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Learning management systems (LMS) are becoming increasingly popular at companies large and small. An LMS will allow your business to train new employees and teams on a variety of topics and skills. With an LMS, you can more efficiently onboard new hires and keep employees engaged, which will lead to increased productivity, higher retention rates, and a more successful company in the long run.
To really reap the benefits of e-learning, you need to make sure you invest in an LMS or employee training tracker that’s the right fit for your needs and budget. In this guide, we’re going to help you figure that out with a short list of the best learning management systems along with everything else you need to know when buying new software. Let’s get started!
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Our criteria: How we chose the best vendors
We take our research seriously and want to make sure we are presenting our readers with the very best solutions in a given software category. Here's how we select vendors to be in our buyer guides:
- Product: We want to have a deep understanding of a vendor's product before recommending it. This usually means getting a demo by a senior executive (their CEO, head of product, etc), and/or using the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best in class offering.
- User feedback: We do our best to understand what users say when they experience this product. User input allows us to accomplish a more thorough due diligence of products, put new vendors on our radar, and generally make sure we are presenting the right products to our readers.
- Financial metrics: We are very much finance nerds and so use a product's retention rates, growth, profitability, and scale to understand whether or not it is truly best in class.
- Best for a use case: Sometimes the best solution is the cheapest, the best tool for international companies, or the best for startups. We try to include a diversity of solutions so that our readers can find the tool that is best for what they need.
Here's more detail if you want to read further on how we research vendors.
In this guide you'll find
Featured in
Top Learning Management Systems
After surveying the landscape, we came up with this short list of top learning management system vendors for you to talk to.
Why we love it
:
eloomi's LMS allows for a high degree of automation which means your team can get a lot done while still providing a stellar employee experience.
eloomi
Review:
eloomi's LMS allows your team to create courses including rich media like videos, PDFs, etc. Again, the core differentiator beyond a modern UX is an automation layer that means employees will automatically be put into different learning modules based on moving to another department, finishing employee onboarding, etc.
This platform also includes an out of the box reporting dashboard, with the ability for you to customize the data that's important to your team, and get weekly reports emailed directly to your inbox. This allows managers to see who on their team is making progress, the most popular content, etc.
Employees can access this content via mobile, and will have lots of content to consume given their partnerships with course platforms like Skillsoft.
eloomi
Customers:
Domino’s, Jabra GN, Sophos, Le Creuset, Icelandair Hotels, Delta.
eloomi
Stats:
- eloomi was established in 2015
- eloomi has been used by over 500 customers
Best For:
This is a great LMS for companies of all sizes (they even have a free tier!) which need a modern LMS that also has other employee experience software built in (engagement, performance, etc).
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
:
It's an eCommerce ecosystem specifically geared towards technology workers. They also have their own platform where ways to learn, such as skill assessments, certifications, and cloud labs, are offered.
PluralSight
Review:
Technology is changing rapidly and it doesn't take long for even the best technical teams to fall behind. Pluralsight provides assessments, courses and testing for technologists to stay sharp on the latest in skills, languages, and the softer side of how to get work done. Their expert-authored courses are offered on their own software product, Skills.
PluralSight
Customers:
Companies that use Pluralsight to build up tech skills include Adobe, VMware, ADP, Fujitsu, and Nasdaq.
PluralSight
Stats:
- According to their own surveys, 93% of organizations that use Pluralsight saw a return on their investment after 6 to 12 months of implementation.
- 96% of those surveyed organizations are likely to recommend the tool.
- 70% of companies in the Fortune 500 list use Pluralsight
- This amounts to more than 17,000 business customers in over 180 countries.
PluralSight
Pricing:
There are two plans for Skills by Pluralsight, Professional, which is $579 per user per year, and Enterprise, at $779. With the former plan, you can start a team trial. With the latter, you can start a pilot. Both of them include the entire course library.
Best For
Skills by Pluralsight is an excellent choice for companies that want a solution specific to their technology workers, regardless of company size or industry. It's also great for individuals, as they even offer a pricing scheme for freelancers or consultants which starts at $29 per month.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
:
Docebo is a robust and scalable LMS ideal for companies with more than 300 team members in need of some sort of training.
Docebo
Review:
Docebo allows employees to drive their experience by choosing their learning paths based on skills they'd like to acquire. Managers can then understand the progress made by employees through a unified dashboard. Docebo is used by companies like Uber and WalMart.
Docebo
Customers:
Docebo is used by companies like Walmart, Amazon Web Servies, Heineken, Thomson Reuters, Uber, and Bose.
Docebo
Stats:
- 99% user satisfaction according to their own research
- 500+ global team
- Listed in the Toronto Stock Exchange since 2019 and in NASDAQ since December 2020
- Used by over 2,000 customers worldwide
Best For
Docebo is best-suited for medium to large enterprises. Typically, they work best with companies that want to train more than 300 customers, partners, and employees on a monthly basis. It's also ideal for those organizations that want to expand rapidly and whose learning needs span several business units.
Worth Checking Out:
Interestingly, Docebo is a company that started in Macherio, Italy, but has branched out and has location in Canada, the US, Dubai, and London.
Why we love it
:
Bridge combines a learning management system and an employee performance & engagement tool into a single platform.
Bridge by Instructure
Review:
Companies like Chemical Bank and Livongo use Bridge to engage employees with a learning management system that is tightly integrated to performance management. This means managers can assign continuing education materials that align directly with goals. You can leverage Bridge's content, third party content, or create your own courses.
Bridge by Instructure
Customers:
Notable customers for Bridge include C Space, NHS, TCF Bank, Brewer Science, Domino's, and Catalant Technologies.
Bridge by Instructure
Stats:
- Founded in 2008
- Over 1000 employees
- Bridge was launched in 2015 and had over 500 clients by 2018
- Thoma Bravo, an American private equity and growth capital firm, acquired Instructure for $2 billion in 2019
Bridge by Instructure
Pricing:
Bridge has four potential pricing plans. The first three are priced per user and billed annually. The "Learning" plan starts at $3 per user per month, and then you have the "Learning+Performance" and "Learning+Performance+Engagement" plans which are priced at $9 and $12, respectively. For larger companies, Bridge offers enterprise and custom solutions with unique pricing models.
Best For
Companies of all sizes may benefit from Bridge's LMS. This vendor is especially suitable for companies that may be looking for a performance and/or engagement tool as well.
Worth Checking Out:
Instructure are also the makers of Canva, one of the most popular learning management systems among American universities. They launched Bridge on 2015 to serve the corporate sector as well.
Why we love it
:
We love Lessonly because it's an interactive and beautiful-looking product with all the features you'd expect from a fully-fledged LMS; course authoring, quizzes, forums, SCORM, and more.
Lessonly
Review:
Lessonly allows teams from L&D to Sales to create and deploy effective learning materials to help new employees ramp faster through consistent training, and existing employees to get on the same page with best practices for their roles. It's very intuitive and easy to use, and has advanced features like an open API and webhooks for teams that want to have a deeper integration with existing technologies.
Lessonly
Customers:
Lessonly is trusted by companies such as HelloFresh, Trunk Club, McAfee, Salesloft, Jostens, and Lending Home.
Lessonly
Stats:
- Over 3 million users worldwide
- At Directly, an AI-powered customer service provider, product experts who completed courses through Lessonly averaged 18% higher on customer satisfaction surveys.
Lessonly
Pricing:
Although Lessonly has two available plans (Pro & Pro+Coaching), the pricing for them isn't disclosed on their website. The difference between one plan or another is mainly having additional modules and features like Lessonly Practice, conversations, and certifications.
Best For
Lessonly is a good bet for companies of all sizes, but the product might resonate particularly with distributed teams.
Worth Checking Out:
Lessonly is a company very well-versed in all things remote. Their platform is also designed with this use case in mind, to the point that they also work as a remote team management tool.
Why we love it
:
Cornerstone OnDemand makes highly-acclaimed software for recruiting, training, and managing. Their LMS is a stellar solution for large enterprises and small businesses alike.
CornerStone OnDemand
Review:
Cornerstone OnDemand's LMS is best known for servicing large enterprise customers who need a dependable solution to ensure employees stay up to date with certification requirements, evolve their skill sets, and can get access to a blended learning model of both in person and virtual learning.
CornerStone OnDemand
Customers:
This vendor is trusted by companies like Wendy's, Nestle, Dell, and New Belgium Brewing.
CornerStone OnDemand
Stats:
- Used by over 75+ million people
- Used in over 180 countries
- Available in 50 languages
- Went public in 2011, listed on the NASDAQ as CSOD
- 3,000+ employees
CornerStone OnDemand
Pricing:
Pricing for the Cornerstone OnDemand LMS is not disclosed publicly. However, they do offer a free trial.
Best For
Judging from their stats, customer list, and reputation, we could say that Cornerstone OnDemand could be a good fit for organizations of all sizes, industries, and postal codes.
Worth Checking Out:
Although they now have excellent products for all sorts of HR functions, Cornerstone initially started as CyberU and were focused solely on corporate training. You could say that their LMS is where they first got things right, and it's now taken them to becoming a public company with a global presence.
Why we love it
:
It's an enormous eLearning library that lets you choose between your existing LMS or theirs. You can access all their content for a a low-priced subscription.
Go1
Review:
Go1 provides thousands of online courses to HR teams looking to help their people maintain certifications, grow their hard skills, and become more productive colleagues. While they do provide tools to manage learners, Go1 also integrates with many of the major LMS players so you can access their content from your existing or new learning management system - or just use them as the way your employees access content directly.
Go1
Customers:
Go1 is trusted by organizations like Delta, TikTok, ATP Media, and Hays.
Go1
Stats:
Go1
Pricing:
Go1 is priced differently depending on whether you want the content hub (which includes their platform) or just the platform. To give you an idea, the content hub plan starts at $10 per user per month and is for teams with less than 20 users. Their next plan is for growing teams (21+) and is $12 per user per month. If you just want the platform to use your own content with, the basic plan is free for unlimited users, while the enterprise plan is priced based on your needs.
Best For
Go1 is used by small businesses and startups, but also enterprise clients and government organizations. Naturally, it's best-suited for teams looking for ready-made content instead of creating their own, regardless of size and industry.
Worth Checking Out:
This company launched its own social impact initiative in 2019. They've helped train more than 300,000 people worldwide in topics like mental health awareness and domestic violence prevention.
Why we love it
:
It's an eclectic eLearning ecosystem and LMS from the quintessential social network for work, and one of the top tools for recruiters.
LinkedIn Learning
Review:
LinkedIn Learning has a strong backbone of content from Lynda, one of the first online businesses from back in the 1990s that had several decades to assemble content around all types of business knowledge from soft to hard skills. With LinkedIn Learning, employees can get training on three main areas, business, creative, and technology. Together, these categories can display topics on anything from SCRUM and Excel to photography and non-verbal language for leaders.
LinkedIn Learning
Customers:
LinkedIn Learning
Stats:
- Over 16,000 courses
- An average of 50 new courses are added per week
LinkedIn Learning
Pricing:
With LinkedIn Learning, you can buy individual courses or subscribe to the whole catalogue as you would do for a streaming service. The latter option is priced for a single account, and starts at $29,99 per month if you pay monthly, or $19,99 if you pay for the whole year. If you'd like to purchase the service for a team, they offer custom pricing.
Best For
Companies or individuals that want a simple solution with ready-made content that won't break the bank.
Worth Checking Out:
In order to deliver personalized recommendations, this tool also draws insights from the 600+million wide pool of LinkedIn members.
Why we love it
:
More than an LMS, Trainual aspires to become a playbook, a way of organizing who does what and how, for each business they serve. They do this by encompassing onboarding, training, documentation, a wiki, and other tools, all within a single platform.
Trainual
Review:
Trainual is a simple to use tool that allows organizations to document standard operating procedures across anything from pushing code to re-stocking. This is a great solution for smaller organizations that want to structure the necessary organizational knowledge for people to do their jobs, but that don't want to invest the time and money into a full-on learning management system.
Trainual
Customers:
The UPS Store, Harmon Brothers, RE/MAX, Stanford University, Design Pickle.
Trainual
Stats:
Trainual
Pricing:
Mainly, Trainual is offered in two plans; Pro and Premium. The former is either $99 per month if you pay for one year or $119 if you go monthly. The Premium plan is either $149 or $179 per month. Both plans include the first 25 users. Afterwards, you'd pay more for each user, but the fee is currently not disclosed upfront, likely because it varies according to the number of additional accounts. If you've got more than 100 users, they offer custom pricing from the get-go. And, in case you're a nonprofit, they may offer you 50% off any plan for as long as you use the tool. They also offer a free trial.
Best For
Trainual was designed for smaller companies that, unlike enterprises, perhaps don't need a very robust LMS. Instead, they've combined certain features of an LMS with modules like a company wiki, process documentation, and SOPs.
Worth Checking Out:
Trainual puts a unique intranet-like spin on their product, having features like platform-wide search (particularly useful if you have your knowledge base there) and quick tests. They also offer an online calculator of the ROI you could derive from using their tool.
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Next Steps
At the end of the day, a learning management system can be great for your company as long as the platform you choose aligns with your learning/engagement objectives. So make a list of your must-haves and then run through that list on your demos so you can be confident in your investment.
Best Learning Management Systems
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