TalentLMS is an LMS built for training success, presented as fully customizable and easy to manage, so that teams embrace training while feeling right at home. It is used to provide the right training to any team and every use, while giving expert guidance and support every step of the way.
$139
per month 1-40 users
Xero
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Xero is an online accounting software product for small businesses and personal finance. Its features beyond general ledger and double-bookkeeping include quotable invoicing, bank reconciliation, purchase order and expense management, and tax management. Third party apps can extend its features further.
$13
per month
Pricing
TalentLMS
Xero
Editions & Modules
Core
$109
per month (billed yearly)
Grow
$229
per month (billed yearly)
Pro
$399
per month (billed yearly)
Enterprise (Custom plan)
Custom
annual plan Starts at 1000 users
Early
$13
per month
Growing
$37
per month
Established
$70
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
TalentLMS
Xero
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Users can stay on the Forever Free plan and upgrade, or downgrade or cancel at any time. Monthly pricing also available. Discount available for annual pricing.
Prices in table are in USD and just apply to the US - other markets & prices are listed below:
Canada - Starter $18 CAD/month, Standard $45 CAD/month, Premium 5 $58 CAD/month
UK - Starter £14/month, Standard £28/month, Premium £36/month
AU - Starter $29 AUD/month, Standard $59 AUD/month, Premium 5 $76 AUD/month
NZ - Starter $31 NZD/month, Standard $66 NZD/month, Premium $84 NZD/month
TalentLMS is user-friendly enough for someone new to LMS management can get a site up and running in a relatively quick manner. It is rather intuitive to operate. My needs have been a rather small scale of 400 learners and TalentLMS more than meets the need to produce a professional-looking and operational website to send customers and staff. The point here is that although I do not know how well it can be up-scaled, it certainly delivers for small to medium organizations to need to get content online
I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.
Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.
Email notifications have arbitrary limits on what information can be included. For example, you cannot include the user password in any notification email regarding course enrollment, group enrollment, etc.
Notification emails are not sent out in a reasonable time frame. Sometimes, it takes over 20 minutes for a new user to get their registration email.
It would be nice to get reports in the base domain containing customer user fields from various branches.
Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.
The ease of use, the robustness of the offering, and familiarity. It does everything we need and probably more. We likley don't utilize all the functionality it has as it does what we want it to without having to dig that deep into its tools. Their course library also has saved us some time in terms of saving time from creating some basic courses.
In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.
The system is intuitive. It does not have a lot of features that are hidden behind secret menus or elsewhere. There are often multiple ways to get to the same place through different menus without having to go back to the home or root menu. It makes things pretty easy. Additionally, if there is something I can't figure out, there is documentation available to help with that.
As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.
We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.
Pages generally load quickly, but it's a fairly common occurrence to have pages taking a bit longer than I'd like to load (as in, 4+ seconds). Occasionally I have to refresh a page to get it to work. Bank feed and integrations tend to be slow in general, but that could easily be due to API latency on the side of the other parties. Most of the time, though, the bank feeds refresh before I login so it's not a huge problem. Not necessarily good performance compared to a local app like QuickBooks desktop, but definitely good performance for a cloud application. Room for growth? yes.
Quick answer, comprehensive, and customized. I sent an email with multiple questions and feedback about their new UI, and the agent addressed all of them directly and honestly no sugar-coating and no call center lingo. Most questions can also be addressed directly in their UI with a really good help center widget.
Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.
All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.
Implementation was relatively easy. When we set up a second branch, we needed a little help. But the support area is well-detailed. My clients had no experience with an LMS and their digital skills were limited. We had a long way to go. Nevertheless, it was relatively easy. It was rather quick!
If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.
Both are good, but the pricing and general value proposition of Talent LMS are better than Trainual in my opinion. Trainual is a bit more modern and cleaner looking from a user interface perspective, but it comes at a higher cost. Both platforms provide very similar features in the way of general functionality and user experience, but Talent LMS wins because of its better pricing model.
Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.
I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing
Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.
