Thought Industries

Pros

The best part of TI is the variety of page styles. The platform features more than 25 different page types and they are all highly interactive. This creates a very engaged asynchronous environment. Also very pleased with the ADA compliance features and mobile friendly formatting.

Cons

The analytics and direct email functions have room for improvement. Some segmenting and automation is difficult to accomplish.

Pros

I do like that TI is working to improve the platform all the time. They aren't afraid to roll out new features to stay relevant.

Cons

We have had several instances where things stopped working as expected, and users admins were affected. Sometimes things change in TI without warning that affects our users, and it puts us in a difficult spot.

Pros

Focus on customer training, whereas most learning platforms are primarily for HR and internal training. Thought Industries is built to distribute (and sell) training to customers. Also great features for Panoramas, or customized environments for specific customers.

Cons

I feel they struggle with usability and flexibility. It's one of the clumsiest CMS's I've worked in as a developer, and feels like they're figuring out how to build this system as they go. That's a bit frustrating when you're building customer-facing content... UI and UX are critical, and they are lacking here. Additionally, they have struggled to distribute content on a global level, though that was one of our requirements during our evaluation and sales discussions. We've faced significant issues with compliance, payment, and legal issues outside of the US.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Thought Industries

Pros

Our team is really using more of the features of Thought Industries now that we have our system up and running. What I like most it how the content is organized in the system, how easy it is to assign all of the settings available, and also how easy it is to assign access and use the panoramas to keep different audiences organized.

Cons

We are struggling with getting a stable certification exam running on the system. Also, I wish the details page could be visible regardless of the subscription model assigned to the user. Lastly, I wish the "back" arrow within the left hand navigation was truly a back "one page" button.

Pros

We like the ability to subgroup our customers into groups which allows us to assign a "manager" that can assign and manage content to users.

We like the mobile responsiveness and the ability to access clear content from anywhere.

The course build-out functionality is very easy to use and offers many ways to engage the learners.

Reporting feature is robust and provides the ability to customize your reports based on your need.

Cons

Native webinar functionality still needs some work- but happy with the road map.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Thought Industries

Pros

The best part of the solution so far is the progress bar which includes the items which learners need to progress to complete their course.

Cons

The software leaves much to be desired. We switched from an old provider to this solution but it's unfortunately been a backward step.

The UI is dreadful, clunky and not intuative. There's a lack of features on the platform. The reporting that you can get out of this platform is pretty poor too.

Nothing comes easy with this solution.

Pros

I am attracted to the modern, sleek design of the platform, as well as the ease of integration.

Cons

I do not enjoy the limitations on logging in as other users for discovery / troubleshooting purposes. The home/manager portal buttons atop the page are confusing and change based on where you are on the site, this is confusing to most of my internal users.

Pros

Customer support is great. And they're continually enhancing/adding features to make the experience better for admin and learners.

Cons

Still just looking for more features to help in the way we use the software. And more training manuals to help us build out internal training, i.e. as we grow our team and train others to be admins.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Thought Industries

Pros

Thought Industries is a capable LMS and its leadership is constantly looking to add new features and functions. Since becoming the LMS Admin, there is very little daily "work" I need to do to ensure users can access and complete the content they need to. It just works!

Cons

Reporting has come a LONG way from when I first took over this platform at my company. 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"

Pros

It's easy to use and customize things, and when I don't know how to do something there's a robust help site I can go to for information. The platform is capable of every function we need and they are always making improvements and adding functionality so we can stay cutting edge. I love that we're able to offer some education for free, and other courses at a cost for users. TI makes it easy for us to do both and the detailed reporting helps us track information about all of the users visiting the site. I genuinely love using this platform.

Cons

The platform can be a bit pricey, but you get what you pay for and in my book, this is well worth the investment.

Pros

The robust feature sets and flexibility. Every month new features get rolled out we can take advantage of, and we're able to utilize the platform in a variety of ways which are unique to each individual learning business. The eCommerce functionality and monetization options are also helpful as we offer up our courses in a variety of ways across all of our sites (some are free to enroll, others require payment). Overall, the platform is solid and enables us to build and launch new learning sites quickly, and the in-course learning experiences have been a significant improvement for our users.

Cons

There are cheaper alternatives out there, but you get what you pay for in my experience. With Thought Industries, we view them as a business partner who is committed to our success, and it has been 100% worth the investment.

Pros

We appreciated the help from our TI contacts and all the ways you can make your learning platform/learning path unique for your company. The wistia app was very helpful in uploading/storing and moving videos over to the TI platform. Visually the program looks very nice.

Cons

I am not the main purchaser of this program, but I believe my boss was misled by a TI salesmen about what the TI platform was capable of when he agreed to purchase it. I do not know if it is the best platform for our type of content, but our TI contacts did their best to try and help us put our content in the system and display it in a way that made sense. The system is very complicated. A lot of clicking on the back end to design and add content and create learning paths. The group upload CVS did not work at all for us and was incredibly difficult to use. I had to code it in another program to upload a group of 80+ after trying and failing several times. There are so many features, but they become difficult to use, understand, and employ correctly.

Pros

TI is the only company that has ALL the capabilities we need. They are also continually looking at improving the system as well as expanding the languages available.

Cons

It is my understanding that TI will be adding additional capabilities very soon that will cover a majority of our requests so at this point I cannot say what I like least.

Pros

We needed to transition IO Education learners and educators from an outdated, difficult to use, Learning Management System to a platform that was user-friendly, intuitive and easy to manage. Thought Industries was just the platform to get the job done! Their new Panorama feature helps us to accomplish our specific goals for varying client needs and several different use cases. All while creating uniquely branded learning environments for our clients, managing and updating all of our content in one place, and providing a simple content provisioning process to all admins. The Thought Industries Client Success team plays a critical role in being our partners to understanding our goals, and has directly connected us to Product when we needed to discuss additional features necessary to meet our needs. For example, the grading interface within our platform was difficult for our learners to manage and usage was declining.The open dialogue between IO Education, our Client Success Manager and the Product team influenced feature functionality innovation and the Thought Industries Product roadmap, resulting in scalable business outcomes.

Cons

There were a few features that we worked with the Product team to implement in order to reach our desired outcomes, but they were responsive and collaborative. We did like to see more UX flexibility.

Pros

What I like most about TI is that they take our feedback seriously and are always working to improve their software (and thus our and our customer's experience).

Cons

The thing I like least is that when using the native course authoring tool, your work is not auto-saved. You must click the Save button. This is doubly frustrating when creating an activity; you must first save the activity and then save the page.

Pros

I really enjoy the native authoring tools- these allow someone who is new to online learning to be creative, while also providing a format/guide to follow. The catalog also is really clean and easy to navigate.

Cons

I would like more information on all updates, even if they are not considered major ones. Besides that there is nothing major with the platform. There have been times we would have liked other capabilities, but that would be the case with any platform.

Pros

Thought Industries produces beautiful user interfaces and pages and is pleasing to use as an administrator. It accommodates our live-online Zoom-based learning well through Learning Paths, and also permits us to host SCORM-based on-demand learning effectively.

Cons

Learner management is only "OK" - it's hard to find learners (you must type in the full name, not just part of it) to search, learner progress is tracked but only at a high level. Some of the reporting is flexible and powerful and other reporting is very limited.

Pros

I enjoy how interactive the system is. I also enjoy the "white label" option for our clients.

Cons

So far I don't have any real complaints.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Thought Industries

Pros

Being able to create and deliver sites/courses has streamlined our ability to go-to-market. The learner experience from within the courses is very engaging, especially for instructor-led courses where direct interaction and communication is crucial. The eCommerce functionality is great since we can sell courses and get insight into the financial data with the reporting and analytics features.

Cons

Totally satisfied.

Pros

The platform is very easy to use. There are several page types which helps to create engaging courses, that are not static and boring

Cons

A few page types (recipe for example) can only be used for recipes. I would like to be able to customize this for use in trainings that require step by step instructions

Pros

Thought Industries was able to cover everything our company was seeking to use the software for.

Cons

As of right now there have not been any negative feedback from using this software

Pros

Ease of setup and use. Intuitive navigation. UI/UX.

Cons

Needs more functionality and less linear navigation. More robust data analytics and reporting. Ability to export all data to data warehouse.

Pros

I love how many page types there are to choose from... you can really jazz up educational content with some exciting formatting options.

Cons

It can be buggy at times and there should be a search bar on the homepage to quickly find courses deeper in the catalog.

Pros

TI provides a lot of options both on our end to build courses as well as for our clients to manage their users.

Cons

The site can be confusing to navigate at times.

Pros

The product was really to use and our developers had nothing but good feedback.
Additionally, TI was very helpful in creating custom changes when requested in a prompt and efficient manner.

Cons

I am unaware of any negative feedback. Any changes that I, personally, requested were responded to promptly and actioned as we were able.

Pros

I most appreciate Thought Industries' dedication to helping companies provide best-in-class learning experiences for their audience. Their easy-to-use platform makes content creation and delivery streamlined and engaging. They also feature an incredibly comprehensive suite of tools and services to support customer success, with updates and improvements being made regularly. The customer service is top-notch and their pricing models are both flexible and affordable.

Cons

I would say the main drawback to Thought Industries is the customization options. It can be limiting if you want to create a customized learning experience. Additionally, the platform lacks some of the advanced features that other platforms have, such as quiz creation and detailed analytics.

Pros

I have found the overall school configuration and course authoring easy to use. There are many ways to customize the learner's experience. The people at Thought Industries are great to partner with, especially [SENSITIVE CONTENT]. She helped our team navigate all the parts to get our school up and running. Additionally the support team members I've encountered [SENSITIVE CONTENT] are very thorough, with quick replies & recorded video explanations. The Office Hours and the academy are great resources for learning the platform.

Cons

The reporting continues to evolve, and I appreciate that movement forward. However, understanding how the report "dimensions" match up with the fields of the platform is not always clear, as different wording is used. So that takes a bit of trial and error. Additionally, I wish there was more ability to target messaging to different Panoramas at the page and course detail sidebar levels. Finally, the learning paths could benefit from more customization options.

Pros

The TI Platform has such a myriad of page types and lesson functionality that we keep our learners entertained and progressing while tackling the tough concepts of accounting and finance.

Cons

The reporting functionality is improving, which I like. At first, I was generating custom reports as requested by clients, and it seemed like the most basic of information regarding learner progress was overlooked. Clients wanted to know percentage completion by learner within each course, rather than the basic reporting fields of "Started" and "Completed" which were so black and white. I believe the dev team is working on making this reporting more mainstream and I'm encouraged by that.

Pros

The ease of use is fantastic. I love the Office Hours as well. The support team puts this together for weekly customer education on new and current features.

Cons

There are things that wish the software would do, however increasing my proficiency on the software may generate a solution that is already there. Learner tracking is one thing that I wish was easier for my use case.

Pros

I appreciate TI's willingness to work with us to scope on our needs to accommodate our two very different business models. I also like that the platform has a lot of very robust functionality, yet still very easy to use.

Cons

The reporting leaves something to be desired. Although there is a lot of data available, the dashboards are not intuitive, and using a date range doesn't change some of the data. Like number of users is always the same, no matter what the data range is. There is also a lot of usable data that is not surfaced in any of the available reports. Reporting can tend to be a manual and tedious process. Also, there needs to be more granularity with the role permissions, or the ability to toggle functionality on and off for certain roles. I hope is that they invest development in a better content management system. My only other gripe is that you can't delete learners (only disable them).

Pros

Course authoring tools are good and allow for many different page and media types. For us, the Panorama functionality is a must and it works well - allowing us to setup unique instances for each of our clients.

Cons

Some functionality/page types are clunky - workbooks don't allow for easy editing, sublicenses don't offer much functionality like we would expect them too, the reporting, while vast is missing some key connection points to make it work for us.

Pros

We use TI for both external and internal training. Our business cases are complex, but TI is able to mostly accommodate our needs. The integration with Salesforce is also worth the extra spend. It creates a dynamic link between your Sales/Service pipeline and training data.

Cons

TI currently does not support recertification for recertification. Our users need to recertify every 2 years and we have to create a new course to work around this problem. TI is currently working with us to add this feature however.

Pros

Integration was a seamless process, course authoring inside the platform is intuitive, and navigation from a learner's perspective is also very intuitive. We love that we can customize our different sites- not only the theme, but also the site navigation and widgets available for each site.

Cons

One thing that holds us back is that there is not a report that can give a complete picture of learner progress in a course(s). You can see who has started and completed a course(s), but cannot see who has not started a course. Compliance training is a key use for us, so in order to get the data we need, we have to export the available report, then manipulate it next to a complete list of learners to see who has not started their course(s).

Pros

Purchasable content has been the best for our organization! We used this platform for internal training for several months, but when COVID hit started using it for client training. Until we started using Thought Industries we manually created certificates (sometimes hundreds at a time), so this has definitely saved time.

Cons

Some features are too customizable and it's easy to get all kinds of tangled. I also think the software is very very expensive.

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Switching to Thought Industries

Pros

It's easy to use with a lot of feature options, both included in the base product and available as upgrades. I really appreciate the ongoing efforts to find other software to integrate with the TI system. There are several integrations available and more on the way.

Cons

There is not a lot of flexibility within scripted setups. When creating content or a panorama you have a lot of options, but once you choose options for one reason, there are no work-arounds to solve other use case issues. It's very black and white: Choose this or that, there is no way to choose a little of this and a little of that.

Pros

The platform is very flexible in it's offerings. The product is specializes in deliver customer education unlike many other LMSs that are focused on internal training.

Cons

For new users some of the functionality was not obvious. Reporting was overly complicated to figure out for simple tasks.

Pros

Creating sites, pages, and courses is simple thanks to the user-friendly drag and drop interface, but it's also powerful enough to handle unique customizations. We're able to easily scale as well as provide customers with the targeted content they need.

The learner experience is clean, modern looking, and mobile-friendly, which was important for us as most of our learners are on the go. In addition, Thought Industries updated their platform to accommodate our ADA accessibility requirements.

Another big advantage is we no longer need to work with disconnected technologies to build, distribute, and track our courses and customers -- everything is done right within the platform! One-stop shopping!

Fun Comment: One of our staff loves TI so much, she will often say, 'I want to have their digital baby'. Sounds strange, but we feel that strongly about our partnership and collaboration with TI.

Cons

We've been very happy working with Thought Industries! We would have loved to experience a trial version, but they walked us through a very detailed demo and put our use cases into action for us!

Pros

The simplicity of adding and deploying our courses as well as managing users.

Cons

The reporting is lacking and it is difficult to customize user reporting.

Pros

The customer-facing interface of TI is very clean and user-friendly. We have had no issues with customers being confused on where to go to find what they need. The support team also meets with us regularly to work through issues. 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

While the customer-facing interface of TI is amazing, the back-end has some things left to be desired (which is better than the other way around, but not ideal). Support is very responsive, but enhancements usually fall into a black hole, which TI has said they are working on improving. Also the built-in gamification and translation functionalities are currently quite limited.

Pros

THERE IS NOT ONE POSITIVE THING I CAN SAY ABOUT THIS SOFTWARE, WORKING WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION OR THE LACK OF FEATURES THAT WE REQUIRE. CHOOSING THIS WAS A MISTAKE ON OUR PART THAT WE ARE NOW STUCK.

Cons

THIS LMS SHOULD NEVER BE USED TO TEACH COURSES. WE HAVE HAD PROBLEMS WITH EVERYTHING FROM HOW TO CONFIGURE, INABILITY TO GRADE DISCUSSION, HOW TO GET OUR MEDIA INTO THE SOFTWARE, HOW TO DEVELOP PAGES, THAT WE HAD TO KNOW HTML TO DO THIS...THE LIST GOES ON AND ON.

Pros

The biggest pro of this product is the customer service. T.I really goes above for their clients.

Cons

The inability to track user completion at the section level. As of now, we are only able to track if a user completes the entire course. We are unable to determine what sections the user completed if the course has not been completed. We are working with T.I to fix this (another example of their great customer service).

Pros

Presentation/look/user ease. Allows for individualized program pages fo0r easier management and administration.

Cons

Reporting functionality is not what we were told it would be when we bought into the software.

Pros

TI offers things that other platforms don't, which is nice—keeps us on the platform.

Cons

Certifications; the navigation on mobile is limiting; the search function is poor; the help center is confusing and support rarely responds—and when they do, they can't really help.

Pros

It is easy to get set up and tailor content for users within specific areas that are relevant to them which in turn helps us put out required content for our users that helps to generate revenue streams.

Cons

The exported data files can be confusing to manage at first and requires some effort to digest and absorb

Pros

Very user friendly. Most options for content require the same steps so relatively easy to transition to a different way of building content.

Cons

When an update is pushed out, some features are moved around and not easily found. Some settings are disabled when an update is released.

Pros

Great learner experience. UX is very intuitive, Learning Journeys are a great way to guide learners through required content, and platform has a ton of interactive elements for the content itself, which makes for a much more engaging learning experience than just text and videos.

Thought Industries is also constantly pushing out new updates and features which we've been able to utilize. There's things we're very much looking forward to launching (e.g., continuing to improve upon more Content Management features)

Cons

Thought Industries has a ton of functionality and can be configured to do most everything we want. However, it can be very finicky to program in the back-end, related options are in different parts of the back-end, and we've had to create a lot of convoluted processes to get everything to operate the way we want.

Pros

Thought Industries is an extremely intuitive and easy to use software. By having our members access content, all in one location, the learning paths have saved us so much time sending repetitive emails. The learner notifications also help us save time by sending learner reminders to complete action items as opposed to sending emails manually.

Cons

I would like for Thought Industries to have flexibility around "required" and "elective" courses in the learning path. There are times where we would like certain modules to be required but we would also still like members to have the capability to move on to the next milestone.

Pros

Thought Industries LMS has a wide range of learning arrangement capabilities and delivery mechanisms, making it a very versatile platform for creating, housing, and distributing learning content.

Cons

From an administrative standpoint, Thought Industries' LMS takes a significant investment of time and testing to become familiar with the plethora of features; however, they are making noticeable ongoing efforts to improve the user experience.

Pros

Customization of the frontend was a significant plus for us along with the ability to integrate our own SSO. In addition, the Thought Industries platform supports a BI Connector, that enables our analytics to be delivered to our data warehouse each night. Lastly, we have a custom middle layer that supports third party integrations that are complex. Coupled with the high touch customer service we have received, they are a unique partner.

Cons

We had a challenging onboarding due to all of the customizations - but much of that is to be expected. It required strong Project Management on our side to get it over the finish line. In addition, we have had some SEO challenges that Thought Industries is partnering closely with us to overcome.

Pros

Thought Industries has robust features that empower our instructional design team to create meaningful and highly effective learning experiences for our learners and clients.

Cons

The reporting tool might need more additional tweaking so that we can easily mine the data we need more efficiently. Also, having the ability to assign due dates for discussions, quizzes, workbooks are a plus so that students can easily keep track of their progress.