Absorb vs. Seismic Learning

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Absorb
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.N/A
Seismic Learning
Score 6.7 out of 10
N/A
Seismic Learning (formerly Lessonly, acquired by Seismic in August 2021), is a learning management system (LMS). The vendor emphasizes eLearning for client-facing skills, as well as a drag-and-drop interface. Lessonly supports customizable learning paths and corporate onboarding processes.N/A
Pricing
AbsorbSeismic Learning
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Pro
Contact sales team
Pro + Coaching
Contact sales team
Enterprise Learning for Global Teams
Contact sales team
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AbsorbSeismic Learning
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AbsorbSeismic Learning
Considered Both Products
Absorb
Chose Absorb
During our evaluation and research we really like LearnUpon and Lessonly but Absorb LMS came out on top with the ease of use and familiarity to our team and cost!
Chose Absorb
Absorb [LMS] had [many] of the same features. Many of the vendors had a lower base price with additional pricing for the add-ons. From a cost perspective, the majority of software providers' costs were higher with all of the required addons. For the features required Absorb …
Seismic Learning
Chose Seismic Learning
Lessonly's tools allow me to natively create screen recordings with narration - this was something that I couldn't do with other LMS products that I reviewed. Other providers did not offer the ability to quickly pull up lessons and review them side-by-side in Chrome. Being able …
Chose Seismic Learning

We looked to bring on an LMS for a few reasons. First, to free up our bandwidth (with a small team of two training and developing 60+ revenue generating roles) - an LMS system allowed us to create well-built out, self-paced trainings that did not need to be delivered in person. …

Chose Seismic Learning
The builder that is built directly into Lessonly is what makes it so much better on the admin side. On the user side, it really easy to use and keep up with.
Chose Seismic Learning
I have not seen the need to look at other products since we have partnered with Lessonly.
Chose Seismic Learning
We selected Lesson.ly because the practice scenarios were key for our onboarding program. This was the only platform that offered that. It also has integrations with more of the products we already use, including Salesforce, Slack and Google Suite. This made it easy for us to …
Features
AbsorbSeismic Learning
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
Absorb
8.7
163 Ratings
5% above category average
Seismic Learning
6.8
110 Ratings
19% below category average
Course authoring9.2128 Ratings9.7108 Ratings
Course catalog or library9.3142 Ratings9.5106 Ratings
Player/Portal8.4147 Ratings5.585 Ratings
Learning content8.9120 Ratings3.1104 Ratings
Mobile friendly8.0117 Ratings9.058 Ratings
Progress tracking & certifications9.6155 Ratings9.896 Ratings
Assignments9.7134 Ratings2.3107 Ratings
Compliance management9.8129 Ratings9.763 Ratings
Learning administration9.3159 Ratings7.2100 Ratings
Learning reporting & analytics8.9156 Ratings6.595 Ratings
Social learning6.186 Ratings2.172 Ratings
Gamification6.184 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign On (SSO) Enabled Learning9.8121 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AbsorbSeismic Learning
Small Businesses
iSpring LMS
iSpring LMS
Score 9.6 out of 10
iSpring LMS
iSpring LMS
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
iSpring LMS
iSpring LMS
Score 9.6 out of 10
iSpring LMS
iSpring LMS
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
AITalent LMS
AITalent LMS
Score 9.3 out of 10
AITalent LMS
AITalent LMS
Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
AbsorbSeismic Learning
Likelihood to Recommend
9.1
(166 ratings)
6.3
(114 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.1
(9 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.9
(70 ratings)
8.0
(3 ratings)
Availability
8.9
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
8.3
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.6
(152 ratings)
9.7
(97 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.6
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.5
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
7.9
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
4.5
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
6.4
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.0
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Professional Services
9.6
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.6
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.6
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AbsorbSeismic Learning
Likelihood to Recommend
Absorb Software Inc.
Absorb LMS has been incredibly well suited to our business needs. It is a robust platform with a wide ranges of tools, which make it easy to implement whatever training is desired. While there are many tools and options, the system itself is not overwhelming. The team we have worked with at Absorb (Jordan Wolf and Steve Ernstes) made onboarding, implementation, and continued customer support a breeze. The amount of support we received when we did encounter small issues was amazing.
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Seismic
If you are onboarding new employees or consultants and you have a complex product, solution, or your business is layered and complex, this can help distill down the layers into basics so that new team or partners can build their knowledge base up the right way. This ensures they are learning what needs to be learned, and not what they surmise or assume, which can be incorrect and cause issues down the road - this is especially sensitive in our field. Training of all kinds can be done easily with this tool.
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Pros
Absorb Software Inc.
  • 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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Seismic
  • Open to feedback and ideas and constantly innovating and iterating on their product to serve new needs that arise
  • Making me feel like more than just a customer: They aren't transactional and focus on building the relationship and making me feel heard.
  • Extremely easy to use product so building content takes little time, and I can leverage other subject matter experts to build content as well.
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Cons
Absorb Software Inc.
  • 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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Seismic
  • Media import (audio, video) are still in infancy. Reliability of uploaded content isn't 100%.
  • The Events function lacks some features that are more built out in other platforms.
  • Reporting interface has a bit of a learning curve, but overall isn't bad.
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Likelihood to Renew
Absorb Software Inc.
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.
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Seismic
Worried about its acquisition by Seismic and hope that they don't change the product or the terms drastically.
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Usability
Absorb Software Inc.
The system is very flexible, allowing admins to build dashboards that offer different UX and UI for different roles. The increase in usability is great for engagement and one-click actions. In addition to the dashboards, the admin interface is intuitive and allows managers to easily access reports for their teams.
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Seismic
It's completely simple and intuitive, anyone can pick it up. The hardest part is looking for a save button and finally figuring out you don't need one. We don't provide training for users and never have complaints. For creators, we provide best practices, but using Lessonly itself requires nothing .
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Reliability and Availability
Absorb Software Inc.
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
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Seismic
No answers on this topic
Performance
Absorb Software Inc.
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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Seismic
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Absorb Software Inc.
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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Seismic
The support team is very friendly and eager to help you learn the ins and outs of Lessonly. They can set up training for large groups or send links in a chat for individual help. They are quick to respond and if one person doesn't have the answer, they will collaborate with others to help find the answer.
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Online Training
Absorb Software Inc.
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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Seismic
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Absorb Software Inc.
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.
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Seismic
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Absorb Software Inc.
Absorb LMS is feature packed with small but smart elements (can have a username that isnt an email, can change the core language used in the platform, can change the font and layout) that offer greater security and accessibility for learners.
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Seismic
I felt some of these products had more features than were necessary and needed for our team. Some of them were limited on the number of content creators that were allowed which to me forces you to use one or two people to create content where I would rather see it done by key members of each department.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Absorb Software Inc.
Seems very expensive for limitations we have experienced.
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Seismic
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Absorb Software Inc.
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.
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Seismic
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Absorb Software Inc.
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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Seismic
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Absorb Software Inc.
  • 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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Seismic
  • We've had an increase in quality overall as a company, as we are able to continually train our employees outside of our New Hire Training program.
  • We've seen stronger communication as we are able to send out material to our stylists about products, policies, procedures, etc. and they are able to provide us with feedback. After all, it is their tool for learning and we want to know the best way to provide that information to our Team Members.
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ScreenShots

Absorb Screenshots

Screenshot of Absorb's course details page, accessible from the course catalog dashboard, used to give learners an understanding of the course material.Screenshot of course creation with Create AI Beta.Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of