Absorb LMS vs. Skilljar by Gainsight

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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

• 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.