Absorb LMS Reviews

Pros

It offers a very pleasant experience when browsing its interface and viewing the content of the learning programs. Its search tool is very precise to quickly find the required courses. It provides a lot of versatility with its mobile app, which allows you to log in from anywhere and at any time. The evaluation process is very intuitive and simple to carry out.

Cons

So far, the only thing I think it can add is a better level of personalization of the learning processes, however, this is a versatile and very complete platform.

Pros

The Absorb LMS is easily customizable and Admin/Learner user-friendly. This allowed me to expand my Training effort and capabilities with not only scope but greater efficiencies in that I can customize the LMS to meet the varying needs of my different stakeholders.

Cons

If there is a negative, it is in the format of the Training Transcript when printed, or exported as an electronic file. The courses appear in alphabetical order without the ability to filter for a time period, or sort chronologically. This frustrates Supervisors who then have to review the entire transcript to find what training an employee has completed in the last year. I understand the Transcript are being reworked by Absorb for 2022, so this may become a non-issue.

Alternatives Considered

Accord LMS, Totara Learn, Adobe Learning Manager, Cornerstone LMS and Litmos

Reasons for Choosing Absorb LMS

I was seeking a fully supported proprietary platform with the enhanced features and functionality my training program had grown to demand.

Reasons for Switching to Absorb LMS

Absorb met the overlapping sweet spot between cost, features, supported company size, and alignment with the structure of our training program.

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.

Pros

What I liked the most about the system were the following features: 1. Intuitive User Interface: Provides a user-friendly and easy-to-navigate experience, which allowed our employees to quickly adapt to the online learning environment.2. Personalization: The ability to customize course templates, themes, and design helped us deliver engaging and branded learning content.3. Resource Library: The extensive resource library, including videos, articles, and presentations, allowed us to create and enrich our courses with additional materials.

Cons

Some aspects that I consider could be improved in the system are: 1. Price: For smaller organizations or with limited budgets, the cost of the platform may be a bit high. It would be beneficial to implement cheaper or more flexible plans according to the specific needs of each company.2. Advanced features: Some features, such as setting up complex assessments or creating custom learning paths, could be easier to access and use. Facilitating these tools would allow the implementation of even more efficient training programs.

Pros

I love that this product is customizable according to your organization's needs. The business model is to teach you how to fish so that you own the system and can make branding updates, page templates, email templates, etc. You can customize the Learner Home to your preferences. You're not stuck with an LMS in a box where you have to rely on customer support for everything. In addition, the system is simple to learn administratively. I'm most impressed with its reporting function which has been very complicated in my experience with many other learning systems. Also, the Global Resources field is awesome so you don't have to pretend documents always belong with a course.

Cons

The ILC course feature could use more flexibility. Would be great to have users be able to register for more than one ILC session within a course. I end up duplicating a lot of courses just to add the ability to register for more sessions.

Pros

Coming from another software, we loved the customizable features of the software!

Cons

Only honestly the reports feature. There was only ways to run mass reports, or individual person or courses. I couldn't pick various folks and run it all at once. HOWEVER being able to to download to excel file instead of CSV file was a game changer!!

Alternatives Considered

Relias Healthcare LMS

Reasons for Choosing Absorb LMS

Our contract was ending with them and we used them for HR purposes as well.

Switched From

Paycor

Reasons for Switching to Absorb LMS

The product design, the team, the support, and our data transfer.

Pros

Absorb has made the implementation process incredibly easy. User training was broken down into helpful microlearning and many features have been customizable, which my company stakeholders have loved. Having a project manager as a go-to source of knowledge has been fantastic, and the Help Center has given me self-sufficiency that I look for when working with other vendors. We also love that most features are already included in the pricing, versus being nickel and dimed for reporting, mobile interfaces, different learning methods, company branding, etc. We're excited to have Absorb help our company grow.

Cons

I'd love it if Absorb could work on additional API integrations that are included in the price. My company uses several 3rd party content creators (KnowB4, Udemy) and there are currently no connections with them.

Alternatives Considered

Coassemble, Skilljar Customer Education, LearnUpon and Docebo

Reasons for Switching to Absorb LMS

Absorb offered the most functionality for its price. It has not required major additional upsells to get the functionality we were looking for. Any other company either did not have key functionality, or cost more than Absorb to get the functionality we were looking for.

Pros

It is designed for all kinds of learners and organizations no matter you are a large corporation, mid-size business, or small business. It has made it easier to develop and manage training programs for both external and internal shareholders. Its main focus is on lining up learning needs with the demands of the business. It inspires business productivity. It empowers organizations all over the world to deliver training efficiently.

Cons

It is pretty expensive. Its tech support is not able to solve an issue. Sometimes, it does not do reporting at the level that you need it and results in reports that require much more manual work to meet the requirements. Also, dashboards of repotting have various column options that make it difficult to see information in one place. It lacks versioning. Thus, whenever you update a course, you will have to re-enroll all users. It has limited assessment options. So it should more options so that learners will have various paths leading to the same goal.

Pros

Absorb was very easy to install and is easy to use. This product meets most of our needs and the product support has been top notch.

Cons

I do wish Absorb had an easy way to provide training content to the users who did not have accounts.

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)

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

Pros

Absorb has such a wonderful client portal to submit feedback. There's an ability to submit feature requests and have other clients talk through the pros/cons and use cases for those items. I've had calls with Absorb developers based on the feedback that I had submitted and those features then went forward into the production environment. It is awesome to see how involved Absorb is in the client community.

Cons

There are not many features that are problematic. I wish there was a more seamless way to allow a learner to take one course in place of another. If a learner submitted a third party certificate for a course that is equivalent to an in-house course, the admin needs to manually award completion for the in-house course. It isn't exactly clean and can lead to some confusion when auditing learner completions to understand which version was completed vs credited.

Pros

I really like that navigating through its functions is very easy. It allows you to design a personalized, interactive and very flexible learning experience. The tracking of participants' progress is very effective and offers very complete reports that provide detailed information for the improvement of the following courses. The electronic signature helps to confirm the fulfillment of the different training stages that are planned.

Cons

I would like to see more integration options to strengthen corporate learning paths.

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.

Pros

Integrating to Absorb was pretty straightforward. The software is easy to use and the on-boarding we received was exceptional. We have been using the platform for about 2 years now and we are adding new administrators and courses on a daily basis. Our account manager [SENSITIVE CONTENT] is outstanding!

Cons

There are obviously features that are not offered in Absorb that frustrate our admins and we have just signed up for Absorb Analyze to make reporting easier and more robust. It's hard to make enhancements or changes for our organization only on the platform as changes usually go across their entire platform and are system wide.

Pros

Customer support has been dedicated and addressed our concerns, however much of the FAQs are only in text format with no video or other engagement methods to demonstrate walk throughs.

Cons

Limited functions, does not allow us to connect learning direct with learners since it has a 'firewall' type sign on mechanism that does not connect hyperlinks to courses. Authoring tool very limited, and searchability is difficult for admin and users.

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.

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.

Pros

Ease of use.
Can't think of 40 characters.

Cons

Reporting is VERY Lacking.
eCommerce Cart is VERY lacking. Cannot purchase different quantities of different products. Need 5 Widget Courses & 2 Dohicky Courses. Takes 2 different transactions to purchase.

DO NOT expect SUPPORT Assistance !!

Pros

Flexibility to adapt the solution to our specific needs and it's reliability. Our "rep" is very accessible and very helpful to bring solutions to our concerns.

Cons

the fact that we lost the file manager in the new admin interface and the search engine (not very efficient)

Pros

The ease of use. From the administration side to the Learner Experience, the system is very user friendly and easy to follow. The creation side provides the agility to create course and materials for a variety of needs

Cons

Missing some way to capture attendance digitally. For instance, on Instructor Led Courses a user could access the course and mark their own attendance rather than having an administrator have to complete it manually for each class.

Pros

Ease of use. Everything is easy to find and the options make sense.

Cons

When bugs are introduced, they don't always get fixed very quickly.

Pros

This software is very user friendly to the administrators and to the users.

Cons

This software does not currently integrate with the company's HRIS (due to the HRIS being outdated).

Pros

Clean interface. It's navigable and easy-to-use.

Cons

We had a little hiccup with uploading hundreds of users who were all in different departments. It required us to upload a spreadsheet per department (about 12) instead of uploading one spreadsheet and having the system parse the groups. I think this is a fairly rare circumstance though (either you are a small group and it doesn't matter or you are a big group and you have an API). Added an extra 2 hours of work - not a big deal. Otherwise the user-upload interface is very effective.

Pros

The ability to create your own courses and pull in outside courses as well.

Cons

With every software there are things that could be updated. It's the nature of the technology beast. But being able to edit an employees profile and see their course data all in one area would be better than having to go into separate areas.