PiiQ by Cornerstone vs. Thinkific

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
PiiQ by Cornerstone
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Cornerstone’s PiiQ is an SMB offering formerly known as Sonar6. PiiQ is aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses and includes core learning management and performance management systems, including content creation, mobile accessibility, and in-product reporting.
$8
per user per month
Thinkific
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Thinkific Plus is a scalable learning platform that’s designed to be easy to use for teams and customers. Thinkific Plus offers enterprise-grade features that scale with the needs of enterprises, and the service includes a people seriously dedicated to helping users to reach their goals.N/A
Pricing
PiiQ by CornerstoneThinkific
Editions & Modules
PiiQ Performance
$8.00
per user per month
PiiQ Learning + Content
$8.00
per user per month
PiiQ Learning + Content & Performance
$15.00
per user per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PiiQ by CornerstoneThinkific
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup Fee$1,000 per installationNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PiiQ by CornerstoneThinkific
Features
PiiQ by CornerstoneThinkific
Learning Management
Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
PiiQ by Cornerstone
6.6
Ratings
21% below category average
Thinkific
-
Ratings
Course authoring6.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Course catalog or library6.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Player/Portal6.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Learning content6.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile friendly7.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Progress tracking & certifications6.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Assignments6.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Compliance management5.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Learning administration6.60 Ratings00 Ratings
Learning reporting & analytics6.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PiiQ by CornerstoneThinkific
Small Businesses
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.6 out of 10
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.6 out of 10
iSpring Learn
iSpring Learn
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Axonify
Axonify
Score 10.0 out of 10
Articulate 360
Articulate 360
Score 9.3 out of 10
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User Ratings
PiiQ by CornerstoneThinkific
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
3.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.5
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
9.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
6.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PiiQ by CornerstoneThinkific
Likelihood to Recommend
Great for managing medium sized teams of people spread over geographically dispersed offices. Not so good for small teams (less than 15). Requires a degree of time and effort to set up correctly to provide useful data for management and a good experience for staff members, but once that effort has been made the results are great.
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Thinkific is well-suited if you want to host an online course and have a variety of materials, such as videos, PDFs, and assignments. A plus is that you can host a community linked to your course, making it easy to give feedback.
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Pros
  • Excellent customer service - when all else is equal, customer service will win the day.
  • Ease of use helps us get everyone on board with the goals and ratings.
  • The analytics are helpful to senior managers - we can compare how managers rate as well as how employees perform.
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  • Enables course creators to deliver high quality courses very fast
  • Offers unlimited hosting for videos included in the subscription price
  • Provides an easy to use administration interface that's powerful and accessible
  • Easy to scale subscription tiers on B2C plans, cost effective highly scaleable B2B plans (Thinkific Plus) ideal for companies who want to start a customer education program
  • Amazing support and account management team - great mindset and people in the teams.
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Cons
  • Being able to select more than one person when approving goals.
  • Options to identify which people managers haven't approved goals, dine a review etc...rather then having to mimic each manager to see how they are going.
  • 360 Feedback to stakeholders outside the business.
  • Being able to remove a role that isn't being used in the organization anymore.
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  • I would add some more blocks for page design to have more options as to what I can do, like a proper gallery where you can open and close images.
  • I would expand the text options within specific blocks, like being able to hit enter inside a text box and having my paragraphs separated if I wanted to.
  • Adding new integrations would be awesome, so you don't have to pass through Zapier. Maybe a ClickFunnels integration?
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Likelihood to Renew
It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.
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We will continue to use Thinkific for our company pieces of training. Until we are able to create our own in house portal, this is an excellent source to have a learning management software tool that is easy to use and easy to implement without much technical training to administer
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Usability
There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.
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Under Site Builder, when trying to add a new section, so many templates appear; however, preview is not shown, which makes it super difficult and time consuming to identify a template that suits the purpose. Customization of certification designs is a bit difficult too. There are limitations to the type of quiz questions I can create - for example, there's no option to have fill in the blank questions.
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Reliability and Availability
So far 100%.
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I've never had any issues with accessing Thinkific but I can see when it has been a problem for others. When I get updates on when they are doing maintenance to their platform I tend to make sure that is not the day I plan to be working on my school so as not to get frustrated
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Performance
The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.
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When it comes to the performance of Thinkific for me I find that it's good but could be better. I tend to think that the larger the files and videos you upload on your courses may add to the impact of it's uploading (not sure if that's actually true or not). But overall the performance of Thinkific via my tablet and desktop is very good when I have a fast speed broadband speed
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Support Rating
My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.
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I rate Thinkific a ten because of its excellent customer service, ease of use, high-quality product, fair price with excellent ROI, and because they keep making improvements. Using Thinkific solved the problems of piecing together our course with various WordPress plugins, iframes, and payment processing software. It's easy to create a course website for people who can't write code.
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Online Training
We bought training provided by 3rd party – it was fabulous.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.

I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads
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The implementation period took time like it would in earning and using any new tool. It was more about being organised, having better time management processes in place and having people you were able to reach out to if you were every able stuck. The other key ting with the implementation period was giving yourself a realistic time scale to get the job completed.
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Alternatives Considered
We did review other systems when we purchased PiiQ but I don't know what these were due to the member of staff no longer being with the company, however, I do not that we chose PiiQ as it was simple to use and that it also had the Performance option available in addition to the learning platform. we knew that this was something we wanted to have in the future which is why we purchased it.
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I think Thinkific is way better than Udemy. The Udemy platform was not user friendly, they require you submitting for approval before you can even upload a course and have so many restrictions. They never even approved my course, nor did they email me as to why. The support is not there like it is for Thinkific. Also, with Udemy, it feels like you are competing with so many people because they are given other options in comparison to you vs on Thinkific, it truly is your own. You do your own marketing and when people come to your landing page, it is all they see. They can't venture off of it to go to the next person who is on Thinkific. I love Thinkific and tell everyone to get on it. People say to me they want to know my ROI before they decide to invest in it. They want to know that it actually works.
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Scalability
No answers on this topic
The opportunities to scale your online course business with Thinkific is endless. They provide a great range of plans with features, integrations and support to suit the needs of any business as different levels. The key here is knowing where to start with the budget you have and then knowing when it's time to scale up and the tools and resources it will require.
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Return on Investment
  • Reviews are generally taking managers less time to prepare because the essential infrastructure is in place. Past reviews are easily retrievable for review if needed.
  • HR administration of the system takes less time than the previous version of Cornerstone (CSOD). HR is still responsible for training new users, but the built-in user guide is more thorough and easier to use.
  • We're starting to see - slowly but surely - more (and hopefully better) interaction between manager and employee.
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  • pre thinkific vs post thinkific launch for sales training, our sales reps are getting their first solo sale on average 0.6 days faster. Before it was 5.7 days on average to sell by themselves, now it is 5.1 days on average accross 1500 sales reps that have completed the training since launching the training in May 2024
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ScreenShots

PiiQ by Cornerstone Screenshots

Screenshot of PiiQ Performance Employee ReviewScreenshot of PiiQ Learning on DevicesScreenshot of PiiQ Manager/Employee Check-insScreenshot of PiiQ 9-box Talent MatrixScreenshot of PiiQ Learning Publish New ContentScreenshot of PiiQ Learning Searchable Library & Self-registration