Learning and LMS

What this category covers

Delivering training and keeping a record of it: internal onboarding, compliance courses, product enablement and public course platforms that sell to students.

Those two audiences want different software. An organisation training staff needs assignment, tracking, reminders and evidence. A business selling courses needs marketing, checkout, pricing experiments and a way to attract students. Products claiming both usually lead with one.

Documentation people read on demand sits in docs and knowledge base. Staff records and onboarding checklists belong in HR and recruiting.

Authoring, or reusing what exists

Content is the expensive part, and platforms differ in how much they help you make it.

Built-in authoring covers text, video, quizzes and simple interactions, which is enough for most internal training. Anything richer usually comes from a separate authoring tool, which raises the question of what the platform can import.

Package formats matter only if you already own material in them. If everything will be created fresh, drop that requirement entirely. Judge the editor instead on how quickly a subject expert can produce a module without help.

Video hosting deserves a look. Some platforms include it, some expect you to supply a link, and the difference shows up in bandwidth costs and in whether learners can watch on a phone with a poor connection.

Assignment, tracking and proof

For internal training, the record matters as much as the learning.

• Assignment rules by role, department, location or start date.
• Deadlines and reminders, sent to learners and to their managers.
• Recurrence, since compliance training expires and has to be repeated.
• Completion records with timestamps, retained after someone leaves.
• Versioning, so an auditor can see which version of a course was taken.

That last pair is what turns a training platform into evidence. A system showing only current status cannot answer what a person completed in March, which is exactly what gets asked.

Making people finish

Completion rates are the honest measure of these projects, and most of what drives them is not software.

Short modules beat long ones. A stated reason beats an assignment with no context. A manager who mentions it beats every reminder the system can send. Platforms help with sequencing, spacing, nudges and progress that feels visible. None of them rescues material nobody sees the point of.

Mobile access is worth checking properly, particularly for staff who do not sit at a desk. So is accessibility: captions, keyboard navigation and readable contrast are requirements in many organisations and courtesy in the rest.

Selling courses, if that is the business

Public course platforms are marketing products with lessons attached.

The questions become checkout, payment methods, tax by country, coupons, bundles, affiliate handling and whether you own the student list. Search visibility matters too, since a course page that cannot rank depends entirely on paid traffic.

Ask what happens to students if you leave the platform. Content export is the easy part. The customer relationship is the asset, and some platforms make it deliberately difficult to take with you.

How the money works

Pricing runs per registered user, per active user, per seat with a ceiling, or per course. Active-user models suit organisations that train in bursts, while registered-user models charge for everyone on the list whether they log in or not.

Storage, bandwidth, extra administrators, single sign-on and reporting depth are the usual add-ons. Course platforms may take a percentage of sales instead of a subscription, which is cheap to start and expensive to keep. The same arithmetic appears across the market in what pricing pages hide.

Internal training and public courses diverge quickly

The two audiences here want different things from the first week onwards.

Internal training is judged on completion and evidence. The buyer is HR or compliance, the learners have no choice, and the reporting exists to satisfy an auditor or a regulator.

Public courses are judged on sales. The buyer is the creator, the learners are customers who can leave, and the platform is competing on checkout, marketing tools and how much of the student relationship you keep.

A few products serve both, usually by treating one as a secondary use case. If you plan to do both, check which side the product was built for by looking at where its newest features have gone rather than at the feature list.