.

An access group is how you control who can see what. Two groups means you can segment your gated content two ways. That is fine for “free tier” and “paid tier.” It is not fine for an academy with eight courses that each need separate access, or a training provider running distinct cohorts.

So the honest version of the buying decision looks like this:

Your setup	What works
Content Hub Starter	Memberships not available. Public course marketing pages only.
Content Hub Professional	Gated learning, but a maximum of 2 access groups
Content Hub Enterprise	Up to 100 access groups, per-course or per-cohort access
Legacy CMS Hub Professional	Memberships not supported, check your plan

If you need per-course access control and you are on Professional, you have three options: upgrade to Enterprise, restructure your content so two groups is enough, or keep the learning delivery on a dedicated platform and use HubSpot for the marketing and CRM side. All three are legitimate. We would rather you know now.

A few other membership details worth having: each contact can receive a maximum of five membership emails per day, passwords must be at least 12 characters, and password-protected pages get a no-index response so they will not appear in search results.

What EDULMS is not

A HubSpot LMS theme is a website and access layer. It is not a learning platform, and pretending otherwise would waste your time and ours.

• It does not do quizzing or assessments: No question banks, no scoring, no pass marks.
• It does not track progress: There is no built-in “you are 60% through this course” state.
• It does not issue certificates: No completion certificates, no credential management.
• It does not support SCORM or xAPI: If you have existing SCORM packages, EDULMS will not run them.
• It is not a video hosting platform: You will embed from Vimeo, Wistia, YouTube, or similar.

If you need those, you need a dedicated LMS, and the right architecture is HubSpot for marketing, CRM, and enrolment, with the LMS handling delivery and a deliberate integration between them. We build those integrations. That is HubSpot development work, and it is a better outcome than forcing one system to do both jobs badly.

Who EDULMS actually fits

It fits you if:

• You market and sell courses, and want the course website and the CRM in one system
• Your learning content is video, text, and downloadable material rather than interactive assessment
• You run cohorts, workshops, or events alongside or instead of self-paced content
• You are on Content Hub Professional or Enterprise
• Your access control needs fit within your tier’s access group limit

It does not fit you if:

• You need assessment, progress tracking, certification, or SCORM
• You are on Content Hub Starter and cannot upgrade
• You need per-course access control on Professional, where two access groups will not stretch
• Your website is mostly about your institution rather than your courses. In that case Siloh Pro is the better fit at $899, with 39 page templates built for professional services. We would rather send you there than sell you the wrong theme.

If you want to see how EDULMS sits against our other three themes, that is in the HubSpot theme comparison.

Getting started

1. Check your subscription first: Content Hub Professional or Enterprise for memberships, and count how many access groups your content structure actually needs.
2. Consider activating the Courses object: Data Management > Data Model > Edit data model > Activate. Even if you are not ready to build against it, having courses as CRM records makes your reporting and automation better immediately.
3. Purchase and install EDULMS from the HubSpot marketplace.
4. Follow the EDULMS documentation for theme settings, colours, typography, and module configuration.
5. Set up your access groups and gated content before you build course pages, because the access structure shapes the page structure.
6. Use your 4 hours of included setup support. Most teams spend it on branding and membership configuration.

Frequently asked questions

Where this goes next

The reason we built a HubSpot LMS theme is the same reason we built one for real estate. Education businesses have a specific shape, and adapting a general-purpose theme to that shape costs more than starting from one built for it.

But a theme only solves the website half. The half worth thinking about first is your data: whether courses are CRM records, whether students associate to them, and whether your subscription supports the access structure you actually need. Get that right and the website becomes straightforward.

If you want to talk through your setup before you spend anything, book a 30 minute call. If your answer is “keep the LMS and integrate it,” we will tell you that.

Related reading

• HubSpot Theme Comparison: Estate Pro vs Siloh Pro vs EDULMS vs Commerce Craft
• The HubSpot Listing Object Explained