Absorb LMS

"Absorb is the perfect LMS!"

Comments: Absorb is so powerful and easy to use. The company itself is great to work with. Their customer service staff is so nice and friendly, and the project manager and account manager I worked with helped me every step of the way. The interface is gorgeous and importing your learners is a snap. I love that Absorb has built-in quizzes that I can create in seconds. I also love that I was able to work with Absorb's designers to customize the branding for our company. Creating certification programs and badges was easy. You can upload or link to practically any type of media. Customized reports can quickly be generated. Grouping learners into categories to deploy specific training is also painless. You can create contest, polls and gamify the learning experience. Ultimately, Absorb is fast, easy, gorgeous and even if you're a staff of one or two (like me) you can easily manage hundreds of learners and dozens of online courses. I love Absorb!

Pros: Fantastic customer support
Easy to use design
Quick import of new learners
Easily upload any type of multimedia
Customizable interface for branding
Out of the box solution at a reasonable price point
No extra IT or web developer support required

Cons: It would be great to:
- Quickly switch between Admin and Learner to see a course
- Create a "test" user who can take courses over and over again just to test functionality without having to enroll, un-enroll and then re-enroll
- Show and disable the contest feature (without having customer support perform this function)

"Absorb does a lot of awesome things. A few tweaks could make it even better."

Pros: Ease of course creation
Branded dashboards
Recently improved search page
Options for badges and certificates
Course and resource replication easy

Cons: Organization of Course and Resource folders is only alphabetical order
No way to create groups through a CSV upload
Enrollment and Resource availability rules limited for some items (i.e. can't exclude departments in enrollments)

"Great Software, Suffers terribly from its customer service."

Comments: I rushed into this purchase a little and didnt investigate the level of support that would be offered. In hindsight this would have been a game changer for me as I would have went elsewhere.
The software is good, though it doesnt manage blended learning easily which is frustrating.
Customer Support is absolutely non existent.

Pros: Good User Interface,
Good Course Management.
Good sync with BambooHR on most things.
Good Learner interface.
Good Customisation options.

Cons: Difficult to manage blended learning.
Some factors in course management could use improvements. (Managing assessments)
Cannot see how many absences from courses that users have.
Some issues with how it syncs with Bamboo(overwriting course information)
Customer Support is non existent. 10+ days to resolve any issues. Most issues I have to try and resolve myself by resetting and that causes me other issue.
Can sometimes be 'buggy' and will introduce random bugs which can be time consuming to fix and result in me resetting the system sync.

"Great product that focuses on being good at one thing... Online learning."

Pros: Absorb was the first LMS that I worked with that fully supported HTML5. The interface was beautiful from a learner perspective and could be fully branded to your company. It was intuitive and supported all of the training types that we created and purchased. The company was easy to work with and provided support for our needs.

Cons: The backend/admin portal was separate from the user portal. Meaning, it was based on different technology (flash at the time), was actually hosted on a different part of the system and did not seem as unified as other systems I have worked with. It was still very functional, but left some to be desired.

"Easy to use, affordable LMS"

Pros: Blatant Media developed such a forward thinking interface that it hasn't needed a refresh the last few years. This is a positive, not a negative. I've been both an admin and a user of the system and it's really nice to know everything is going to be laid out the same even after not using it for a few months. Very future proof. The responsive capabilities of the user end are really top-notch as well. Great for blended learning as well as complete "eLearning."

Cons: Support is just okay. I think they outsource their support and it's not always super efficient.