SumTotal (legacy) Reviews & Insights

Score7.9 out of 10

38 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for SumTotal (legacy) are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

User-Friendly Design: Several users have mentioned that SumTotal has a very user-friendly design, making it easy for non-programmers to configure their LMS interface. This has allowed for customization of various environments for different groups and integration of external web applications through iFraming, such as social media or news feeds.

Customizable Features: Reviewers have appreciated the customizable features offered by SumTotal, such as custom color schemes, logos, widgets, news feeds, and training messages. These features have allowed them to create a personalized environment for several different clients, tailoring the LMS to each client's specific needs.

Clean Front-End User Interface: Many reviewers have highlighted the clean front-end user interface of SumTotal, which makes it visually appealing and easy to navigate for both administrators and learners. This intuitive interface enhances the overall user experience and simplifies navigation within the system.

Reviews

9 Reviews

My experience using SumTotal Talent Development

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

December 20, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SumTotal Learning Management System to support on-line courses, learning plans and ILT programs. It helps us to leverage knowledge among teams, to reduce training efforts and costs, to optimize management through decentralized administration and to get more reliable information for management decisions. It is a complete and robust plaftform that provides great functionalities.

Pros

Complete functionalities for learning and training management
Reliable data and performance
Integration to other products / systems
Mobile learning

Cons

Admin experience (a little hard to use)
Portal and look and feel customization
Gamification (user experience)

Likelihood to Recommend

I believe it as very good solution for complex projects with a big amount of courses and ILT activities to manage and control. It can work specially well in companies where learning management is decentralized through divisions and/or departments. It is complete in terms of functionalities and possibilities, what makes the platform a bit complex. It may not be the best choice for simple projects, because sometimes it can be hard-to-use for administrators, since it is actually a robust solution.

Verified User

Director in Sales (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Best suited Talent Management tool for Mid-market enterprises

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

December 8, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are high-end Analytics staffing services provider company. Our basic business model is to hire best Analytics and data engineering talent out there in the world and put them on cutting-edge assignments. We used SumTotal Talent Development for our hire-to-retire journey of employees. From getting employee references to setting up multiple interview discussions, feedback, compensation, stock ownership, growth, and analytics on top.

Pros

Tracking employee learning goals and making sure they meet the goals
Capturing feedback from multiple interview discussions while hiring and showcasing it in one screen
Funnel analysis of candidate recruitment pipeline

Cons

I did not see any functionality to add multiple contractor companies to the hiring funnel and do partner level analysis
There are no AI capabilities for generating insights and recommendations on yearly or quarterly data

Likelihood to Recommend

Very good for learning and development and training of employees. For Applicant tracking, recuirement, onboarding, and enablement, I prefer SAP SuccessFactors or Skillate. I also found that the SumTotal app is not very friendly on android and crashes sometimes and it is not optimized for mobile. Hence I end up never using it.

Abhideep Jain

Manager Consultant - Business Development in Sales at Tiger Analytics (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

SumTotal Core Review

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

August 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently SumTotal is being used by HR, Payroll, Compensation, Tax. It is our only source for payroll and human resource records.

Pros

Calculates pay and taxes

Cons

Reporting
Mass importing of manual checks to be issued in California
Ability to fund pay cards immediately
Perform gross-up calculations within the payroll system automatically

Likelihood to Recommend

I personally, am not a fan of SumTotal. I have worked on several different HRIS and Payroll systems which outweigh all aspects of SumTotal (Lawson Interface Desktop, Ceridian Dayforce, ADP Enterprise, and Ultimate Software's UltiPro). As antiquated as Lawson felt, it had more functionality than SumTotal. Of course, all others I worked on were for the most part cloud based and had modern functionality to go with it.

Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

A developing, unrefined LMS

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

January 28, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Where to begin.....It's been a long and slow process to get everything up in running in this software. It has way too many features with 20 clicks to get to anything. We were promised big things with SumTotal Learn but have received something that is more messy and complicated to use than we ever thought. We're slowly making progress with SumTotal and unlocking the features we need but this is very much a developing piece of software that is unfinished.

Pros

Clean front-end user interface.
Custom layouts for front page and individual users.
Flexibility on user roles.

Cons

Navigation (too many clicks to get anything done).
Reporting is complicated.
Buttons everywhere that don't do anything.
Features enabled that don't fully work or function the way they should.
Support for the product is lacking.

Likelihood to Recommend

SumTotal Learn is an LMS that is slowly developing into a finished product. I can't recommend this to anyone until it is a more finalized product. We have a large number of users in our database and the product seems to run fine even with 10,000+ users. If you're looking for an easy administrator user interface, this is also not for you. It has a very steep learning curve for admins.

Verified User

Employee in Human Resources (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Dated looking, but works.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

March 23, 2016

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use SumTotal Maestro across our franchise network for providing access to online courses for our owners, their managers, as well as their employees. Every manager looks for ways to on-board new employees as quickly as possible and online learning helps reduce that time. Online learning also provides easy access from anywhere with internet access, 24/7 to employees wanting to continue developing skills in their respective fields, as well as learning new subjects.

Pros

Assign complete learning plans to users so they don't have to spend time searching for courses.
Export learner's transcripts so managers can easily see their employee's progress.
Embed Social Media feeds that are relevant to their business.

Cons

I don't think we can build courses using Maestro. We rely strictly on third party software for course development.
Creating custom reports can be challenging.
Since we have to manage our total number of monthly active users, many of our manager's accounts go inactive. Once they're inactive, they stop receiving any notifications from their employee's course completions.
The user interface is dated looking. Many of the newer LMSs have more of a Windows 8 look and feel, which is what newer users are wanting.

Likelihood to Recommend

It works well for just uploading SCORM compliant courses. We don't use it for managing ILT courses as it was complicated when we last tried it. We also do not sell courses, but I don't think that it's capable of doing that.

Verified User

Employee in Corporate (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Providing a solid platform to deliver education

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 24, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are able to deliver mass education through the LMS as well as track completion and competency of our employees. It enables us to communicate consistently and effectively across our campuses as well with those that are spread throughout the state. Staff can rely on a constant and consistent source to find new communication, education or track their educational experiences.

Pros

It allows for simulations to address complex scenarios in the healthcare setting.
We can quickly review reports to see completion rate of an activity.
We have empowered our upper managment to utilize the tracking functionality to have quicker compliance on education modules.

Cons

Staff would like to see the links of assigned training to allow users to launch into an activity
Offer more reports within the programs so users dont have to make their own

Likelihood to Recommend

I think the links not being active to send the users into the activity causes a lot of frustrations for our users.

Kimberly Barricklow

Revenue Application Analyst in Information Technology at Spectrum Health (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

LMS Shopping: Like buying a car, know what your money buys you

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 24, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it to provide eLearning asynchronous training to our clients. We decide what to develop, and our clients buy subscriptions to our training library. Our training supports their requirements to earn CLPs and certifications in their fields. Our employees also use it for the same purpose.

Pros

SumTotal has a very user friendly design, making it easy for non-programmers to configure their LMS interface, customize various environments for different groups, and to integrate numerous external web applications through iFraming, such as social media or news feeds. I was able to configure a custom environment for several different clients, making it feel like their own LMS, such as a custom color scheme and logos, custom widgets (which are section of any page), news feeds, training messages, and custom learning plans.

Cons

SumTotal can not yet support media-rich mobile learning. Our eLearning design use instructional video, text, interactions, pop-ups with course resources and other information, etc... The SumTotal mobile capability right now does not support our design; ie our pop-ups won't pop-up, even those that simply open a PDF or document, and non of the hyperlinks will work.

Likelihood to Recommend

When choosing an LMS, you need to decide what features are most important. Things like single-sign on, 508 compliance, ability to support mobile learning, price per user, ability to customize for various audiences, and technical support. When I chose our LMS, it was called GeoEngage because of price and all of the tech support was on the East Coast. The LMS was bought by SumTotal a few years ago. We originally wanted SumTotal, but it was too expensive for our small company. Now we get both, and we continue to get great customer support.

Verified User

Administrator (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Sum Total- Does it add up as an LMS?

Rating: 5 out of 10

Incentivized

June 20, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sales training, onboarding and curriculum development

Pros

Curriculum development
Prerequisites
Calendar view

Cons

Usability- launching activites
Look and feel could be more appealing
Audience management/integration could be improved

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Project Manager (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

Not Warm and Fuzzy

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

June 20, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company provides LMS Support for a large company using SumTotal. The whole company uses SumTotal as their primary LMS, about 80K users.

Pros

Easily customizable notifications
TMU tool allows for quick mass uploads
Configurable front end

Cons

JasperSoft Reporting - it is difficult to use and manage.
Exams could be more robust. Offering alternate types of questions.
Too many clicks on the administrator side. Adding new activities is not intuitive, you need to click through each section to determine what needs to be entered where. Would be better if it was guided for new activities, just prompting for 'required' fields.

Likelihood to Recommend

If a company requires specific functionality, SumTotal appears unwilling to be flexible.

Verified User

Account Manager in Professional Services (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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LMS Shopping: Like buying a car, know what your money buys you

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

June 24, 2014

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

SumTotal has a very user friendly design, making it easy for non-programmers to configure their LMS interface, customize various environments for different groups, and to integrate numerous external web applications through iFraming, such as social media or news feeds. I was able to configure a custom environment for several different clients, making it feel like their own LMS, such as a custom color scheme and logos, custom widgets (which are section of any page), news feeds, training messages, and custom learning plans.

Cons

SumTotal can not yet support media-rich mobile learning. Our eLearning design use instructional video, text, interactions, pop-ups with course resources and other information, etc... The SumTotal mobile capability right now does not support our design; ie our pop-ups won't pop-up, even those that simply open a PDF or document, and non of the hyperlinks will work.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Administrator (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience