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)

"Unexpected Limitations"

Comments: Overall it's ok. Again we were really disappointed about the department/sub-department functionality. So if you are using Absorb for multiple clients not just internally then beware. It is definitely easier to see how many users we have in the system, who has taken what courses, our popular courses, and course evaluation scores which for us are all important KPI's. overall great value for the price.

Pros: Absorb is really easy to use and navigate. We purchased it for the ability to have "department" or sub-companies. We provide training materials and the platform to our clients so having a multi-tenant LMS was critical. I love the ability to customize colors and layout for various clients. The onboarding process was pretty smooth and the staff is attentive.

Cons: My biggest disappointment was that that the multi-tenancy or segregating by departments did not function as we expected causing us to have to adjust our offering and prices for clients. When assigning courses you can only assign to a whole or sub-department, you can exclude. So if 99 customers get the library and one doesn't, you have to allow 99 clients instead of just restricting one. When restricting departments they can manage only the users and courses within their department. However, this does not apply to the mercury module, Global Resources, Competencies, Categories, Message Templates, Ecommerce, and Public Catalogs. So we had to disable access to department admins for these features otherwise they would see other departments (clients) information which is terrible!!!! So instead we have to manage all of these features for our clients. So every time they want a billboard changed we have to do it for example. It puts a lot more management on our behalf that we weren't expecting. other little things we don't like are:
-no course number field
-can't control the order modules are consumed ina chapter only the order of the chapters.
-can't change the reports on the dashboard or re-order it
-resources don't have a thumbnail- makes them look empty/incomplete
-no place for text on the home dashboard.
-roles are not department-specific
-can't change password expiry beyond 7 days
-task functionality is way too basic
-no ability to integrate tasks or due dates with calendars

"simple to use, but QA poor and support prioritized by popularity votes on their customer forum site"

Comments: had it for 3 years. our requirements were basic - no hr integration, no e-commerce, short term users, few courses. yet when we were faced with their sudden requirement for us to move/"upgrade" to their new system that contained functional and design continuity problems from the system version we were using, we were told that our problems would not be fixed due to the fact that not enough other customers had "voted" for the same issues to be fixed. that was a dealbreaker. :(

Pros: easy startup, easy to use (provided everything is working properly)

Cons: Software is AS-IS product. Difficulty getting help with system problems - first tool for them is interpersonal pleasantry, and email with article links to something that may or may not be addressing the reported problem. If there is not an easy out-of-the box solution (addressed by the link they send you by email), it will take many interactions and possibly a video screener of your problem before your issue is investigated. Individual learner issues are typically not investigated.

"The easiest and most attractive LMS I have used in the last ten years!"

Comments: We have saved a very significant amount of time and money switching from Cornerstone to Absorb. And we have gained features, ease of use, faster time to market. As a company that puts customer service above all else, Absorb is our learning engine helping us deliver on that promise to our customers. We have grown our eLearning use by 300% since switching to Absorb mainly because it is very easy for our customers and we can get more content to market faster.

Pros: In no particular order, but all equally important:
- Social media and marketing integration is easy to setup and use
- Dashboards and reports are the fastest and easiest I have seen; reporting highly customizable with just a few mouse clicks
- Rapid deployment and migration; thousands of users, tens of thousands of records were migrated off of Cornerstone and fully functional in less than 60 days - a record!
- Customized look and feel matching our corporate site was ready in one week!
- Super easy for end users to get to training quickly
- Saved over 50% in costs from Cornerstone and saving more everyday in reduced administration costs
- Sales and support friendly and quick to help
- Wide range of content support and did not have to rebuild a single training report
- Flexible API offering unmatched integrations
- SSO and Shopping cart easy to implement and works right the first time AbsorbLMS does one thing only, and does it right - manage my training. It's not bloated with features and functions I don't need. The administration is easy to learn and quite intuitive/flexible. It just works...and works great.

Cons: After six months of use, I have not come across a "least" like for Absorb. I would like to see more customization options for lower layer pages, but I cannot say this is an "issue" as I am still exploring the many possibilities offered by Absorb. For once, I have an LMS that I have not outgrown, I am still playing catch-up!

"Absorb LMS - Flexible and User-Friendly"

Pros: We have been using Absorb LMS for 4+ years. The product is excellent and the Absorb team is very cooperative in working with us to customize the LMS for our unique needs. It has evolved into a collaborative partnership, rather than a typical vendor-client relationship. We have users around the world, and the user-side LMS has proven to be stable and easy to use. The admin-side has a wide range of features, and it is relatively easy for people to learn the basics. We use the LMS to deliver classroom courses, e-learning and bundles. We have established special access roles for instructors which has streamlined operations. Absorb is releasing a major upgrade which we are testing. The upgrade adds great features, and we are eager to migrate to the new version.

Cons: We provide our clients with very specific project tracking and reporting functions that have become part of our competitive advantage. These functions go beyond the capabilities of the Absorb LMS and the needs of typical LMS users. We have had to develop customized modules that import data from the LMS.