Absorb vs. Courseplay (LMS, LXP and PMS)

Absorb is highly intuitive for end users. The resources feature allows for uploads of materials that are not marked as part of any training but rather available for users to review at their convenience. Scheduling reports so they are sent to users via email has been a pain. Reports are duplicated and there is also no start and end date, which causes the portal to continuously push the reports unless they are manually cancelled

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

• Overall, Absorb LMS is pretty easy to use for learners and especially for admins. It's practical to create and manage course content - it provides the most crucial options and yet is lean enough not to overcomplicate the admin's life. The consistent and customizable "table-view" in most of the admin-areas is very helpful and easy to follow.
• Using Enrollment Rules, Absorb LMS let you define who a course applies to and how they get enrolled. You can build rules based on learner attributes, such as department, location job role, group, to include or exclude specific audiences. The way Absorb LMS is using enrollment attributes, no other LMS actually can fulfill our requirements easier. Enrollment rules are mainly embedded in individual course options (you can also create scheduled enrollments outside of the courses).

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.

Our company has performed many software implementations over the last few years. Getting Absorb LMS up and running was one of the easiest and most pleasant by far. The process is fairly straightforward, but you are also given excellent support in instances when it is needed.

Incentivized

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

My client success manager had to reach out once for our company once. Although it was not an Absorb issue (it was an issue on the course vendor side), Absorb offered a resolution while the vendor was fixing the issue. We were very happy with the resolution and feel like Absorb went above and beyond for us.

Incentivized

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.

Absorb offers a more flexible and robust experience for managing learning ecosystems. The user interface is more modern and provides a stronger user-centric learning experience. Absorb is at parity for social learning, which most learning platforms struggle with. The admin capabilities within Absorb are stronger than those of each of these providers. The notifications are strong, too.

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

Clear and easy to understand. Of course, I would love to have seen these costs during my research of different LMSs, but I understand why they don't share this information.

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

• We used Absorb LMS to track Annual Safety Training to ensure compliance with inspectors and ensure our teammates understand the risks and how to mitigate them safely. We were never able to track this before and thus, we simply didn't have mandatory annual training.
• A huge drawback prior to implementation of Absorb LMS was our inability to offer more than our 40 purchased e-courses to our employees. These were mostly safety and equipment based courses, so we didn't have any soft skill development happening. Now we have hundreds of courses available from the Absorb library that cover the safety aspects, but we also have dozens of leadership courses, communication and influence courses, etc. It has been a huge gamechanger for our employees and their development opportunities! When I look at our course library, there are 400 courses, which over 300 being available through Absorb library (the other 80+ were made using Absorb Create).

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