TalentLMS Reviews

Out of the box, it's a fairly robust, no frills learning management tool. My company has learner and admin accounts with this solution, and I'm the super admin. I actually own it for my company.

You cannot beat the price point of this solution. It is one of the least expensive learning management systems I've ever worked with.

I have very strong feelings about TalentLMS, most of which have to do with the limitations of the programming. The built-in builder has some rather serious limitations. If you are porting in SCORM files to build resources in Captivate or Articulate, their program is only compatible with SCORM 1.2, which is a really old SCORM packaging format. 

The output is kind of clunky. The learner experience and UI is really basic, and this is an out-of-the-box, bare bones, 'nothing fancy' UI. You do have the ability, like most learning management systems, to do some customization, and you'll need to work with developers to do that.

The reporting is severely limited in that it only shows rules. You can't set up dependencies. You can't set up cyclical course, so you can't have equivalencies. The back end is kind of clunky. It's not as user-friendly as I would like it to be.

I have been using this solution for three years.

I would say it is a stable program, although it does have some little idiosyncrasies. We found some glitches in the reporting piece of it, which is probably the weaker aspect of the programming. We have found some challenges in the reporting data with false completes and things like that.

We scale the solution by going from 300 licenses to 1,500 licenses every year. We scale it for three months for our fourth quarter of the year. It absolutely has been very easy to scale and also to downgrade.

The tech support team is very receptive. The challenge that I have with their support model is that it depends on where you are in your subscription. The larger your audience, the more support you receive. When we're in our period of under 500 subscriptions, which is typically most of the year, Q1 through Q3, we can only communicate with support via email. They tend to be relatively receptive, but mind you, they're located in Greece, whereas I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area in California in the United States, so there's a bit of a time lag. If there's something that's happening right now, there's no way for me to get in touch with someone immediately.

However, when we scale beyond 500 users, which we do in Q4, then we have access to chat support, and that's instantaneous. It's an interesting transition for myself and my team, when we spend our high season with the ability to tap someone and get what we need sorted immediately, versus going back to having to wait 10 to 14 hours to get a response because now we have to email them.

The team is always receptive. Generally speaking from a technical standpoint, I have a lot of questions about the programming and capabilities. A lot of the responses I receive are links to articles that aren't really helpful, or I'm told that it's not something that the program can do. When we have false completions and things like that during Q3, or when the system glitches and people can't find or access a curriculum, they tend to go in and address it relatively quickly.

You can't beat this solution for the price. I've worked with Cornerstone On-Demand, Captivate Pride, Sum Total, and Knowledge Planet. Those learning systems are $40 to $70 per person. 

For this solution, depending on what licensing level you're at, you're looking at less than $3 a user per month. The pricing is insane for what you get, which is why my company is still using it.

This solution requires some fancy footwork and maneuvering. If you want to use their built-in curriculum builder, you really need to have at least some understanding of HTML to tailor it to what you want it to be. Otherwise, you run into some rather serious formatting issues with spacing and kerning.

I would prefer to work with Moodle. I don't know what Moodle's backend looks like, but I suspect that the organization invested some monies into the look of the UI because it is a seamless transition from a company's website to Moodle. That is not the case with my experience with TalentLMS. TalentLMS is out-of-the-box usage. There's no dev to make it more aligned with our brand and brand identity, other than the little bits I've done myself.

From a user perspective, this solution is very easy to use, so I would rate it as a six or seven. From an administrative perspective, it's more like a three or four due to the reporting limitations and challenges with the builder. If I were giving a rating for an economical learning management tool and we were only looking at tools of a certain value, then I would say it's a seven or eight. If I'm looking at the solution in conjunction with Cornerstone On-Demand, Sum Total, Knowledge Planet, Mozilla, and some of the other larger scale learning management tools, this solution is on the lower end of the spectrum and would rate around a three or four.

To give it an average rating taking all of that into consideration, I would rate it a five. 

My advice to people considering this solution is to be very, very clear on what their specs are. The program predated me, and the people who worked at my company and did the research into Talent didn't really know what they were looking for.

The biggest challenge of TalentLMS is that if you use their builder and go through the effort of building courses in their programming along with your text and information, the only thing you're going to be able to pull out are images or media. You can't pull your courses out because there's no way to export them. That's a huge problem. It's kind of how they protect themselves, and I understand that, but if you're dealing with people who are not instructional designers and do not have experience with using eLearning tools to create SCORM files, that's a huge handicap.

My recommendation would be to make sure that you test everything, and be absolutely certain about what you are looking for. If anything were to happen, or you were to want to move to another platform, you wouldn't be able to migrate any of your courses. You would need to recreate them all.