Absorb LMS vs. Courseplay Cloud Learning

I would highly recommend Absorb. From the implementation team and then the handoff to our client support manager the customer support alone makes it worthy of my recommendation. I have never built/managed an LMS platform before and I find it very user friendly and capable of doing 98% of what I need it to do. We have been in the system almost a year and one of the struggles I had using the reporting tool has already been resolved and updated.

Incentivized

Courseplay was a good tool for delivery professional development training to school district staff over the internet. We were able to get through our annual courses in 2020 and 2021 with little difficulty. I would not use Courseplay for regular or more formal meetings. For our purposes, the cost was pretty minimal.

Incentivized

• Customizing the user interface was fairly simple and our learners WANT to use the platform because it looks so nice.
• Admins have so many tools at their fingertips to pull reports, create new users, author new courses, and more!
• Absorb LMS has been the solution to so many problems we had experienced in our previous LMS: ease of use, course library, course authoring, tracking, reporting, etc.

Incentivized

• Accessibility on any device.
• Detailed user and activity reports.
• Teaching content online via video.

Incentivized

• The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
• The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
• more education around Absorb analyze essentials
• How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
• Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order

Incentivized

• APIs only available upon request.
• Does not mesh well with Tableau.
• Android app is not always reliable.

Incentivized

We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.

There is room for improvement with anything - and Absorb LMS value this by making their 'submit an idea' function prominent. When selecting platforms, a MoSCoW tool was developed and Absorb LMS easily ticked mre boxes than any of its competitors for features that were necessary for our style of business.

We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team

We have experienced infrequent issues with things like load times on reporting, or pages timing out, but for the large majority of our time within the system things have worked as they should

Incentivized

[...] is a ROCK star- having her as part of our support team has been a game changer. She is a true problem solver at heart and has an unique ability to retain who we are as a company and match that with what can help us most. She has been a game changer for our internal admin team and is supporting us through a business review to help guide us in the best direction on our constant growth.

The training was comprehensive - there were existing modules to learn functionality but working with Absorb staff, and receiving recordings of those walk-throughs, made a rapid understanding of the LMS achievable and covered the necessary material that was needed and allowed for specific questions to be addressed.

Incentivized

The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.

All sites provided at least a basic LMS platform, and Talent was probably the closest in terms of features and like-for-like comparison. Ultimately, none of the others had the same level of course creation and it would either have meant outsourcing or spending a significant amount of time building the courses which was not ideal as we would still be paying for the service during this time. Absorb had the best course creation software of all evaluated which is why we chose it, although it was also by far the most expensive of those evaluated.

Incentivized

Courseplay has features that are designed specifically for content-delivery and educational situations. Zoom and other video chat applications don't offer features like gamification or user reports. The cost per user is also relatively low compared to similar services. A higher ownership cost would have probably driven us to make something like Zoom or WebEx work instead.

Incentivized

Seems very expensive for limitations we have experienced.

Incentivized

We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.

We work directly with Kirsten Spak, who has continuously
provided timely and quality help for myself as the lead and our organization.
Kirsten has helped us ensure that we are going about things as efficiently and
is always willing to walk through things to demonstrate suggestions and
functions. As we look to expand our offerings further, Kirsten has helped
strategize for the best approach, which has helped our workflow and the
end-user experience. As we are still relatively new users, but using the LMS
every day, Kirsten has been very patient and provided clear instruction on
processes when we were unsure of what to do and has been able to troubleshoot,
with her team, functions that were desired but not availability at the time, to
provide us with solutions.

Incentivized

• Lighter administrative load, we went from 20-30 support tickets per month to 1 or 2.
• Our course setup and configuration time now takes less than 5 minutes. In our previous system it took us close to 15 minutes to publish a course.
• We have been able to push administrative responsibilities to department level administrators, because of the ability to have department level admins, who only have access and control of their department users and content.

Incentivized

• We were able to deliver training courses in about 80% of the time vs in-person.
• Free trial period allowed us to evaluate without risk.
• Employees with proper training perform better.

Incentivized