Absorb LMS vs. Thought Industries

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Absorb LMS
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.N/A
Thought Industries
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
The Thought Industries platform enables enterprise organizations to create, manage, distribute, monetize, and analyze their end-to-end customer education and external training initiatives. The solution addresses the unique needs of customer education, and aims to make it easy to handle complex learning operations at scale to empower growth. Its administrative capabilities include native tools and thirdparty integrations, businesses boost learner engagement, operationalize processes, and…N/A
Pricing
Absorb LMSThought Industries
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Absorb LMSThought Industries
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Absorb LMSThought Industries
Considered Both Products
Absorb LMS
Chose Absorb LMS
Absorb LMS has way more customization, better customer service, and a much more user-friendly look and feel. Sadly, Absorb LMS does not allow you to take notes on the platform, which is a huge miss. However, everything else is far superior to Thought Industries. Absorb LMS is …
Chose Absorb LMS
We felt Absorb LMS best fit our needs.
Thought Industries
Chose Thought Industries
Thought industries allowed us to create multiple customized portals in the price point we needed.
Features
Absorb LMSThought Industries
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
Absorb LMS
8.9
90 Ratings
9% above category average
Thought Industries
7.4
4 Ratings
1% below category average
Course authoring8.073 Ratings8.54 Ratings
Course catalog or library9.678 Ratings8.54 Ratings
Player/Portal9.182 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Learning content9.263 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile friendly7.167 Ratings00 Ratings
Progress tracking & certifications9.985 Ratings7.54 Ratings
Assignments9.974 Ratings2.33 Ratings
Compliance management9.969 Ratings00 Ratings
Learning administration9.687 Ratings9.04 Ratings
Learning reporting & analytics8.885 Ratings8.44 Ratings
Social learning8.044 Ratings6.93 Ratings
Gamification6.839 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign On (SSO) Enabled Learning9.661 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Absorb LMSThought Industries
Small Businesses
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.5 out of 10
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.5 out of 10
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Axonify
Axonify
Score 10.0 out of 10
Intellum
Intellum
Score 6.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Absorb LMSThought Industries
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(92 ratings)
8.5
(4 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.6
(78 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
8.2
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Absorb LMSThought Industries
Likelihood to Recommend
Absorb Software Inc.
My (internal) project build team consisted of three people - one with experience setting up an LMS previously, and two with no experience. I have experienced 'out of the box' builds before and they are rarely intuitive and/or easy to navigate and set up. This was not the case with Absorb LMS. The eLearning modules and face-to-face support provided was thorough and there was a lack of unneccessary complexity to setting up the platform. My novices now know there way around every inch of the platform and love using it. This was not our first LMS, but it may well be our last. The functionality (from reporting for admins to ease of access for learners) far exceeds our previous experiences and we have a product that looks great, works seemlessly and that we are very proud of.
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Thought Industries
Thought Industries is perfect if you are trying to scale your customer education business for a growing customer base. It is more expensive than their competitors, but the price is worth it based on the product and experience. Thought Industries is likely great for smaller customers, although we are an enterprise-level customer. If you are not offering multiple modalities for your training program, Thought Industries (or any LMS for that matter) might not be the best investment.
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Pros
Absorb Software Inc.
  • Customizing the user interface was fairly simple and our learners WANT to use the platform because it looks so nice.
  • Admins have so many tools at their fingertips to pull reports, create new users, author new courses, and more!
  • Absorb LMS has been the solution to so many problems we had experienced in our previous LMS: ease of use, course library, course authoring, tracking, reporting, etc.
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Thought Industries
  • Built in eCommerce pages and purchasing options.
  • Data to drive real-time decision making.
  • Customization options.
  • Team to work with our needs and custom scope.
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Cons
Absorb Software Inc.
  • The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
  • The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
  • more education around Absorb analyze essentials
  • How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
  • Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order
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Thought Industries
  • Lacks the ability to make courses required
  • Cannot pull a report for a course(s) to show who has not started the course
  • Cannot reset gamification or run specific gamification campaigns
  • Although SCORM compliant, SCORM courses often break or do not show as complete on the learner side even when the module is marked as complete on the back end
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Likelihood to Renew
Absorb Software Inc.
We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Usability
Absorb Software Inc.
It is very intuitive, not just from an admin perspective to manage courses and track completions, but also from a learners' perspective. It is very easy to find courses, search for courses, and track personal course progress. The interface is well designed, which makes it simpler for our audience to navigate the portal and find what they are looking for
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
Absorb Software Inc.
We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Performance
Absorb Software Inc.
Absorb LMS's performance is very reliable and consistent. Pages load quickly. Report are generated within a reasonable amount of time (even with significant amounts of data), etc. Nothing seems to slow it down.
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Absorb Software Inc.
[...] is a ROCK star- having her as part of our support team has been a game changer. She is a true problem solver at heart and has an unique ability to retain who we are as a company and match that with what can help us most. She has been a game changer for our internal admin team and is supporting us through a business review to help guide us in the best direction on our constant growth.
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Thought Industries
The customer support and customer success teams are really great. BUT, it is their product team that sends them into a super high rating. The product team has worked with me on several occasions to try to solve the business challenges that I have.
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Online Training
Absorb Software Inc.
Absorb was able to provide an initial training of the platform, covering all our basic needs. Additionally, there are Absorb learning modules available for further learning that can be accessed at anytime. There is also the ability to review Absorb's extensive resource library to find the answers to questions/troubleshooting. Beyond that, we opted for the Premier Support so our organization has access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager.
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Absorb Software Inc.
The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Absorb Software Inc.
All sites provided at least a basic LMS platform, and Talent was probably the closest in terms of features and like-for-like comparison. Ultimately, none of the others had the same level of course creation and it would either have meant outsourcing or spending a significant amount of time building the courses which was not ideal as we would still be paying for the service during this time. Absorb had the best course creation software of all evaluated which is why we chose it, although it was also by far the most expensive of those evaluated.
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Thought Industries
Thought Industries is better on the financial side and as far as ease of use. It is more affordable than Docebo and is more aligned to an external customer use case. Docebo and Tovuti seemed to be more for internal training. Tovuti was less expensive, but it was a little harder to use although it had more quiz features.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Absorb Software Inc.
Seems very expensive for limitations we have experienced.
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Scalability
Absorb Software Inc.
We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Professional Services
Absorb Software Inc.
I believe this question speaks to additional professional service hours that we had built into our contract to work with a set of staff members for purposes of changes or enhancements to our specific instance of Absorb. Again, I have nothing but positive things to say regarding our dealings with people at all levels of the organization. The PMs, the technical experts, the help desk staff are all friendly, knowledgeable, helpful and efficient
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Thought Industries
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Absorb Software Inc.
  • Lighter administrative load, we went from 20-30 support tickets per month to 1 or 2.
  • Our course setup and configuration time now takes less than 5 minutes. In our previous system it took us close to 15 minutes to publish a course.
  • We have been able to push administrative responsibilities to department level administrators, because of the ability to have department level admins, who only have access and control of their department users and content.
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Thought Industries
  • Multiple Months with $20,000 in eCommerce Sales.
  • Site Up Time and Engagement has remained steady for all 4 years.
  • Course authoring is faster and more efficient.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Absorb LMS Screenshots

Screenshot of a company's unique identity with a training interface that is custom-designed for the brand.Screenshot of a company's image and values with a training interface that is tailored to the brand's specific needs.Screenshot of the course creation workflow, that offer a diverse set of formats, including instructional videos, quizzes, and assessments.Screenshot of Absorb's course details page, accessible from the course catalog dashboard, used to give learners an understanding of the course material.Screenshot of learners' progress insights, used to make data-driven decisions with the reporting capabilities of Absorb LMS.Screenshot of course creation with Create AI Beta.

Thought Industries Screenshots

Screenshot of Modern-looking learning sitesScreenshot of MonetizationScreenshot of Reporting Hub