Absorb LMS vs. Articulate 360

Absorb LMS answered a lot of questions we were facing as an organization in how we train and develop our employees. Absorb LMS is not only a fantastic repository for learning resources, the built in tools make creating new resources and experiences for our teammates so much easier and more streamlined. We use the Absorb Create authoring tool and have had great luck in course creation using many methods (AI, templates, etc.). We implemented the LMS in 4 weeks due to the guidance and willingness of our Implementation manager to move along at a quicker pace. We also love the Absorb library of content that helps fill in some of the soft skills and safety gaps without us having to create internal resources.

Incentivized

Articulate provides for simple, custom interactive training modules. There isn't much wrong with this software that I have found. Using Rise 360 for quick turnaround or fully customized training with Storyline 360. Articulate has made the possibilities limited only to my imagination. Their simple and well-thought-out toolbars make starting from scratch a breeze.

Incentivized

• Customer Service - Our CSM, Kirsten Spak, provides friendly, timely and high quality help and has helps us to understand and efficiently use the system.
• Course Creation - We have been able to create custom courses with a wide range of features, including branding, audio, video and assessments.
• Reporting - Absorb LMS offers a robust reporting function which allows us to understand our users and meet the needs of our partners when user information is required for their projects.

Incentivized

• It just seems to be very intuitive for instructional designers, especially nowadays from what I'm seeing with the new AI. But it's very intuitive. It's better than any other tool authoring tool that I've tried. I think it's just really outstanding in the industry and that's evidenced by every year. Demo Fest, like 95% of the best examples are all done in Articulate products.

Incentivized

• The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
• The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
• more education around Absorb analyze essentials
• How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
• Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order

Incentivized

• The most hiccups that I've recently experienced are honestly involved with AI and just my trying to learn AI and figure out how we can maximize that for our business case. The AI voiceover is what I'm specifically curious about and trying to learn more. So in regards to the AI, there's still some shuffling needs to be done. SSML that needs to be added for it to read correctly. There is a very large amount of voices and dialects, which I think is beneficial. It was also a little overwhelming in trying to play around with it and find that right part. So just continuing to look through the community and find the guidance that I need to essentially make the audio, make the voiceover work better and read the words correctly. For example, one of my most popular courses that I sell is Record Your Time and it kept reading, it records your time, and I could not figure out how to make those words. We've submitted a ticket, you guys have been very helpful, but we can't really figure out how to make those little nuances work with the complex English language.

Incentivized

Absorb provides the platform and support for us to create a place for resources that is agile and simple to deploy. We are able to use across multiple countries and departments. Absorb is also constantly developing their platform to meet users needs, which is helpful for us as we grow.

It goes without saying that Artculate's products are the easiest to use and offer a great deal of functions with flexibility. Once an eLearning author uses the product it becomes tempting to not use other methods, but one would be wise not to limit him or herself to a single learning authoring platform. On the other hand, if given a single choice of a tool for rapid eLearning development, Articulate's Storyline would be a top choice.

It is very intuitive, not just from an admin perspective to manage courses and track completions, but also from a learners' perspective. It is very easy to find courses, search for courses, and track personal course progress. The interface is well designed, which makes it simpler for our audience to navigate the portal and find what they are looking for

Incentivized

Overall, Articulate is fairly easy to use and intuitive. They have excellent training materials in the training videos on the website, as well as good technical support. Someone with limited expertise doing content creation would be able to immediately pick up functions and get started in the software. I was able to create my first course within an hour or so of opening it up.

Incentivized

We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team

Installed software so alway available

Absorb LMS's performance is very reliable and consistent. Pages load quickly. Report are generated within a reasonable amount of time (even with significant amounts of data), etc. Nothing seems to slow it down.

Pages load fast, the videos play normally, and I haven't seen any delays in the system

Incentivized

[...] is a ROCK star- having her as part of our support team has been a game changer. She is a true problem solver at heart and has an unique ability to retain who we are as a company and match that with what can help us most. She has been a game changer for our internal admin team and is supporting us through a business review to help guide us in the best direction on our constant growth.

I rate the overall support for Articulate 360 ​​with a 9. On the one hand because of the smooth and accurate support from Articulate's support team (usually within 24 hours) and on the other because of the commitment / use of a community (e-learning Heroes) where I have all kinds of insights from other helpful users.

The instructors don't know how to use it.

Incentivized

Absorb was able to provide an initial training of the platform, covering all our basic needs. Additionally, there are Absorb learning modules available for further learning that can be accessed at anytime. There is also the ability to review Absorb's extensive resource library to find the answers to questions/troubleshooting. Beyond that, we opted for the Premier Support so our organization has access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager.

The online training options given by the online tutorials, forums, and "E-Learning Heroes" community are simply awesome. Examples galore, easy to understand descriptions including step-by-step guides, images, occasionally videos, and the "Articulate Insiders" sub-community give you more materials to learn about Storyline than you are likely to be able to read.

The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.

It is pretty straight forward and easy to implement is you are already creating eLearning. If you have old courses created in other versions of Articulate I recommend you update them to the new version even though it is not necessary (especially From Storyline3 to 360) but if you don't you may find difficulty opening and keeping things straight

Incentivized

Absorb LMS is feature packed with small but smart elements (can have a username that isnt an email, can change the core language used in the platform, can change the font and layout) that offer greater security and accessibility for learners.

For me, since I had used Articulate prior to using Lectora, I found Lectora to be very archaic. It was cumbersome to create triggers, and I had issues getting my scenarios to play correctly. My company switched to Articulate after my request, and I was able to recreate all of our modules into Storyline. Now I am able to manage our scenarios with efficiency and ease. Articulate products are intuitive and very easy to understand

Incentivized

We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.

Easy to use. Cheap. It has a lot of features.

• Our ROI is yet to be determined as we haven't fully rolled it out yet. We hope that this will improve our customer loyalty and advocacy, set us apart from competitors, and appeal to prospects as something that is extremely valuable. ROI measurements will include customer participation, satisfaction from learners and their managers and any new customers who quote the platform as a reason they chose us.

Incentivized

• Definitely more accessible course creation. How we're able to add accessibility features into our trainings is unparalleled with captioning, with voice overing, with alternate texts for images. There's so many ways that it creates our trainings to be more accessible for our audience.

Incentivized