Absorb vs. iSpring LMS vs. Studio 360 (discontinued)

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

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My specific scenario is, that I need to deliver courses in two languages to multiple departments, so iSpring helps me with that from beginning and creating courses, to translating, and then enrolling people. What could be better is how reports works. Right now you can check report either by course or by department/person, but I would need to see everything on one page, like every single enrolment.

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Articulate Studio is constantly surprising in terms of what it can do. It is like a "Swiss Army Knife" of functionality. I've used it to build portfolios, whole interactive websites, authoring videos and I often discover novel ways to make it useful on a pretty regular basis. What would be a situation where you would not want to use Articulate Studio? Well, even though you can use it to author video and to publish websites, it's not a replacement for a video editing package or a web platform like WordPress, but there are times when it will do certain things in an astoundingly simple way superior to other tools.

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• 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).

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• Automatically re-enrolling employees when a certificate expires. Set it and forget it!
• If set up properly from the beginning, you don't have to do much, with the roles and groups settings, you can automate a large portion of the course management.
• I can provide visibility to anyone about any employee necessary, allowing me to put more responsibility on my managers, instead of doing it all myself.

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• They made it very easy to understand how to add new content to the courses, including images, videos or audio, of course, you are still able to do text-based content as well.
• Creating quizzes has never been easier. The ability to add controls to each question and what actions each answer creates, whether an additional question or passing to the next section. Customizing these actions are very easy to learn and add to your course.
• Being able to use your own scoring mechanism is awesome! I like SCORM but there are many options to use including a custom one of your own. This ability allows you to pass your students over to a proprietary system that enrolls them in the next course, or use the built-in utilities to provide the next course or quiz, the choice is yours!

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• 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

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• Some limitations where you can't create exactly what you want either in the design of interactions or lack of varied interactions
• Images cannot be moved to where you want them on the interaction slides
• Layout of interactions can't be adjusted and overides your powerpoint background
• If you have to edit a course and delete it off iSpring Learn then the records of all the people associated to that course are swiped and there's not a way of retrieving the information.

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• The audio editor is awful. Sometimes when you cut a section, it actually takes a different section that you selected. Especially when in zoom mode. You have to then undo the action, and re-do. Also, scrubbing through the audio is difficult. If you're exporting audio, it can glitch during the process. I avoid using the audio editor whenever I can.
• After all these years, it's still a buggy program. You can be doing your recordings, and a sudden message appears saying that something went wrong and needs to close. I've done re-installs, contacted support, and I constantly clear the temp folder. Still happens. Also, it's a good idea to export your audio, and there have been times the program freezes up on me, and the audio file (in the .ppta file) gets corrupted and all audio is permanently lost.
• The program can get slow when publishing, previewing or opening the audio editor.
• The included Engage program is pretty good, but it needs more customization options. And I think they can add more modules that provide a little more engagement.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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.

In the past I could not encourage my students to take online training. The results and the questions were hard to be given. When I used the iSpring Suite along with iSpring Learn, my dreams came through and most of the time my students are online and take good training with my programme.

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There is very little chance that this software wold not be renewed. It has become an integral part of our standard software for elearning development.

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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.

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Sometimes, things just aren't intuitive enough. For example, burying the catalog in the settings area makes no sense at all. The same goes for permissions and year reviews. It was a massive oversight that really caused a lot of confusion for all of our managers. It caused distrust in the LMS simply because someone who designed and developed it did not think that an employee review should be private to them, their direct supervisor, or the supervisor above. Instead, ANY manager could read ANY employee review. I have mentioned this several times throughout these questionnaires, and as you can see, I still find it incomprehensible that a company that wants to promote its software as a multifaceted solution could be so blind to something so critical, especially in terms of privacy.

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This is very useable software even for novice eLearning authoring users. People with some PowerPoint experience should be fine with this software and even Excel!

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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

I never experienced any unavailability

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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

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Everything runs smoothly.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

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.

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iSpring Learn’s customer support receives high praise for responsiveness. Live chat and tutorials are noted as highly effective in promptly resolving technical issues. iSpring Learn is a strong LMS for organizations focused on efficiency, engagement, and ease of use, with excellent support to ensure adoption success. iSpring Learn is a strong LMS for organizations focused on efficiency, engagement, and ease of use, with excellent support to ensure adoption success.

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I've never really had any major issues with the product (Other than the registration loop error)and my ten out of ten rating is based on the assistance I got when we initially set up the extension in Power Point. I found the support folks to be professional, helpful and friendly

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We can say that most of my students attend my classes twice a week and that's not enough for someone to learn. I put some training for them to do at home and they really enjoy doing them. The kind of progress they make is really satisfying for them and they are always learning.

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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.

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As a teacher, I used to spend a lot of time correcting my students' papers. Now with iSpring Learn, my time has been saved and everything is done automatically. All the time I can check my students' progress and I know which exams they have taken or they should take. On the whole, online training has really helped a lot of teachers

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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.

When I talked to my colleagues or informed them to search for a programme before iSpring Learn, they were not successful in designing and implementing a programme like this. I am sure they have done a lot to implement it in the best and educational way. That was not that easy as we thought.

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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.

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iSpring is a more entry level LMS. It does not have the same level of features and benefits. For example, it does not have the same level of communication capability. It does not have the same level of reporting functionality. It does not have the same ability to build reporting. It also does not have the same level of communication capabilities

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Articulate Studio is very much a leader in the e-learning space. It stacks up well against other tools designed to quickly and easily build and update CBTs by managers and super-users versus needing to invest time and effort in dedicated e-learning developers. Process improvement initiatives and cross-functional departments are empowered to develop their trainings themselves and identify areas for future development.

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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.

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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.

Awesome. We have 10+ department, around 10 to 100 people in each and it is still very manageable

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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.

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• 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).

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• iSpring has enabled me to deliver professional education to very high-level learners.
• Due to the reviews of my users, many more learners have purchased my courses.
• Several professional colleagues have inquired about my experience setting up online courses on iSpring Learn. I told them it was easy, logical, and no hassle; they will love the level of support.

• I only see positive impact since it is a very easy to use tool for rapid learning. The only point is to know what is possible to develop using this tool to avoid any kind of frustration afterwards.
• Another positive impact is that we don't need a diversified development team. There is no need of technical professionals, and a creative instructional designer is enough to develop effective learning content using Studio.
• The third positive impact is that Studio makes possible to realize short-term projects, mainly when there's already a PowerPoint presentation.

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A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info