Cornerstone Galaxy vs. Saba Cloud (legacy)

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

Our organization uses Saba Cloud primarily to manage all types of learning systems or staff training empirically. In addition, it provides us with a quick test-based follow-up to the trainees. We use Saba Cloud to train our clientele in a professional manner with respect to our worldwide online service. With this tool we are able to enhance the customer experience with the organization. Similarly, our organization uses Saba Cloud to monitor the performance and effectiveness of our employees and customers after having access to all the information provided by the application to subsequently make learning and development reports.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Saba Analytics for learning are comprehensive and customizable allowing us to view any variety of data we need internally or need to provide to our customers.
• Support has been amazing throughout our time with Saba. We have always been able to work quickly with someone to develop a new process or obtain guidance on a new feature.
• Saba Cloud delivers training in a clear and modern format, allowing customers to easily access and consume training.
• Saba Cloud also provides regular system updated which reflect the needs of their customer base.

• 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

• In the certification process, it only lets us do look back days it would be very beneficial to have a look backdate. Our services have a training year from July 1, thru June 30 and we assign training to services that are required by federal and state laws to be completed annually. During the pandemic we found a lot of staff taking jobs in other areas and still in their original position and then back again. If we assigned someone HIPAA training and they took this on July 4 and then in October went to a different service line the training plan would ask them to retake HIPAA. It would not pick up the one on July 3. That is the only real issue but it is a large one.

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

The only reason I wouldn't rate this a 10 is because we always want to evaluate the technology we use to drive our business. While Saba would be the "leader in the clubhouse", we would still perform our due diligence when it's time to renew.

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.

As someone who creates classes and is also a learning administrator in the system, I have run into some issues with the system's capabilities for my needs. I am not a fan of having to use Adobe Captivate to download a PowerPoint presentation into the system, as my training sessions are much more than a glorified PowerPoint. Our organization has yet to turn on Saba Meetings, which may help with these limitations.

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

For the times that we have used the support provided by Saba, it has been a very pleasurable experience for our department. Part of our package with Saba includes a specified number of hours of "training" time with Saba. During these meetings, we have shared our desires of the product and the support personnel have either shown us how to accomplish our task or they have taken our requests to their developers to look at future enhancements. Overall, very pleased with the support.

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

Was not involved with integration.

Incentivized

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.

We had extensive reviews with a plan of what we needed and must have out of the system, including custom learning paths and tracking inside our HRIS system to grant permissions and positions based on completed learning certifications and courses. We weighed each option and chose based on the one that met the most of the must-haves.

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

• We have heard from many people that the visibility of goals and skills expectations has impacted their engagement levels, which aids us in our retention goals.
• With the easier reporting provided by Saba, we are able to generate compliance training reports in real time, which keeps our regulators very happy.

Incentivized