Cornerstone Galaxy vs. PlanSource vs. TribeHR (discontinued)

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.

Less appropriate for small groups with one very simple health plan. More appropriate for 20+ EE groups with multiple plans and supplementary benefits.

Incentivized

I think it's great for small companies to manage their basic HR functions if they do not have a dedicated department. I'm unsure of the capabilities it holds for a large company with multiple teams to organize and how the calendaring functions across departments. But, for our team of roughly 20 folks it is simple and straightforward.

Incentivized

• 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

• Puts all of your healthcare selections in one place making changes, drops, and additions are taken care of in one place instead of having to contact every vendor individually.
• Keeps an accurate record of real time enrollment which helps when you are in an account manager role and handling client questions concerning their health plans.
• Provides tools to keep the client and yourself organized. Several Open Enrollment messaging tools and places to add any educational documents for the different health plans.

Incentivized

• Ad publication
• process streamlining
• scalability

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 more advanced options, such as HCM, could have a slightly more user-friendly dashboard for users who are not daily computer users.
• Needs to be easier to customize the homepage. Clients are always interested in adding in their own pictures, colors, welcome message position, etc.
• Needs to have a function where the employer can send a document for the employee to sign, open and capture the employee's signature, send back to the employer and save in the employee file.

Incentivized

• I would like even more capabilities, but I think that has to do with how we are using the site.
• I would like to receive email notifications once a week with a summary of activity in TribeHR, including time-off scheduled by my team and any new documents or information that has been added.
• I'd like reminders if I am going to go over my time off that is allotted to carry over into the new year and other pertinent vacation, floating holiday, sick time notifications.

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

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)

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

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

I have looked at GoCo, Kronos and Zenefits. I selected PlanSource because I felt it was the most customizable for a variety of clients across the board. The interface seemed functional but slightly professional looking than it competitors. PlanSource also seemed well established and that it was capable of handling my client needs.

Incentivized

We evaluated Greenhouse but went with net suite because we were already using some of the other NetSuite. Greenhouse seemed a bit easier to use. The others were a bit too small, didn't have the stretch to scale.

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

• Positive - Reduces time spent contacting vendors of enrollment changes. When you are dealing with several hundred employees and their dependents across several vendors that time starts to add up.
• Positive - Point of value when trying to gain or up sell a client.
• Negative - You do need to meet the minimum number of people on the platform as per your contact to avoid having to pay a fee to PlanSource. If one of your larger clients leaves that could be a potential issue.

Incentivized

• As I stated it has alleviated numerous back and forth emails with our CFO (who is only available PT) and CEO (who is often too busy to spend time on HR functions) - this has allowed for easy answers to basic HR questions.
• It has allowed us to track all employee time-off in one place, saving us time from checking each individual Outlook calendar for scheduling purposes.
• It has allowed us to direct all employees to one place for core HR documents and information, ensuring that folks are always getting the same answers to their inquiries.

Incentivized