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

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!

Great for Small Organizations

I've used a variety of learning management systems (LMS) over the years including Blackboard, Moodle, scormLMS, Canvas, Success-Factors, custom LMSs, and Absorb LMS. All of these had their place. Some were geared toward academics and schools (Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas). Others were for huge enterprises (Success-Factors). While others were great to test your E-Learning modules on-line (scormLMS). So what do you do if you have a small organization with under a hundred employees and not enough server space or talent on hand to customize an open-sourced program like Moodle. If that's the case, you turn to the cloud. Software-as-a-service (SAAS) has now become a way of doing business for individuals and small organizations. You can save money and time on resources while reaping the benefits of frequent or constant updates to the software. Absorb LMS is a purely cloud-based application. It's a SAAS that lets you customize the front pages of your LMS, the landing or welcome page perse while giving you a hybridized version of LMS Administrator controls. You see the secret behind every LMS is that somebody, either you as the administrator or someone else working behind the scenes with the SAAS has to upload your content (E-Learning modules, Job-Aids, Videos, Presentations, etc.). So with Absorb, you get a fairly well-featured LMS, but with the benefit of having someone else go through the pains of uploading your content. After having to do the full admin tasks behind the scenes of an LMS, I can say that having someone else do it is quite an appreciable service. Overall, Absorb is a good LMS for small and large organizations that want to save money on resources and overhead. Your trainers can also function as the LMS "admins". My only complaint about Absorb is that it has decent reporting tools. After years of working as an LMS admin, it seems that reports are an after thought with most LMS developers. Yet, sooner or later someone up your chain of command will want to know the value of the LMS and that's where good reporting tools come in handy. I can gladly say that the folks at Absorb listened to customer requests for better reporting and they delivered.

Pros

1. Ease of use - it's in the cloud.
2. Simplified admin functions
3. Decent reporting tools.
4. Customized landing page.

Cons

1. Responses from Absorb can be slow.
2. Customer service isn't the best.
3. Can suffer from service outages.

Absorb: Solid But With Some Shortcomings

(note: this review is based on our experience using Absorb 4). At ARRIS, Absorb powers ARRIS Academy, our centralized location for all things training serving both internal employees as well as external customers. The platform has performed very well, maintaining consistent up time and performance while serving the diverse needs of our organization. Using the eCommerce integration and curricula, we have successfully launched certification programs so that customers and employees can demonstrate their proficiency in our products and thus demonstrate a marketable skill. We have also utilized the curricula feature to easily mass-enroll our employees in mandatory trainings; based on this success, we are exploring other forms of automated enrollments, particularly for onboarding new employees. Working with Absorb has been a great experience. Overall, the customer service is top notch. The team has worked with us to provide SSO and learner import solutions which not only reduces the overhead in Admin time but it also provides a more seamless user experience. In my first year at ARRIS, we have rapidly grown in our reliance of Absorb, turning it into a company-wide hub of training needs. As such, we have experienced a lot of 'growing pains' as we discover the limitations of the current version of the platform. In particular, the reporting capabilities leaves a lot to be desired. There's no way to run a report on courses which also includes sub categories. In addition, a report on employees and their training records cannot be produced on a single page; one has to click within each employee to see what she/he has done. Admin permissions is another area that is lacking. In order for somebody to create courses intended for a specific audience, he/she has to have the ability to affect all courses. It would be ideal to grant only very specific permissions for given category and also prevent he/she from performing specific actions for a given course. These are just a few of things that contribute to a lower score in ease of use as it does make the job of an admin more difficult than it needs to be. As good as customer service has been, there have been times where there have been lengthy gaps between emails or phone calls and our delayed upgrade to Absorb 5 which brings down the score a bit. We are excited to see what the capabilities are of Absorb 5; we hope for many enhancements that improve the experience for all users.

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.

Absorb has been an easy to use platform for meeting our eLearning needs for our community.

It allows us to engage our community through eLearning by showing courses, webinars and lesson relevant to our field of work. It allows us to keep our learners engaged, connected and kept current with ideas and best practices. It allows us the opportunity to represent ourselves as experts in out field.

Pros

Creating and development course content in a straight-forward and simple manner. Enjoy making quick edits and updates to published courses. Ease of importing courses from various types of APIs. Support staff is very attentive and helpful with students and system issues. Administrator back end is very flexible and easy to use. Enjoy using the "impersonate" feature, which can identify problems quickly. Like that the framework of Absorb is still under development, which allows for new innovations, looking for ways to improve and stay relevant.

Cons

Reporting features still need a bit of development to allow for more control and options for what should be saved in the report export document. Giving more options for data being displayed by a student transcript. Some features of pulling data from the metrics can be a bit tricky.

Team Absorb provides the perfect mix of Yoda and Obi-Wan for anyone new to the LMS universe!

We introduced Absorb ten months ago and have been able to centralize/track a lot of internal and external learning for staff. These are exciting times and there is so much more to learn!

Pros

My favourite feature is the people behind the software and their willingness to provide meaningful/practical answers for each question I ask. There really are no silly questions and that is most reassuring for novel LMS users!

I had no prior experience with this type of technology so it's been quite the learning curve for me and my organization. Thanks to Team Absorb's reliable customer service, I'm still learning something new each day!

I also appreciate how many ways there are to customize the software for organizations of any size. We're relatively small (under 1,000 learners) but we have some unique features in our reporting structure. I was able to work with Team Absorb to build some behaviours/rules into our LMS that reflect our set-up and match the information coming in the nightly imports from our HRIS.

Cons

Right now, about 98% of supervisor approval requests make it to the supervisor but it would be awesome if 100% of the requests made it through.

Great LMS solution

Absorb is a solid LMS and a great solution compared to any alternative we examined from a cost/benefit perspective. Things that are cons are more than made up for by the pure breadth of functionality available for the price, and they're very very good at taking customer feedback and making improvements to their product. I'd be comfortable recommending them to any business looking to start up a new LMS or replace an aging in-house system.

Pros

Nice interface and excellent feature set - great coupon tool, course bundles, shopping cart functionality, multi-module courses, lesson plans, forced pre-requisites, monitoring and reporting (SCORM and AICC), scheduling tool, assessments and surveys, discussion boards, linking resources to courses, multi-tiered and customizeable user/admin management, certificates, waitlist management, and customizeable automated email notifications. Integrates with our web-based training platform (Adobe Connect), supports both self-paced and instructor-led courses, responsive to customer requests, able to go from zero to fully-functional LMS in a matter of days. Great value.

Cons

Can be a bit clunky and non-intuitive, difficult to set up and classes as individual objects (each course requires the set-up of a separate instance, even if you want a 1:1 ratio between setup and delivery), finance-based reporting (and reporting in general, actually) is just OK (but getting better), Flash interface that requires pop-ups is a recurring complaint, needs better user account flexibility (i.e. ability for users to manage their information, change their password, etc.) and security (everything is stored/visible in clear text).

Absorb LMS - Great Product and Customer Service

Overall I would highly recommend the Absorb LMS software to any company who is looking for a customized and affordable solution. They have an excellent implementation team that will work with you every step of the way until you are satisfied with the finished product. They also have a great customer service team that is always responsive to our needs and are willing to work with us to incorporate new updates to our system.

Pros

While working with the Absorb team we were able to fully customize an Learning Management System to fit the needs of our small company within the clinical trials space. We initially worked with a great implementation team who were very supportive in meeting with us each step of the way to gather the proper requirements for our final product. Once we were satisfied with our finished product we were able to easily introduce the software to our employees to use with minimal training required. We continue to be very pleased with the level of customer service Absorb provides when we have a new inquiry or suggestion for improving our employees' experiences.

Cons

The only con to Absorb's software was that they did not have a full suite of course content that met our needs in terms of internal training. We were able to work around this feature by uploading course content through another provider which was easily imported into our current system.

Absorb is the perfect LMS!

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 has provided us with a unique mix of feature and quality support helping us obtain our goals.

Speed of delivery of content to customers and users and with the ease of user mgmt, the amount of time I am spent managing the system is kept to a minimum.

Pros

The ease of adding courses, content and attaching relevant material to this cannot be overlooked and for me is easily just one of the items most enjoyed. The built in workflow allows me to take my video production and related documents and attach them to a course that can be distributed to my users in a matter of minutes.

Cons

Nothing really stands out as a negative. One area for improvement would be exporting reports - It would be nice to be able to customize the look and feel of reports in the tool before exporting, and it is a minor issue as a lot of this can be done via the Excel export anyway.

Not the ideal LMS, but pretty darn close.

We love Absorb. It works well and does exactly what we hoped it would. Even with the issues with reports and the test view, it’s still very much worth the money, if not just for the mobile app. We highly recommend Absorb if you’re looking for an easy-to-use LMS software that isn’t absurdly expensive.

Pros

Love the interface. It’s very easy to use, especially once you get the hang of it. There are so many features packed into the system, even in the mobile versions. Having a mobile version is a big plus due to many of our learners using iPads and the like.

Cons

Reporting and exporting reports seem to not work quite as well as we would hope, though it isn’t a deal-breaker. It would be nice to have a way to have a test view of what your learners see. Either by toggling or just a link to preview before everything’s finished.