Brightspace is an academic and corporate learning management platform. It provides core e-learning features, as well as mobile accessibility and granular personalization and analytics insights.
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Skilljar by Gainsight
Score8.5 out of 10
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Skilljar’s Customer Education LMS Platform is a solution to educate, engage, and retain everyone a business interacts with. An external LMS for customer and partner education, it is a Gainsight solution since the 2025 acquisition.
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Pricing
D2L Brightspace
Skilljar by Gainsight
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
D2L Brightspace
Skilljar by Gainsight
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Must contact vendor for pricing information. 30-day free trial is available.
If you're an educational institution (K-12, Higher Ed, etc.), this is an amazing tool, and it will provide you all the functionality to support anything you may want and need it to do. If you are looking at Brightspace as a tool for corporate training, I'm not sure exactly how good or bad it will be for you. My guess would be that it likely depends on your organization's size. Along that line, what I can speak to is how we use it for our customized training and in-house professional development/training, and it works fantastically for that. While we primarily use it for normal higher ed coursework, we regularly do training and professional development for all of our employees and I manage those along with our HR department. Because we use it for many other things as well, all of our employees are familiar with the product, which makes our trainings go that much smoother and makes my job that much easier.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Skilljar is fantastic for structured onboarding processes. If you're looking to streamline and standardize the onboarding experience for your customers, especially for software or complex products, this platform is a gem. It allows you to create step-by-step courses guiding users through functionalities, reducing confusion and accelerating their learning curve.When you need versatility in content delivery, Skilljar is spot-on. Whether it's video tutorials, interactive quizzes, downloadable resources, or live webinars, the platform accommodates various formats. It's perfect for accommodating different learning styles and ensuring engagement.
For scenarios that demand highly complex simulations or immersive learning experiences, Skilljar's capabilities might fall short. While it supports interactive elements, extremely sophisticated simulations might require additional specialized software or platforms.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Allowing users to embed content links from YouTube or Google Drive enables learners to experience a richer lesson.
Providing a powerful editor that allows developers to also include content from Adobe Stock as well as textbook publishers and cloud storage companies gives more power and creative ability to instructors.
Providing scaling for mobile and traditional computer systems ensures students will not have issues on the go.
The customization of home pages and groups enable courses to be used for small training sessions with breakout groups, large courses with separate sections, and even just more engaging courses that present themed icons and logos.
Unlimited courses, learning paths, quizzes, pages, plans, and certifications
Ease of use for students, administrators, and content creators
Customer Success and Service are top notch. The CSMs are genuinely committed to helping you achieve your metrics and goals
Asking for and listening to customer feedback for enhancements
Developer Center where people with little to no coding experience can learn how to use and apply HTML templates and code snippets to customize your site
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
One can feel a bit rushed on the Brightspace platform during the log-out period. Security requirements may require this, but it makes end-users more conscious about getting through content than taking notes.
From my experience, there is not a direct connection between the platform and Outlook.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Would love to see parent/child courses so that when something is updated in the parent course that change is automatically reflected in the clones of that course.
Features that allow for the translation of content to allow access to content across languages.
Re-onboarding process when the usage of Skilljar changes hands within out company in order to address knowledge gaps.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I would never give any system a perfect score. In the technology environment today we need to be constantly looking at ways to improve the user experience and LMS companies like Desire2Learn need to know that we have options today with other systems and they need to stay current with features and listen to their customers.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
Overall, the learning environment works as expected. However, there are plenty of bugs. For example, for a few versions, trying to print out a PDF from the Content screen in several browsers would produce a blank page. We inform D2L support about these issues, most of which are known issues. However, they are very slow to respond. D2L seems to spend more time selling than actually coding and testing their product. Most of the issues are not major -- however, there have been a few that are unbelievable. In fact, this past week we had a sudden issue where the "Submit" button in quizzes would not appear if users had a certain browser/operating system combination. This is a major problem, if students cannot submit their exams! D2L is slow to respond to these kinds of situations, which do occur more often than I would like.
The learning curve for Skilljar is not too steep, and I've renewed our contract twice now. I've been able to add additional administrators and get them up to speed on platform functionality within a day. Plus, Skilljar provides awesome resources to help you learn how to use is. The Help Center has articles for almost everything, and when in doubt, their amazing CSMs (like ours, ...) provide exemplary support/advice.
Both students and instructor enjoy the 24-hoiur access. After, all isn't that the point of online learning. As an instructor located in an Eastern time zone state it is great to connect with students located in a Pacific time zone state. I have gotten comments about the early hours I am in the course room grading assignments . . . 4:00 a.m. PST; 7:00 a.m. EST So, it's sleep time for my students and "first cup of coffee" time for me.
I have had excellent support from Desire2Learn. Any ticket that I submit is acknowledged immediately and the correction is usually almost as quick. We use this for thousands of classes and it is pretty well liked by both faculty and students. We have been using it for almost 4 years now and most of our instructors have become pretty proficient with it.
I have opened several support cases in the past and at times felt like little was being done to resolve the issues I was having. For example, when searching the use against a training credit, Skilljar said the code was fully used, yet only 1 had been used. The support team seemed to not have interest in learning why this was happening and ensuring it does not happen again. The issue was resolved with this particular case, but I have no idea if it was the only training credit having this issue. At times I feel like the issues we encounter do not seem as important to the support team
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
The training provided online did not, necessarily, fit the version of the system that I was using. Screens were somewhat different and not all options were readily available. This could have been due to customization on the part of my institution however, I rather believe it was due to version changes and training materials not yet being updated.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
I have used Blackboard Learn 8 and 9. I am currently learning about Canvas. Blackboard is overall much clunkier and lacks the intuitive feel in some parts of D2L. Its grade book is much harder to control and manipulate than D2L's. Its navigation menu can be more radically modified from the default than D2L's, but this doesn't seem that useful to me. Discussions in Blackboard can be more easily reorganized than in D2L, but no grading of discussions is possible. Blackboard Assignments is a good innovation which allows markup directly in the students' submissions, but it displays student work in a confusing manner that doesn't allow for any customization, and its markup options need further tweaking. Furthermore, no rubrics can be used in Blackboard in any way to grade any kind of work (that I am aware of). Overall, I would choose D2L over Blackboard.
Skilljar provides stronger customization features, more code snippet options, more styling tools, and more effective integrations. These include Credly, Salesforce, and SCORM. Additionally, the catalog is all part of the same system, making it easy to manage. The analytics tools are also more robust, and the customer service is much more helpful and responsive
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
During my first semester working with Desire2Learn the integrated learning management system was more down than up. This meant reconfiguring assignment due dates, frustration for both the instructor, students, and help desk staff. After an upgrade, Desire2Learn has been reliable.
I cannot speak to whether this system is less expensive than the more fully featured Blackboard, but employees are far less efficient, frustrated, and require frequent calls to the help center to set up fairly simple course templates.
I have been asked to consider teaching courses which will be completely online at my current institution. I have done such online courses several times at other universities, but I have decided Desire2Learn is too frustrating and cumbersome to do so. I am now exploring using Google Drive to teach a course online. Otherwise, I will not teach online until required or I find an alternate system.
Our customers seem to be getting onboarded efficiently. Giving our customers a good experience helps us retain them longer.
So far, we are still not able to come up with solid metrics that it provides evidence of ROI. If Skilljar could somehow come up with clear, actionable metrics about customer success and how that relates to ROI then I think it would be vastly better. To be fair, we roll the cost of using Skilljar in the overall price, otherwise, we would charge customers and have a revenue stream to measure.
A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info
