A Guide To Choosing The Right LMS Platform For Your SaaS Business

What is a Learning Management System?

A Learning Management System (LMS) is a digital system that allows an organization to create courses, manage enrollment, and track progress. It is a software system that manages the delivery of learning materials and assessments to users.

An LMS can be used in a variety of settings, such as educational institutions, corporate training programs, and independent training providers.

The system offers a content management module that provides tools for creating, organizing and delivering educational content. It can also help with evaluating the progress of the learners by providing tools like quizzes.

Why an LMS for your SaaS Organisation?

The best way to introduce new users to a SaaS product is by using an LMS. It helps them with the basics and guides them through the process.

An LMS for user onboarding in SaaS is important for new users, as they need to be guided through all the features of your product before they can start using it. If you are not sure what an LMS is, you can think of it as a course that will teach your customers how to use your product and keep them engaged all the time.

Here’s how you know when you require an LMS platform:

You want to keep track of the user’s progress
You want to better onboard your customers and help them understand your product.
You want to teach your existing customers about your new features, updates, and releases.

How to Choose the Best LMS Platform for your Business?

LMS Platform	G2 Review (out of 5)	Capterra User Ratings (out of 5)	TrustRadius Review (out of 10)	Indicative Client Names
Thinkific	4.6	4.7	8.9	Kissflow, Canva, Hootsuite, Drift, Hubspot, Salesforce
Skilljar	4.6	4.6	8.3	Asana , DataRobot, Braze, Bloomreach, Moz, Zenefits, Intercom
Northpass	4.8	4.7	9.5	Aggriweb, Moengage, Channable, BombBomb, ClouRadial
Intellum	4.5	4.5	7.7	Gainsight, Zoominfo, FB Blueprint, Google Digital Garage
Thought Industries	4.6	4.4	-	Miro, Cloudinary, Amplitude, Seismic
WorkRamp	4.7	4.4	-	Zoom, Reddit, Unity, Intercom, Paypal, Square
AcademyOcean	5.0	4.9	-	Lemlist, Reply.io, ProductHunt, Planfix, Ajax
Teachable	4.4	4	6.1	Surfer, Adobe, The New York Times, Intuit, Shopify, Pearson

Well, a lot of things come into choosing the ideal LMS Platforms and making the right decision can be difficult sometimes.

In fact, here is what the top SaaS Brand do to build their Academies (along with secrets, tips, and tricks from interviews with their core team)

To help you make a more informed decision.

Here are the Top 8 LMS Platforms for your Business Operations and Training Needs

1. Thinkific

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"Overall I'm super happy with my experience. I've spent the last few months editing my course based on feedback from the beta and am almost done setting up my first official launch."
"Outstanding course-hosting platform that makes your life easy."
"Thinkific is so easy to set-up and has a wealth of customisation options. I like being able to rely on the platform to provide a good experience for users, even at scale."
"We also hope using this software would ease our students learning as well as helping our company to grow by reaching out to more people."

Cons:

"Everything else is about the same, but Thinkific is slightly more expensive and the pricing model is confusing."
"For the plan I am on it is a shame there certificate functionality is not available."
"I only manage to find a few on Google which helped a little. Sizes of the images are only limited to JPG file which I didn't know why after a constant struggle of failures to upload a PNG image."
"In the days of Covid, with so many things happening to small businesses- THinkific has been the WORST to deal with."

Text source – Capterra

Thinkific is a robust course-building platform that provides everything you need to create & deliver high-quality courses. Your goal can be to educate your customers, or sell courses for revenue. Or you may just want to grow your brand and engage your audience.

With Thinkific, it becomes easy to join their already existing thousands of consultants, experts, authors, speakers, trainers, teachers, coaches, professional associations, and companies, and start selling courses.

Cost: starting at $39 for unlimited users per month
Capterra Review: 4.6 (127 reviews)
G2 Review: 4.7(103 reviews)
Trustradius Review: 8.9 (20 reviews)

Features:

Academic/Education
Asynchronous Learning
Audio/Video Recording
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring
Certification & Licensing
Corporate/Business
Course Publishing

Data Import/Export
eCommerce Management
eLearning Companies
Gamification
Instructor-Led Courses
Interactive Content
Interactive Learning

2. Skilljar

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"It allows us to post training material for our clients and partners to use. Its easy to post items on the back end and to make changes and you can find support on any topics you need help with."
"Overall the system is great and accomplishes what we need."
"The customer service and support is amazing and they also have a huge portal of learning videos and reading material to quickly learning things yourself."
"The ability to have unlimited students and different domains to house internal and externally facing content separately."

Cons:

"You drive your own course, start to finish. For that alone, Skilljar rocks."
"Looks very old school, we got a lot of negative feedback on this from employees, and management wasn't going to let us use it as is for client training."
"Customizing the design to a more modern look would have been very costly and time consuming."
"The design end of this product is difficult. The coding is constantly changing from what is inserted and it's nearly impossible to copy and paste anything without it changing."

Text source – Capterra

Skilljar is the leading training platform that offers enterprise-grade tools for education. Their platform helps you onboard, engage, and retain customers at scale. Skilljar works with some of the best integrations so you can take advantage of all the tools, platforms, and software you’re already using.

These integrations help bring over data from activity on Skilljar to be analyzed for data-driven insights that can be used to create a robust Customer Education ecosystem.

Their system is specially designed to train organizations that train customers, partners or other external users.

Cost: Quotation Based, starting at $1000 for unlimited users per month
Capterra Review: 4.6 (17 reviews)
G2 Review: 4.6 (87 reviews)
Trustradius Review: 8.3 (14 reviews)

Features:

Academic/Education
Asynchronous Learning
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring
Built-in LMS
Certification & Licensing
Churn Management
Communication Management

Corporate/Business
Customer Engagement
Customer Management
eCommerce Management
eLearning Companies
Feedback Management
Gamification

3. Northpass

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"The Northpass team has been truly wonderful to work with."
"We love Northpass and their absolutely INCREDIBLE team."
"This is the best LMS software that I've found. We were able to put all of our courses in Northpass and we've never been happier with how our content is being delivered to our users."
"Creating courses is extremely simple and Northpass is constantly implementing new features to make the process better."

Cons:

"I have moved from another well known online education provider, after being dismayed about a number of things, not least of all, the fact that the product that hosted my courses, just did not work."
"Some might view this as a disadvantage since they have less native integrations with other platforms, but I'd argue that it's actually an advantage."
"There are not many aspects about the platform that I dislike. We did have to change over our system for a variety of reasons and create a whole new learners platform."
"To say the least, I was extremely disappointed. I don't see an ongoing support system for their instructors."

Text source – Capterra

Northpass is a learning platform that allows mid- to large-sized enterprises to build, administer, and scale their learning programmes in their own unique style.

Their simple, straightforward platform allows you to generate content much more quickly and with less effort. The administrative tools are really useful, and the extensive learning experience is an excellent method to keep up with new advances.

Cost: Custom, starting at $1 per user per month
Capterra Review: 4.8 (23 reviews)
G2 Review: 4.7 (46 reviews)
Trustradius Review: 9.5 (2 reviews)

Features:

Academic/Education
Asynchronous Learning
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring
Built-in LMS
Certification & Licensing
Content Management
Corporate/Business

Document Management
eCommerce Management
eLearning Companies
Employee Handbook
Employee Training
Engagement Tracking
Learner Portal

4. Intellum

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"Exceed is one of the few tools we use it in our e-learning projects. Exceed is really a wonderful tool."
"Strong LMS for customer training, great account support."
"We appreciated both how secure and customizable the platform is, which allowed us to design nearly every essential component, from use of our logo, fonts, colors, icons and more."
"They also have great thought leadership resources on scaling learning and a helpful user conference."

Cons:

Text source – Capterra

Intellum is meant for large enterprises and provides a suite of customizable, AI-enabled learning tools. These can be helpful for any business and make it easier to create, manage, track and scale training content that is highly personal.

It is a single platform to deliver learning, knowledge base, customer success & support, sales, and marketing initiatives. Intellum allows you to utilize engagement tactics like notifications, recommendations, certifications, mobile, chat, and gamification to create the ultimate learning experience for your users.

Cost: Custom
Capterra Review: 4.5 (13 reviews)
G2 Review: 4.5 (21 reviews)
Trustradius Review: 7.7 (27 reviews)

Features:

Academic/Education
Account Alerts
Asynchronous Learning
Audience Targeting
Audio/Video Recording
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring
Built-in LMS

Cataloging/Categorization
Certification & Licensing
Collaboration Tools
Communication Management
Content Creation
Content Management
Content Sharing

5. Thought Industries

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"We are very happy with the platform and our relationship with the company."
"That is important for me because doing a deep-dive with one quality idea yields the best return. That being said, when I am in a "quantity mode" for ideas, there are no lack of resources."
"We have had great training and set-up has been easy to manage."
"They are great to work with and truly want what is best for us. TI is also continually developing for the better, so look forward to seeing what else is in store."

Cons:

"The site can be confusing to navigate at times."
"The exported data files can be confusing to manage at first and requires some effort to digest and absorb."
"The reporting is lacking and it is difficult to customize user reporting."
"However the biggest "miss" is still the lack of rules. For example, I cannot easily define a rule that says "assign all new hires in the Customer Service Department, the following training courses."

Text source – Capterra

Thought Industries is one of the top B2B customer training platforms that enables enterprise organizations to optimize the management and delivery of their client-facing training.

This platform is designed to help your business retain customers by providing them with engaging, interactive learning experiences that are powered by webinars, events & courses. You can also incentive them to interact with your training materials through gamification features.

Cost: starting at 5$ per user per month
Capterra Review: 4.6 (67 reviews)
G2 Review: 4.4 (61 reviews)
Trustradius Review: NA

Features:

Academic/Education
Account Alerts
Account Management
Asynchronous Learning
Audience Targeting
Audio/Video Recording
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring

Built-in LMS
Cataloging/Categorization
Certification & Licensing
Churn Management
Collaboration Tools
Communication Management
Community Management

6. WorkRamp

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"I love that its always coming out with new and innovative features like their challenges scorecards and their new design."
"We are growing exponentially - WorkRamp has been essential in onboarding."
"We love the team at Workramp and can't wait for the product to get better and better as time goes on."
"Everyone at the company has been a pleasure to work with and their product offering is pretty darn robust based on the market and we see them only getting better as time goes on."

Cons:

"Can't say that I've had any negative experiences with this software."
"I often find myself having to start my search over after going down rabbit holes of old training pages. That can be frustrating if I am looking for a quick answer."
"Reporting is frustrating when trying to view on a global scale."
"The option we are using is a sufficient work-around, but I am concerned about the longevity of the use. This issue is not big enough to warrant a lesser rating, more of just a small complaint."

Text source – Capterra

WorkRamp provides a singular, centralized platform that allows us to build training that can be deployed internally (for onboarding and employee training) and externally (for customer training, certification, and enablement).

WorkRamp also has an amazing team that’s very dedicated to taking care of their customers! WorkRamp offers easy and intuitive authoring of learning content.

Cost: starting at $25 per user per month
Capterra Review: 4.7 (29 reviews)
G2 Review: 4.4 (208 reviews)
Trustradius Review: NA

Features:

Academic/Education
Asynchronous Learning
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring
Corporate/Business
eCommerce Management
eLearning Companies
Gamification

Learner Portal
Mobile Learning
SCORM Compliance
Synchronous Learning
Video Conferencing

7. AcademyOcean

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"The team is super responsive and the support is amazing. I really like the fact that all the certification process is handled directly from the app."
"Great Learning Management System - with a very reactive and available team."
"Academy Ocean is a great tool to me because you can think your infrastructure in a very flexible way."
"We really like the way AcademyOcean is developing and how many new and useful functions have appeared during our use of this system."

Cons:

Text source – Capterra

Academy Ocean is known for being easy to customise and maintain from an admin side and intuitive from a user side. It takes literally 10 minutes to create and launch a new educational course. They have totally reinvented the Learning Management Systems (LMS) approach to keep it more feature rich and polished and easy to use.

Cost: starting at $225 for unlimited users per month
Capterra Review: 5.0 (1 review)
G2 Review: 4.9 (22 reviews)
Trustradius Review: NA

Features:

Academic/Education
Asynchronous Learning
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring
Corporate/Business
eCommerce Management

Gamification
Learner Portal
Mobile Learning
Synchronous Learning
Video Conferencing

8. Teachable

Indicative Client Names:

Pros:

"Overall, I love creating content with this site. If you have questions, they can help you and help you figure it out."
"For starters, it is great that you can creaet a course and put it on Teachable for free to test drive the platform and see if it will be a good fit for you and your students."
"I like how easy it is to have the lessons structured in a logical manner, and to have different types of resources available to students."
"The payment gateway and ease of setting up courses. It is easy to get started and the onboarding example courses and content was very helpful."

Cons:

"Payout options may a problem for subscribers from outside the USA."
"They used to market unlimited, but that changed to under 4GB if I remember correctly and now they have a hard limit of 2GB. They made this change with NO NOTIFICATION to customers."
"Since teachable is a US based company, when you pay in GBP, they convert it into dollars, then in order to pay me, they convert those dollars back to GBP, which messes up your income."
"Their insensitivity to isolated cases where I actually needed them to cancel from their company side, instead if making a fooling me....and I still didn't know how to get my self cancelled."

Text source – Capterra

Entrepreneurs and creators are enabled to create their own online courses and coaching with the Teachable software. You can turn your knowledge into engaging lessons complete with videos, lectures, assessments and more. You can collect payments through Teachable so you don’t have to worry about the nitty-gritties also.

Cost: starting at $29 for unlimited users per month
Capterra Review: 4.4 (119 reviews)
G2 Review: 4 (27 reviews)
Trustradius Review: 6.1 (11 reviews)

Features:

Academic/Education
Asynchronous Learning
Blended Learning
Built-in Course Authoring
Corporate/Business
Course Publishing
Data Import/Export
eCommerce Management

eLearning Companies
Instructor-Led Courses
Learner Portal
Mobile Learning
Progress Tracking
Quizzes
Self-Paced Courses

Final Words

LMSs are a big component of any organization’s training and education ecosystem. It is crucial to pick the right one for your business. The following five points should guide you in your decision on which LMS to go with.

How frequently will you be updating your courseware?
How many people will be using the platform?
What are your technical requirements?
Which features do you require?
Which company has experience with companies like yours?

Close consideration of what you really require is the only way to understand which one would be the best fit for you and your brand!

FAQs

How do I choose the right LMS?

It is important for every B2B SaaS company to research and evaluate which LMS platform would be best suited for their product. It is imperative to focus on important LMS features like integrations, learning portals, and ease of use. Identifying the target audience and understanding their needs when it comes to the platform is also important.

Why should we choose LMS?

LMS software helps in providing companies with everything they need to build and start the virtual training process, be it for internal training of their employees or product training for new customers. A learning management system (LMS) is the most efficient way for any B2B company to manage and automate training.

When selecting an LMS you should follow these vital steps?

An LMS platform helps in replacing expensive and tedious manual work and time, by automating content and audiences. It is therefore essential for B2B companies that steps like analysis, defining requirements, product evaluation, product vetting, and selection are understood and executed.

What are the advantages of an LMS?

A learning management system (LMS) provides many advantages to the B2B SaaS companies using it like reducing training and learning costs, providing access to key learning material, consolidating training information, providing integrations, and making the process of learning easy.

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A Guide To Choosing The Right LMS Platform For Your SaaS Business

What is a Learning Management System?

Why an LMS for your SaaS Organisation?

How to Choose the Best LMS Platform for your Business?

Here are the Top 8 LMS Platforms for your Business Operations and Training Needs

1. Thinkific

2. Skilljar

3. Northpass

4. Intellum

5. Thought Industries

6. WorkRamp

7. AcademyOcean

8. Teachable

Final Words

FAQs

How do I choose the right LMS?

Why should we choose LMS?

When selecting an LMS you should follow these vital steps?

What are the advantages of an LMS?

Ready to get started?

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