Cornerstone OnDemand vs. Skilljar by Gainsight

The dashboards and reporting needs more additional features to clean up the old reports, manage dashboards more effectively is my main concern. I recently launched one of three phases for dashboards and I noticed I cannot work efficiently seeing which dashboard is important to me, which has been shared with me. More organization is requested

Incentivized

Skilljar is fantastic for structured onboarding processes. If you're
looking to streamline and standardize the onboarding experience for your
customers, especially for software or complex products, this platform
is a gem. It allows you to create step-by-step courses guiding users
through functionalities, reducing confusion and accelerating their
learning curve.When you need versatility in content delivery, Skilljar is spot-on.
Whether it's video tutorials, interactive quizzes, downloadable
resources, or live webinars, the platform accommodates various formats.
It's perfect for accommodating different learning styles and ensuring
engagement.

For scenarios that demand highly complex simulations or immersive
learning experiences, Skilljar's capabilities might fall short. While it
supports interactive elements, extremely sophisticated simulations
might require additional specialized software or platforms.

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.

• Unlimited courses, learning paths, quizzes, pages, plans, and certifications
• Ease of use for students, administrators, and content creators
• Customer Success and Service are top notch. The CSMs are genuinely committed to helping you achieve your metrics and goals
• Asking for and listening to customer feedback for enhancements
• Developer Center where people with little to no coding experience can learn how to use and apply HTML templates and code snippets to customize your site

Incentivized

• 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

• Would love to see parent/child courses so that when something is updated in the parent course that change is automatically reflected in the clones of that course.
• Features that allow for the translation of content to allow access to content across languages.
• Re-onboarding process when the usage of Skilljar changes hands within out company in order to address knowledge gaps.

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

I like what you are using and how we are doing it. Also, changing systems is a lot of work

Incentivized

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.

The overall usability is great as the software is very easy to learn and navigate. After just 1 week of "playing" around in the system I felt very comfortable using it and teaching others to use it as well. Customers have also mentioned Skilljar is a much better than out previous vendor

Incentivized

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

The support team is great at Skilljar. Not perfect, but that can't be expected. Everyone I've worked with has been friendly, attentive, and fairly quick to respond/act. They also have a pretty sturdy set of Knowledge Base articles as well to self serve.

Incentivized

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

Do a good job of preparing your internal teams (IT, Salesforce, etc.) about the work they will have in the process

Incentivized

We have been with Cornerstone OnDemand for about 7 years now. I do not recall the other products we evaluated at the time, but more recently there was some interest in using Workday as an LMS since that is our HR platform. Their learning platform, however, simply couldn't compete with what Cornerstone OnDemand can give us, especially with our critical need of robust reporting.

Incentivized

Skilljar provides stronger customization features, more code snippet options, more styling tools, and more effective integrations. These include Credly, Salesforce, and SCORM. Additionally, the catalog is all part of the same system, making it easy to manage. The analytics tools are also more robust, and the customer service is much more helpful and responsive

Incentivized

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

• Having Skilljar is improving retention—customers who completed recommended training made up 85% of our Q2'23 renewals.
• Customers who completed the recommended training make up 84% of our healthiest accounts and we've seen a 15% decrease in support ticket volume.
• Since launching Skilljar, we've seen a 16% increase in active users.