IT

Best Learning Management Systems

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We’re living in an era where digital learning is becoming way more commonplace. As such, learning management systems (LMS) have become a vital tool for improving the efficacy and efficiency of teaching, training, and onboarding. We find Trainual is the best LMS platform for most organization’s needs. With dozens of templates, Trainual can work as well for teaching new skills and routine training as it does for centralizing policies and SOPs.

The Best Learning Management System for Most

Trainual Logo

Trainual

Best for Most

Start documenting essential business processes, procedure, policies, and training materials to prepare your small business for explosive growth. Includes dozens of templates and pre-built business playbooks, a built-in screen recorder, and a mobile app. Paid plans start at $99 per month for up to 25 users.

Standardizing your business and creating a company-wide playbook are crucial steps in creating a continuous-growth environment. Trainual includes everything you need to create and store SOPs, procedures, policies, and training materials in one centralized location on top of essential LMS features.

Whether you’re onboarding new employees or training existing team members, it comes with everything you need to create a centralized online learning environment.

The 7 Best Learning Management Systems to Consider:

  1. Trainual – Best learning management system for most
  2. TalentLMS – Best for small business employee training
  3. Arlo – Best for businesses that sell online courses
  4. Thought Industries – Best for B2B customer onboarding and training
  5. AccordLMS – Best for large-scale enterprise training programs
  6. Edmodo – Best LMS for K-12 education
  7. Canvas – Best for colleges and higher education organizations

When It Make Sense to Invest In a Learning Management System

Whether you’re an educational institution without an online learning platform (or are unhappy with the one you have), a business looking for a better way to train employees and customers, or selling online courses, investing in a learning management system is a smart move.

They come with all the features you need to create exceptional online learning environments for all types of learners, whether they’re new employees, seasoned employees, customers, or students.

Investing also makes sense if you’re transitioning to a remote learning environment for the first time. The right LMS can help you:

  • Onboard new employees 
  • Set up required training materials for your team
  • Train customers how to use your software
  • Teach college classes 100% online
  • Conduct K-12 all-day learning programs
  • Hold regular corporate training programs 

The right learning management system can help you seamlessly transition from in-person training without sacrificing efficacy and comprehension. 

You may even discover new ways to generate revenue to help justify the cost of your new software, as well.

#1 – Trainual — The Best LMS for Most

Trainual Logo

Trainual

Best for Most

Start documenting essential business processes, procedure, policies, and training materials to prepare your small business for explosive growth. Includes dozens of templates and pre-built business playbooks, a built-in screen recorder, and a mobile app. Paid plans start at $99 per month for up to 25 users.

As a business, the importance of documenting processes, onboarding new employees, and giving them the resources they need increases as your business grows.

When you’re just getting started, you can get by without these things in place. But as you grow, you need them in place to standardize processes and ensure everyone knows what to do, even if you’re not around to guide them.

While core LMS software is helpful for this, you also need something that goes a bit beyond those essential features.

Which is where Trainual comes in handy. 

With it, you get LMS software’s benefits plus a centralized place to store your processes, policies, SOPs, and documentation. This makes it easy for everyone to access vital business documents without spending hours looking for the info they need. 

Trainual also understands that building out a robust and all-encompassing company playbook takes time. 

To help jumpstart the process, it offers dozens of templates and pre-built process playbooks you can use as a starting point. So, you can say goodbye to the time-consuming process of writing docs from scratch.

To sweeten the deal, all Trainual plans come with a built-in screen recorder so you can easily record yourself following your processes. This makes it incredibly easy to create new videos as you need them and upload them for everyone to view. 

You can also embed existing videos—hosted elsewhere on YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia, for example—into your training material with just a few clicks. 

Regardless of the complexity of your process, you can utilize an unlimited number of subjects, topics, and steps.  So, you can turn your business processes and SOPs into an engaging online learning experience complete with quizzes and tests to bolster comprehension. 

As such, onboarding new employees becomes a snap, opening up more for you and your team to focus in improving operations. 

Managers can also leverage performance and progress reports to remind team members to complete training materials, identify areas where employee engagement drops, and evaluate the effectiveness of existing documentation. 

Plus, your team can download and install the Trainual mobile app on Apple and Android devices, allowing them to access everything they need regardless of where they are. 

The interface is clean and incredibly easy to navigate on every device, even for first-timers. And you won’t add another learning curve to the one you’re already working to eliminate. 

Note: Trainual doesn’t include live training or built-in video chat options out of the box. If that’s something you need, you can utilize one of the thousands of integrations that are available to set it up. 

There are two pricing plans to choose from for up to 25 users. Both come with unlimited subjects, topics, steps, and tests so you can store everything without ever having to worry about outgrowing your plan.

The Pro plan starts at $99 per month with all features you need to get started and the Premium plan is $149 per month with more advanced capabilities. 

And as you grow beyond 25 users, you can upgrade to a custom plan or add additional users to match your unique needs as your business scales. 

Sign up for a free 7-day trial on either plan to take Trainual for a test drive today!

#2 – TalentLMS — The Best LMS for Small Business Employee Training

TalentLMS Logo

TalentLMS

Best for Employee Training

TalentLMS comes with everything you need to onboard and train new or existing employees without the advanced features you’ll never use as a small team. Includes a free plan for up to five users and ten courses. With 4+ million users under their belt, you know you’re in good hands. Paid plans start at $59 per month.

As a small business, onboarding and cross-training your employees ensures there aren’t any gaps, even when teammates join, leave the company, call in sick, or go on vacation. While it sounds great, actually making it happen usually falls to the wayside as other business initiatives soak up everyone’s time.

The good news is that you don’t actually need a lot of time if you use TalentLMS.

Everything is ready to go out of the box. But you can further optimize and customize the learning interface for your team, with custom employee-facing dashboards. They’re easy to create and just as easy for your team to use.

There aren’t any in-depth onboarding or installation guides because you won’t need them. The team is so familiar with employee education that they’ve made installing, onboarding, and using their software incredibly simple for everyone involved. 

Despite its simplicity, you can create custom learning paths that restrict the way courses are completed and test comprehension in various ways to ensure employees learn and retain what they need. 

You can further boost employee engagement with badges, point systems, rewards, and leaderboards to gamify your team’s learning experience. 

With more than 50 prebuilt courses, you don’t have to start from scratch, gather course materials, or even figure out what you want to say. They come complete with interactive quizzes to ensure comprehension. From marketing, project management, sales training, and customer service essentials, you can get your entire team up to speed without ever lifting a finger of your own.

Using TalentLMS’s library of ready-made courses, you can save hours of time while equipping your team with the tools and knowledge they need to help your business thrive.

All you have to do is add the desired courses to your account and assign them to the appropriate team members. In just a few clicks (and less than five minutes), you can build an entire training program for your team.

Note: the course library is an extra add-on, running in price from $30 to $200 per month, depending on your plan. With that said, it can be beneficial and save you a ton of time if you don’t have the capacity to create custom training modules when you’re first getting started. 

Although this feature is an add-on, it’s well worth the price if time is your biggest concern.

From there, you can easily set up custom reporting dashboards to track performance in real-time to learn from your employees and identify what’s working for them. You can even set up scheduled emails to automatically inform stakeholders on a regular basis. 

You can also host live, face-to-face training sessions with a built-in Zoom integration, which is perfect for remote teams that don’t have the opportunity to meet in person. 

From the employee perspective, TalentLMS is responsive and displays beautifully on every device, with native iOS apps to enhance the learning experience on the go. In just a few clicks or taps, they can access everything they need on any device. 

You can start on Talent LMS’s free plan with up to five users and ten courses. It’s also a great way to try it out to see if it’s a good fit for you and your team. 

Once you outgrow the free plan, you have several options depending on the size of your team. Each plan comes with unlimited courses, so you don’t have to worry about maxing out your plan. 

TalentLMS’s paid plans run the gamut from $59 per month for 40 users and unlimited courses all the way up to $429 per month for up to 1,000 users and all the bells and whistles:

So, it’s an excellent and affordable choice for small teams with fewer than 100 employees. However, you can still upgrade to higher tiers if you end up needing to add more users to your account or need more advanced tools like automation and custom reports. 

Sign up for the free plan to see if TalentLMS is right for your team today!

#3 – Arlo — The Best Learning Management System for Businesses that Sell Online Courses

Arlo Logo

Arlo

Best for Selling Courses

Get everything you need to create online courses, market your courses to the right people, and accept online payments. Includes a drag-and-drop website builder, pre-built web pages, email marketing features, and more. Pricing starts at $89 per month + $0.80 per free registration and $1.60 per paid registration.

If you already sell or plan to sell online courses to make money, Arlo is our top recommendation. 

It includes everything you need to get your offers in front of the right people, accept online payments, create your courses, and sell them with ease. 

Arlo takes things a step beyond the other options on this list by providing all the tools you need to turn your online courses into a full-fledged business with marketing features, built-in certifications, invoicing, course management, and event management.

Plus, it’s helped facilitate more than $1 billion in online course sales thus far.  

The whole goal is automating your training processes so you can scale your business, provide excellent learning experiences for your customers, and make more money with less work.

With Arlo, you can seamlessly create various types of e-learning experiences, from self-paced modules and live online training sessions to webinars as well.

And your customers can collaborate with you and each other using virtual breakout rooms, whiteboards, discussion forums, and built-in messaging features to keep everyone connected.

You can easily create quizzes, record those scores, and track completion rates to identify bottlenecks and ensure customer success. After a completed course, you can create and send custom printable certificates and awards to your customers. 

From there, you can use Arlo’s built-in real-time business intelligence dashboard to monitor registrations, identify profitable (or costly) courses, and manage upcoming tasks. 

The learning side of Arlo is intuitive and incredibly easy for customers to navigate. And each user gets their own self-service portal where they can enroll in new courses, track their progress, and pay outstanding invoices. 

When you sign up, you get a ton of additional features, like:

  • Built-in drag-and-drop website builder
  • A library of pre-built web pages and widgets
  • Customizable registration forms
  • Campaign management tools to attract new customers
  • Lead and contact management 
  • Email marketing and GDPR compliant newsletters
  • Social media and ad integrations to track marketing performance
  • Feedback surveys to continuously improve your courses

Rather than charging based on the number of customers you have, Arlo charges a small fee every time someone enrolls in one of your courses. 

Each tier delivers new features with no registration caps, meaning you can start on the lowest tier and upgrade as your business grows to access more advanced capabilities. 

Arlo offers four pricing tiers to choose from, starting at $29 per month for one license. 

The Smart plan includes up to 30 registrations per month, with each additional registration being $4.

On top of your monthly fee on the Simple plan, you’ll pay an additional $0.80 per registration for free courses and $1.60 per registration for paid courses. And you can always add new administrators or teachers by purchasing additional licenses within your account. 

Plus, the more administrators you have, the less you have to pay for each license. This type of usage pricing makes the platform easily scalable to grow alongside your business. 

Start your free 14-day trial to take Arlo for a test drive today!

#4 – Thought Industries — The Best LMS for B2B Customer Onboarding and Training

Thought Industries Logo

Thought Industries

Best for B2B Customer Training

Thought Industries exists to help you optimize and automate new customer onboarding and ongoing training so you can spend more time growing your business. With it, you can deliver branded learning experiences with adaptive learning paths and the ability to embed your software into the platform.

If you offer B2B tools, software, or products, onboarding new customers can be laborious but necessary, especially if you offer unique services or software.

And the more complex your software, product, or platform, the more likely it is that you’ll need to implement training systems to get your clients and customers up to speed. 

Rather than personally training every new customer, implementing an LMS, like Thought Industries, can help automate the delivery of those onboarding processes and continuous education programs. 

It exists solely for B2B customer onboarding so you know you’re getting a targeted solution and your team can spend more time focusing on other aspects of running your business. 

Customers get their own private customized learning portals where they can search through available materials, bookmark things they want to come back to, receive personalized suggestions, and take notes inline with course content. 

The best part? It’s effortless to use with virtually no learning curve for your customers. 

With Thought Industries, you seamlessly can deliver on-brand and completely customizable blended learning experiences, depending on each customer’s preferred learning methods.

You can also customize the learning experience based on the different solutions you offer and the level of customer training that’s required to get new users up to speed. 

Some of those training methods include:

  • Live on-site or virtual training sessions
  • Self-paced or on-demand learning modules
  • Scheduled, one-time, and recurring events
  • Real-time communication tools
  • Retention assessments, quizzes, and tests

You can also create adaptive learning paths based on your customers’ goals. This means every customer can stay focused on what they need. A great example of this in action is a SaaS company automatically walking a client through the features they’re most excited about. 

As a result, you get happier customers who spend less time in training, retain more of what they learn, stick around for the long term, and refer their friends. 

Plus, the faster they learn, the more likely it is that they’ll continue to use it. 

Another standout feature is the ability to embed your software right into the learning platform. This means you can efficiently deliver live exercises and detailed step-by-step product demos all without leaving the software. 

Doing so lets new users experience your software for the first time in a controlled environment where you can walk them through how to do everything they need to learn. 

This enables them to learn as fast as possible while helping them work towards meeting their employer’s goals. 

When you join the Thought Industries network, you also get a robust set of reporting features that allow you to track customer progress and measure their engagement throughout your training and onboarding programs. 

From there, you can use this insight to identify problem areas and discover new ways to continuously improve the learning experience. 

Plus, you can use the Thought Industries platform to discover new forms of revenue generation by offering and selling premium service packages, training licenses, and paid subscriptions. 

It integrates directly with Stripe so you can seamlessly accept online payments and collect taxes as required. 

Thought Industries offers customized solutions depending on the size of your business and the features you need. As such, pricing isn’t available online. 

Book a free live demo to learn more today!

#5 – AccordLMS — The Best for Large-Scale Enterprise Training Programs

”AccordLMS

AccordLMS

Best for Enterprise Training Programs

Train or onboard employees, customers, franchisees, consultants, and partners all within one platform. Managing ongoing certification requirements has never been easier. Includes unlimited brands, training portals, and courses on top of on a full-fledged CMS.

It’s not uncommon for large-scale enterprise training programs to encompass employees, customers, franchisees, consultants, and partners. With so many people to train in various roles, managing all the moving parts can feel impossible without the right LMS software. 

AccordLMS delivers enterprise-grade features with every pricing tier to ensure you always have what you need to offer excellent learning experiences to everyone involved with your company. 

From onboarding new employees to introducing new partners into your ecosystem, you get an enterprise-grade solution built to do it all. 

The platform can also help your business manage ongoing regulatory training and certification programs to reduce employee turnover and stay in compliance with regulations for your industry. 

There are various industry-specific programs to choose from, including offerings for businesses in healthcare, hospitality, education, legal, retail, nonprofits, and technology. 

Even if you’re not in one of those industries, AccordLMS will work with you to create the perfect certification solution tailored to your needs. 

Every plan includes advanced features and benefits like:

  • The ability to scale to as many users as you need
  • Cloud-hosted SaaS or on-premise deployment options
  • Automatic role assignments based on location, team, or job title
  • Customized automatic reporting for each administrator or supervisor
  • Self-paced modules and live virtual training capabilities
  • Advanced learning paths with automatic adjustments

You can set up as many brands as you need to, making it an excellent choice for large organizations with several distinct subsidiaries or operating in multiple verticals. You get unlimited, fully customizable portals to create highly engaging and white-glove learning experiences for everyone, regardless of who you’re training and the brand behind it. 

AccordLMS’s modular design is built on a full-featured content management system that gives you complete control over site layouts, architectures, and module placement. 

On top of that, there are hundreds of modules and features available to customize your training environment’s look and feel. So, it’s 100% customizable to match your brand (even if you have more than one) and your learners’ needs. 

Learners get an optimized experience complete with comprehension and retention assessments. From there, you can track progress and set up automatic reports for managers.

You can then use those insights to fill gaps, eliminate bottlenecks or employee engagement drop-offs, and continuously improve your training materials over time. 

Unlike most learning management systems, you don’t have to pay for administrators. They’re always free with no limits on the number you’re allowed to have. 

You only have to pay for users. And the more you have, the less you pay per user. 

AccordLMS is $2 per user per month for up to 200 learners, $1.25 per user per month for up to 500 learners, and $0.90 per user per month for up to 1,000 learners. 

You also get an implementation manager and a dedicated support team (for free!) to help you set up your new LMS the right way from day one. 

Request a free demo to learn more and see if AccordLMS is right for you today!

#6 – Edmodo — The Best Learning Management System for K-12 Education

”Edmodo

Edmodo

Best for K-12 Organizations

Get everything you need for online learning for K-12 students and parents. Based on collaboration and communication to bolster at-home learning experiences. Includes simplified lesson and course creation, communication tools, a Zoom integration for live classes and 1:1 support, and a built-in grade book.

In-person K-12 classes are up in the air right now, with no answers coming in the foreseeable future. As such, schools are being forced to transition to online learning. 

With the wrong LMS (or worse, no LMS), this transition can feel like an absolute nightmare for administrators, teachers, students, and their parents. To make matters worse, a new tool that takes weeks for everyone to learn doesn’t do anyone any favors.  

However, such complexity and implementation difficulty will stifle student motivation and turn that headache everyone’s already experiencing into a never-ending migraine. 

The good news is that Edmodo delivers everything you need to streamline and simplify at-home learning for everyone involved. 

And the best part? It’s absolutely free. 

Edmodo has been around since 2008. And, since then, they’ve helped over 100 million users and hundreds of thousands of schools gain access to the educational technology they need to improve education quality worldwide. 

So, you know you’re in good hands when you sign up and start building your online education platform through Edmodo. 

The platform is based on the idea that students, parents, and teachers should be able to openly communicate and collaborate with each other. This helps create a community-based learning environment that opens up more opportunities for learning in-person and online. 

Teachers can easily create digital lessons, lectures, polls, conversation starters, challenges, and assignments. From there, they can turn those activities into a daily playbook for students to complete at their own pace. 

Plus, administrators and teachers can work together to build a growing private library of educational resources that can be used over and over again in just a few clicks. 

Teachers can also facilitate live one-on-one or group sessions via Zoom. 

Edmodo comes with built-in assessment tools to ensure students are learning and continuously moving forward through the curriculum. Teachers can grade assignments and provide collaborative feedback in real-time. 

It also includes a built-in grade book that’s easy to use. Alternatively, teachers can easily export grades to the student information system (SIS) your school already uses. 

From the student perspective, Edmodo’s built-in planner and class folders make it incredibly easy to stay organized, regardless of their age or technical experience. Plus, students can message teachers and classmates to get the help they need to succeed. 

Parents aren’t left in the dark, either. Edmodo automatically delivers real-time assignment updates and lets parents directly get in touch with teachers when they need to. 

The personal edition is completely free for educational organizations, teachers, and students. With that said, there is an enterprise edition that offers unlimited storage space, bulk onboarding, and prioritized customer support. 

Enterprise edition pricing is per user and requires an additional implementation fee. 

Sign up for a free account to explore Edmodo and see if it’s right for your organization today!

#7 – Canvas — The Best LMS for Colleges and Higher Education Organizations

”Canvas

Canvas

Best for Higher-Ed Organizations

From universities and trade schools to tech institutions, Canvas delivers everything you need to simplify the e-learning experience for higher-education students. Instructors can easily create highly-customized modular courses with various content delivery methods in just a few clicks.

Private and public colleges, trade schools, tech institutions, and other higher education organizations deal with hundreds or thousands of students every day. Plus, those students are all taking different classes with different schedules studying different things. 

Higher education institutions like yours are incredibly dynamic and administrators, instructors, professors, advisors, other faculty, and students deserve an LMS platform that adapts to match your evolving environment. 

This is especially true as classes are being forced online and distance learning is becoming the new reality. It’s a difficult change for everyone, especially for teachers and students. 

Canvas makes this shift as seamless as possible for everyone involved. 

It’s an incredibly robust learning management system that continuously grows to match the needs of its users. 

The platform helps simplify course creation and management processes. Instructors can import or build courses, grade assignments, leave feedback, and communicate with their students. 

They can easily create modular courses to organize and sequence content in a way that makes sense. From there, they can streamline lesson delivery in various ways to accommodate learners of all types. 

The best part? It’s all possible from one easy-to-use interface. 

Canvas also offers various other tools to help higher ed institutions store and share videos, promote online classes, and empower their students to showcase their achievements to future employers. 

And you don’t have to implement the software alone. The Canvas team offers various services, including consulting, custom development, implementation support, and onboarding training. 

They’ll even help you migrate from the LMS you’re already using. Plus, you can leverage pre-made content templates designed to make creating and adding courses to your platform as easy as possible. 

Canvas is also highly customizable to match your institution’s brand. Open API access makes it easy for users to integrate third-party apps and tools to create a truly unique and personalized learning (and teaching) experience. 

This is all possible in just a few clicks, thanks to Canvas’s app center. 

So, instructors and administrators can easily experiment and introduce new functionality without relying on IT support or technical teams to do the heavy lifting. 

Advisors and instructors can leverage Canvas’s advanced reporting dashboard to identify problem areas, students who need more help and attention, and modules hitting it out of the park. 

All of that data can also be easily exported using open APIs to spreadsheets, your student information system, or anywhere you’d like to send it. 

On the learning side, students will appreciate their ability to set up custom notifications for upcoming assignments, organize their coursework, submit assignments from anywhere, and communicate with instructors and professors to get the help they need. 

And learners can easily integrate Canvas with their favorite devices and social platforms, so the information they need is always at the tip of their fingers. 

Pricing isn’t readily available online because it’s a customized solution tailored to match your specific needs. As such, you don’t have to suffer from a cookie-cutter solution that doesn’t quite fit the bill. 

But, you do have to contact the Canvas team to learn more and see if it’s right for your institution and your students.

Methodology for Choosing the Best Learning Management System

A learning management system can make or break the learning and teaching experience, depending on how well it fits your needs. 

They come in all shapes and sizes, targeting various learners and countless learning and teaching styles. Plus, it needs to be easy to use regardless of the end-users technical skill level. 

As such, you know you need an LMS that’s intuitive for everyone involved. 

Aside from that, everything else feels like a massive gray area full of confusing features, industry jargon, and seemingly identical solutions. 

So to help you navigate this difficult decision, we put together a definitive list of criteria to consider as you go through choosing the best learning management system for your org and your people. 

Learning Objectives

Are you teaching and training people in a corporate or educational environment? The learning experience is vastly different for each situation, so it’s critical to make this distinction before moving any further. 

It’s also important to think about what you expect learners to take away from their experience. 

Do you expect them to be better at their job, or do you need them to retain and comprehend information so they can move on to more advanced topics? Maybe it’s both. 

Perhaps you want to quickly get new team members up to speed without existing employees spending time training them. 

If you offer software for business or personal use, you may need to provide some sort of training program so customers know how to make the most of their new software. 

Or maybe you need to provide regular certification training for your employees so your organization stays compliant with local, state, and federal regulations for your specific industry. 

There are numerous learning objectives and expected outcomes to think about. And the best learning management system for your organization heavily depends on those expectations and who you’re teaching. 

Arlo is best suited for businesses that sell online training as one of their primary sources of revenue. 

TalentLMS, Trainual, Thought Industries, and AccordLMS are best for corporate training. 

And Edmodo and Canvas are better suited for educational institutions. 

Once you’ve identified your learning objectives, you can cross off ill-fitting options. From there, you can further narrow things down based on your organization’s size and the specialized features you need.

The Size of Your Organization

As a large business or institution, you need more control and management features to guide the right people through the proper training at the right time. Plus, you probably have hundreds (if not thousands) of programs, instructors, and users. 

So, you need something flexible that can adapt to your dynamic environment. This is true whether you’re a public university or a large business. 

Either way, managing that many moving parts can quickly become unmanageable with an LMS that doesn’t offer the flexibility and control you need to streamline everyone’s learning experience. 

On the other hand, smaller teams tend to focus more on ease of use, affordable scalability, and speedy implementation. 

You still need flexibility, but you don’t need thousands of user seats or advanced enterprise capabilities. So, you need to understand what’s most important for you and everyone involved. 

Furthermore, the number of users, administrators, and instructors you have may also play a significant role in pricing. 

Some LMS providers charge by the number of instructors, others base their pricing on the number of learners, and some base it solely on the features you need. 

If you’re teetering between several options, we highly recommend estimating your monthly costs for each. From there, you can compare prices, features, and the overall learning experience to make your final decision. 

And don’t forget to consider how easily the platform scales as you add or remove users. 

Assessments, Grading, and Feedback Requirements

Testing comprehension is important in both educational and corporate learning environments. However, it’s important for very different reasons. 

End users in a corporate environment are typically adults. So, you should consider assessments, gamification, and feedback as methods for measuring comprehension and encouraging learner engagement. 

But you should also keep in mind that certification programs may require more comprehensive testing to ensure learners actually absorb what they learn. 

And you need to be able to award those certifications as well. 

This is where your corporate learning objectives come into play. Those objectives will help you decide why assessments are important. From there, you can evaluate the comprehension and engagement features you need to meet those objectives. 

On the other hand, educational institutions need grading capabilities and quizzes, interactive options, and SIS integrations. 

In this situation, assessments, quizzes, and tests aren’t just tools to keep learners engaged. 

It’s imperative to accurately measure comprehension before allowing students to move on to more complicated subjects and courses. 

Progress and Data Tracking Capabilities

Ineffective courses are a waste of everyone’s time. 

So, it’s essential to track learner progress and gather user feedback over time. From there, you can use this data to continuously improve your courses and deliver a more comprehensive learning experience. 

But to do that, you need the right progress and data tracking capabilities. It’s not enough to simply gather that data. You should be able to make sense of it and actually use it. 

Do you want automatic weekly reports sent to managers or instructors? If so, you should make sure those emails only include relevant information, so they don’t waste their time sifting through data they don’t need to see. 

Maybe you want to create custom reporting dashboards for different administrators so they can easily access the data they need to make quick decisions. 

Perhaps you want to export data into another tool (like a grade book or SIS). 

Regardless of what you need, you should make sure the LMS you choose can make it happen without adding hours and hours of work to someone’s plate. 

You may want to jump on a call or live demo and ask about these situations if you’re unsure. 

Trainual Logo

Trainual

Best for Most

Start documenting essential business processes, procedure, policies, and training materials to prepare your small business for explosive growth. Includes dozens of templates and pre-built business playbooks, a built-in screen recorder, and a mobile app. Paid plans start at $99 per month for up to 25 users.

Summary

Our current technological revolution is continuously changing the way we communicate, collaborate, teach, and learn. 

Plus, our environments are more dynamic and fluid than ever before. 

As a result, it’s more critical than ever to leverage a teaching and learning platform that meets learners where they are, regardless if it’s in a corporate or educational setting. 

This is true whether you’re a small tech startup doubling in size every three months, a Fortune 500 company training suppliers, customers, and new employees, or an educational institution struggling to facilitate online learning. Or anything in between, really. 

The best businesses and institutions continuously evolve and adapt to meet dynamic demands. And the best learning management systems bolster that evolution. 

To recap, our top recommendations are:

  1. Trainual – Best LMS for most
  2. TalentLMS – Best for small business employee training
  3. Arlo – Best for businesses that sell online courses
  4. Thought Industries – Best for B2B customer onboarding and training
  5. AccordLMS – Best for large-scale enterprise training programs
  6. Edmodo – Best LMS for K-12 educational institutions
  7. Canvas – Best for colleges and higher education organizations

And don’t forget to use the methodology we talked about as you go through the decision-making process. 


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