Cornerstone Galaxy vs. Highspot

Cornerstone Galaxy is a good solution for larger companies that focus on training and want to offer a variety of options to their employees and departments. It is highly customizable. It does require a tech savvy team to set-up, and maintain. This is not a set-it-and-forget-it system. From an LMS perspective, it wouldn't be my top choice for employees who only need a mobile-friendly approach.

Great for delivering insight on which personas are engaging with the material shared. If I've had multiple meetings with personas, but they have not engaged with my proposal, I'm now able to understand the priority of our partnership and how it ranks within their other initiatives.

• Ability to provide multiple customizable access roles from general end user to full system admin and anything in between
• Powerful reporting system in the LMS to track a plethora of data points within the platform (user data, training information, transcript information)
• Great options to customize the look and feel of your "home page" to best meet your company's needs and goals.
• Ability to customize the transcript view for learners (i.e. when Completed training will move to their Archived transcript, what to do with Inactive training on transcripts)

Incentivized

• From an admin perspective, the platform is very easy to navigate, build and launch new content and informational pages for our team.
• The search feature within the platform is very accurate and does a great job of curating the top content based off of what our reps are looking for.
• The ability for our reps to hit 'edit in word online' or 'edit in Excel online' is great because our reps don't have to download a doc, edit it and then re-upload into the system. Any changes they make are auto-saved and stored right in Highspot. They can then present straight from the platform.

Incentivized

• Sometimes finding the right answer to your support question can be a bit more difficult than it should be.
• I would like to see more OSHA related courses.
• At times, the administrative interface seems to need to be updated, but the tradeoff honestly might be the absolute rock-solid stability of the platform.

Incentivized

• The mobile platform is not as user-friendly, missing some of the ease of use from a mobile device.
• The Help section is not as comprehensive or accurate. Often a search yields answers that are not relevant to the issue trying to be resolved.
• Content can only be sorted alphabetically or by date, it would be useful to be able to sort by author or department as well.

Incentivized

As long as pricing stays reasonable, we will likely stay with Cornerstone for at least one more contract renewal. It would be a large task to migrate all of our content to a new system. However, the LMS landscape is diversifying with new startups that are showing some real innovation.

Incentivized

I love Highspot, it saves me a ton of time every single day. I like how my correspondence looks professional and I know what I'm sending is accurate and company approved. I'm able to add it to an email template in seconds and choose multiple brochures if it fits the information the student wants or requested. I can also customize templates to make them company specific when appropriate

Incentivized

Easy to use, easy to learn, lots of support during the learning process. There are a few parts of the system we don't use and I'm hesitant to begin using because other clients have said they're difficult and cumbersome (certifications) or outdated (libraries)

It is a very intuitive website with easy navigation. I am also able to search by market name alone to get all the information that I need within that market. It is only as good as the information you place into it, but the naming conventions should be standard across the board.

Incentivized

I haven't really had any major availability problems. The service is practically impeccable but it is true that at times, due to server and latency problems, the application has been slower. But these have been specific issues that have resolved themselves.

I haven't seen many issues at all with load times. Sometimes learning assignments will take longer then expected but it is still reasonable. They have taken great effort over the last couple years to speed things up like reports and search results so I expect that effort to continue in the coming year.

Incentivized

Its always important to have support when you are facing problems and when you are the main admin of the organization. Cornerstone Support is very supporting when you have not found the answer in the help guide. its very useful to have a team support to guide you.

Incentivized

I have not needed any customer support until now, I guess this is because they work on a proactive maintenance of the platform. We have an internal team working with Highspot so if I need help I go to my internal team not directly to Highspot. I have never heard any complaints.

Incentivized

we use also to admin all our training in person events and sessions. Its easy to admin this kind of trainings and automatize some processes we have. Also de user experience and the integration with other systems helps to the employees to use more. All modules integrated oriented to develop people is the principal reason to have CSOD. The training administration is very complete and allows to automate many processes.

The online modules are pretty good. You can access them at any time, which we have done. You learn a lot in the beginning, but having the ability to retake short lessons when you are working on those items was very helpful.

Incentivized

The implementation was pretty difficult. We felt they (Cornerstone) didn’t properly allocate the resources to complete our implementation in the timetable we wanted.

For example, we worked on Workday and SSO integrations - work that we had specifically contracted for in advance. When we were ready to work on that project, they didn’t have the people ready to help us, so it took a lot longer than necessary. That was my biggest pain point.

The implementation approach we went with was a self-led implementation. We would speak to the implementation manager once per week, and self-trained. We met with implementation manager to discuss issues, review things that we’d learned for 1 hour. We found that wasn’t enough. Other things would come up outside that one hour window that we couldn’t get answers to. We didn’t have anyone to ask about those things and we had to wait to ask during our weekly meeting.

The advantage of the self-led implementation approach was that it was really inexpensive – significantly less than the implementation cost for the other systems that we looked at. I also liked that we could pace ourselves. There were however big roadblocks. We would have to make sure the right resources were available. We had an implementation/project manager with a lot of experience and felt that the person was knowledgeable but missed on a few things.

In hindsight, I would still go with the self-led implementation, but knowing what I know now, I would ask for the integration person to be available more. I would work that into the contract. With single sign-on, we needed deep linking to build direct links through a Single Sign-On tool, e.g. when someone gets an email, it directs them to training. But it has to go through SSO to get them to the correct link. Deep linking wasn’t turned on in our system and they had to activate it. We encountered little things like that – sequencing pre-requisites which were problematic. We tried to troubleshoot ourselves.

I recommend you consider contracting for some extra implementation hours and determine when they are going to be available. Work it into the contract that you have the ability to call tech support during implementation. In addition to weekly implementation meetings, they have technical webexes – 4 every week, but 2 didn’t apply to us – one as we were using SSO. The challenge is they were not always relevant – we had specific questions that didn’t fall into those categories

The user experience is a lot better than using SumTotal as an admin CSOD makes working easy. Without having workarounds. Reporting is a lot better than both platforms. Reporting in CSOD is complex however easy to manage and create when you understand the data points collected

Incentivized

Dropbox was sufficient for storing content in an easy to access space but, provided us no value beyond that. SharePoint actually made us less productive due to the amount of time our sales team had to spend searching for the right piece of content. Neither solution provided us any analytics as to what content was being used/engaged with.

Highspot provided us with intuitive content search and organization with the ability to tag keywords, search queries, and fine-tune categorization of all of our content. Highspot also provided us with direct feedback when our customer or prospective customers were viewing content which enabled us to follow-up at the perfect time and was directly attributed to several closed won opportunities. Their Outlook integration is the icing on the top as it allows our sales team to share content, access email templates, and link communication back to Salesforce without ever having to leave the email client. With these features combined Highspot has made me drastically more productive and efficient in my work.

Incentivized

It is important to be familiar with the terms and annual increases in licenses and other aspects of the contract. I recommend analyzing this from the beginning and the permanence is relevant because Cornerstone updates its modules and brings out new features that may allow you to leave a module to acquire another

It's a great product with some pieces that are set but many things that can be customized as needed for individual needs

Incentivized

As I have said before, I have no doubt that the services of the Cornerstone sales people were very good. In particular, our salesperson spent a lot of time in contact with us to make the process go smoothly. Perhaps being a large company in some cases the times were slowed down but it is something normal to take into account.

• We are in the process of trying to increase employee engagement through content expansion. We are in the early stages of this.
• The Edge Import Tool, in conjunction with Reporting 2.0, has done a great job of helping to automate/semi-automate tasks for huge time savings.
• Maintaining compliance. Achieved through dynamic/automated groups, assignments, communication, and reporting.

Incentivized

• Highspot has created more efficiency within our Sales team as reps no longer have to "hunt" for up-to-date collateral
• Highspot helps us understand what collateral gets deals in pipeline
• Highspot aids in new employees getting ramped easier and faster with one location to review training content

Incentivized