Cornerstone Galaxy vs. Trakstar Learn vs. utobo

I feel Cornerstone is a great solution for companies that have a large amount of compliance training to assign but also want to serve up courses for personal and professional growth. Clients are able to control the level of social engagement within the LXP by turning on/off various features such as commenting on smartcards, "Like" and "Share" or with social Communities where posts can be made and commented on. There is also a great amount of flexibility in making certain features visible to a subset of users vs. enterprise-wide.

Incentivized

I believe Mindflash is perfect for corporate training in any industry. It's quick, efficient and provides an unprecedented platform to provide training information digitally. Especially when you do not have enough resources to provide in-person training that requires detailed attention covering a massive territory.

• The user group community is unlike any other. It is easy to connect with other clients and the CSOD team is actively engaged, always interested in what clients want and need.
• Vast content catalog from a wide variety of providers. Content delivery service makes my job easier. I don't have to deal with course files and metadata!
• Ease of use for non-admin admins! I was not a LMS administrator prior to implementation so I learned as I went which was fully supported by the robust training available to system admins.

• Mindflash is very clean and user-friendly. Very easy for learners to navigate and understand.
• Mindflash’s reporting tool is unmatched. You can pull any type of report you could want or need.
• Customer service is top-notch. From our Sales Executive to our CSM, all the way up to the VP, our experience has been amazing.

Incentivized

• User-submitted external training is editable by users even after it has been approved and completed on their transcript, UNLESS a transcript lock is put into place--which also renders all submitted certificates un-openable once approved. Thus they can never be referenced after approval.
• The system is designed for annual compliance training to be re-versioned annually. I [believe it] is a very un-user friendly for training that we don't want to re-version because users take it on a rolling, as-needed basis.
• Some very key components are not configurable and cause our users a great deal of confusion. For example, there is no way to turn off the search bar on a user transcript or even to edit the prompt text within it. Our users are constantly searching for training here, and end up re-opening/re-launching completed courses rather than registering for a new occurrence of a course.
• In general, we find Cornerstone [onDemand] clunky and that it does not really meet our needs.

Incentivized

• Admin: They only allow one admin account, which can be a headache. Instead of logging into my personal Mindflash I log into a shared user, that makes and assigns all the videos.
• Agent UI: It isn't the prettiest UI and can be hard to navigate for beginners.
• Certificates: The certificates for passing a course are just dumb. I have them all turned off and I could never see that being useful.

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 am extremely likely to continue using Mindflash for a few reasons. One, Mindflash has increased its capabilities dramatically during the year that I have been using it. Like any good business or service provider, Mindflash seems to have the desire to constantly improve its users experience. I know in another year, Mindflash will be better than it is today. For example, I know that Mindflash is at least exploring the possibility of adding language support to its capabilities. As someone who works in many non-English speaking countries, this would be a huge benefit to me. Additionally, I have been very impressed by Mindflash's customer service. They have always been very helpful and gracious.

For End-users it is exceptionally easy to use. There is admittedly a steep curve for admins, but simply because there is so much that is truly possible with the system. Cornerstone has been updating many features in recent years, though, which have been moving overall usability in a favorable direction.

The interface is just so simple to understand. It's clean and efficient. We showed Mindflash off to the Safety group, who are not computer gurus and they were beyong excited to use it.

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.

Pages do not load quickly. Often times any action or selection of a box, drop down, check, pretty much ANY Javascript interaction causes the whole entire page to load/reload/start doing something in the background. This makes a nightmare for having to mass edit courses or upload ILT sessions. It's the one of the archaic web designs they use that really bugs me as an admin and makes working in the portal at times intolerable and insufferable

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

Any problems or questions we have had with Mindflash have been handled promptly and effectively. I normally use the online chat option but have had to correspond with them through email and phone as well. We have never had an issue languish for weeks or months with Mindflash. They either fix the problem or let you know that the software isn't capable to handle the need at that point.

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.

Overall our rep changed a handful of times during our LMS switchover, which made the training inconsistent. They offer a large amount of online training not specific for what we were looking for at the time, but we were able to make it work.

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

If you're going to develop a short course to demo the product internally, don't bother avoiding your own topics. Mindflash rolls whatever content you create during the trial into your production environment when you decide to buy. The time taken to go from not having a system to being live with Mindflash is virtually instant. What you'll be wanting for is time to develop content and people to test it out.

We tested Workday Learning and found that it was far less customizable than our current LMS. I will say that Workday has better mobile capabilities. However, the reporting and several additional functionalities were stronger with Cornerstone products. Additionally, Workday's cost was higher than Cornerstone's.

The only other training platform similar to Mindflash that I have used is RedVector. However, we use that platform entirely differently than Mindflash. RedVector has a very large available library for our users to stay current on their PDU/education credits for their PE and PMP licenses. It does have the option to build training within it as well, but we have not used that feature because it is more focused on providing external training for others.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Our goal is to standardize training across our company and its 5 permanent locations allowing us to build a common culture across the company.
• Our goal is to be able to push out specific training to our teams which are spread across an enormous geographical area of the United States.
• We are currently meeting our objectives - in less than three months' time our team members have completed more than 1500 individual courses through Cornerstone OnDemand.

Incentivized

• Mindflash has had a positive impact on our business because it allows us to train more new users with less effort, and ensure that trainees have access to the course materials for a period of time after they have started using our software to do their daily jobs. Review of the course materials allows them to get answers to common questions without having to submit requests to our support team, thereby reducing the administrative burden on our resources.

Incentivized