Absorb LMS vs. LearnUpon

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

With regard to course construction and design, I think LearnUpon excels in many areas. There tends to be a bit of a learning curve for new users, but the dashboard interface and finding courses that a student has enrolled in is pretty quickly resolved, and it is very convenient to house materials in LearnUpon and ensure that students are able to access them, rather than having to rely on printing materials and/or manually distributing documents through emails or some other digital means (DropBox, Drive, Hightail, etc.). It is, for all intents and purposes a Learning Management System, and is intended to manage and track students' coursework and learning. I will say though, that in terms of record-keeping, is an area where it falters. Finding and maintaining receipts of orders placed through the storefront is not convenient from an administrative standpoint. Processing a refund for a student if we cancel a class, that was an enrollment transferred from a previous class, is clunky. Guaranteeing that members are able to purchase course enrollments under their specific price tier, while at the same time preventing non-members from doing so, is not convenient and not something that is easily fixable. Currently, new users can only [default] to either members OR non-members, and that classification has to be manually adjusted. Given that some organizations can run into above 10,000 members, this is an obvious challenge.

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

• LearnUpon has EXCELLENT support. I have always been quickly and effectively taken care of whenever I had a problem (the majority of the "problems" were simply my perception; turned out not to be problems at all).
• LearnUpon has a simple, intuitive interface that works and rarely causes problems. Obviously, they heavily user-tested the interface before implementing. Too many LMSes do not do this and the interfaces which have been designed by software nerds are super hard to navigate.
• LearnUpon has lots of features packed into one system. You can host multiple "portals" for different audiences, you can have learning paths, you can upload videos and documents of all kinds. It just works and is not limiting.
• LearnUpon has an EXCELLENT test creation/implementation feature which I have not seen in any other LMS I have used.

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

• No integration with a payment gateway that shows in a students account what courses they have purchased at what price.
• There is some confusion on when registering for the LMS that only a username and password need to be supplied, it does not require a first and last name.
• Limited function of coupon codes, too many restrictions make us come up with work around in order to utilize coupons.
• They ability to group students by the course type they are selecting not just custom data fields.

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.

We've been a customer for six years and I don't see that changing anytime soon. We're very happy with LearnUpon.

Incentivized

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

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

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.

[...] 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.

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 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.

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.

You cannot publicly post badges from LU which you can with Credly. That would be a nice feature. LU is a much nicer interface than both SumTotal and YourMembership/Crowdwisdom. However, course searchability was much easier in your membership. Course creation is much easier in LU. From an administration perspective, I think LU is easier to use, including standard reporting. Your membership has a much better self-assessment product than LearnUpon. You can rank your confidence when answering questions. You can also do more robust mapping

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.

• 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

• LearnUpon helped us significantly reduce the cost of travel and lodging for staff and trainers who would previously have had to travel to participate in learning.
• LearnUpon helped introduce our organization to the concept of online learning and asynchronous study.
• LearnUpon helps us improve our staff's technological literacy by giving them a friendly and inviting system to learn from independently.

Incentivized