Absorb LMS vs. Studio 360 (discontinued)

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

Small to medium companies on a tight budget cannot go wrong. Articulate Studio enables smaller companies to produce compliant professional looking training courses without breaking the bank. Additionally, the product is quite intuitive to learn and use. I myself had never used a product such as this but was able to produce course work with quizzes that impressed senior management.

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

• Easy learning curve. Just some button clicks for recording narration, syncing animations, and adding annotations.
• They made some fairly recent improvements to how you sync animations and add annotations. With the timeline, you can manually move the timing around. Much better than the earlier task of having to just re-do it from the beginning and hope you get the timing right.
• If you're using Studio in the Articulate 360 subscription, you can easily review the course before it publishes.
• The included Quizmaker program is just great. Simple to use, but you can make a varied mix of questions, and the customization options are great.
• You can add background music in slides, which is pretty great in certain situations.

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

• It's icing on the cake. It provides a lot of usability with its quiz-maker and presenter. The presenter can sometimes feel like an unnecessary add on. If it didn't come apart of a package, I don't think we would have purchased it outright.

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.

There is very little chance that this software wold not be renewed. It has become an integral part of our standard software for elearning development.

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

This is very useable software even for novice eLearning authoring users. People with some PowerPoint experience should be fine with this software and even Excel!

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.

If Articulate, as a company, would require their "community" "support" staff to open tickets on behalf of customers, then I would say that their support would deserve a 10. It's a huge gap between Articulate's management of their support compared to other companies; "support" staff are supposed to open tickets for you if they see the need, but Articulate's "community" "support" staff are prohibited from doing so. Instead, they will tell you that you should open a ticket when it should be their job!! This is just disrespectful of the reality of software support.

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 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.

Several Adobe products combine to do the work of just Articulate Storyline, which is part of Articulate Studio. The comparison is not really one that is easy to make but if you needed to do something with these Adobe products, all of them can be done with just Storyline. The beauty of Articulate Studio is that there are parts of the suite for which there is no match in Adobe such as Review 360 and Content Library 360.

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

• Prior to using this software, we were using a combination of other software, four in total, to accomplish the same task. Investing in Articulate Studio has saved us an annual cost of +$1,900 just in the software alone. Our ROI is less than 8 months as a result of the savings and time consumption saved by using one software and training on one software only.
• Having a lower impact on computer resources, Articulate Studio allowed us to install it on more users workstations that were not able to support other software. This reduced cost significantly by not requiring "mega computers" to run the software we previously used. Since Articulate Studio runs so smoothly, we can purchase standard workstations and it runs great on them.
• Having new employees join the team and training them on producing training courses has never been easier. They only require 3 days of training in Articulate Studio vs. two weeks we needed previously to train on 3 different software to accomplish the same tasks.

Incentivized