Absorb LMS vs. Seismic Learning vs. Spekit

As a way to deliver eLearning content and track completion, I think Absorb handles our 7000+ users competently. In addition, their support team was always extremely helpful and responsive. When we went through the process of integrating Absorb with Skillsoft Business Advanced library, Absorb's team was very knowledgeable and helpful. I think teams needing more streamlined checklist-style OJT skills tracking will be disappointed by Absorb's feature. It takes 4-5 clicks for a user to trainer to sign off on one skill.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Spekit is extremely well-suited for customer-facing teams who truly have a business need for "just-in-time learning." While we all benefit from the concept of just-in-time learning, organizational representatives who must perform to a high standard in front of external-facing stakeholders particularly benefit from having quick access to processes, definitions, answers, contacts, and more in a tool that is easy to navigate. Spekit may not, however, be well suited for cash-strapped organizations that already have a content management tool like Confluence or SharePoint and can't afford to meet their customer-facing teams in the middle. While Confluence and SharePoint serve very important needs, they don't do a particularly good job of making content easy to find in a pinch. Spekit does.

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Looks great, the design of the plug-in looks very streamlined. It makes a difference if a plugin is ugly.
• Integration is great. It installs into Google Chrome in seconds. It's always accessible when you need it
• Usability is amazing. It automatically places itself near tabs that you might need help on.

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

• 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.

Incentivized

• Honestly, there are a lot of tools that do the same thing - there are lots of search tools for orgs that use too many tools to host content.
• I truly despise all the little helpers when I download the extension. Its the worst, stop cluttering my chrome.

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.

Worried about its acquisition by Seismic and hope that they don't change the product or the terms drastically.

Incentivized

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

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 .

Incentivized

As an administrator, it is very easy to navigate. I can easily see which content is performing well, which content has not been touched. It's simple to teach new team members how to create content. We have added new authors easily in multiple groups in the business.

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

We absolutely loved both our sales representative, Mike Kuphos, and our Implementation manager, Joe Zizian. Joe has continued to be a great resource, even since we went live with our LMS and were moved into the maintenance stage! I sent over a quick question recently when I was stuck in the platform... within hours, he responded with a video walking me through how to do what I was having trouble with. I truly cannot say enough wonderful things about Joe and the level of customer service he has provided throughout implementation and beyond. I haven't really had to use alternate support methods.

Incentivized

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.

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 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.

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.

Incentivized

Spekit may not be as robust as Confluence or organized as SharePoint, but its use of embedded tooltips (Speks) and browser extension put it in the S Tier for "just-in-time learning" platforms - particularly for customer-facing teams.

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

• Our ROI is yet to be determined as we haven't fully rolled it out yet. We hope that this will improve our customer loyalty and advocacy, set us apart from competitors, and appeal to prospects as something that is extremely valuable. ROI measurements will include customer participation, satisfaction from learners and their managers and any new customers who quote the platform as a reason they chose us.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• The time saved from using Spekit is incredible. No more calls/emails asking "what's this field for?" or "How do I do ?" It's all right there, thanks to Spekit.
• Using Spekit has provided an unexpected morale boost because it's not only easy to use, but it's making work more enjoyable too.