Sakai vs. Skilljar by Gainsight

Sakai is well suited for any size institution or training organization looking to use an extremely flexible, well-supported and extensible LMS that doesn't sacrifice budget for useless options and extra features. The community that is Sakai (by way of students, instructors, teachers, administrators, information technology professionals, instructional designers and developers) all make Sakai what it is. Sakai can be paired with multiple LTI tools, streaming services, conferencing and plagiarism detection platforms and student information systems to ultimately help students meet with success. As we have a very limited IT staff Sakai is hosted off-site, but are still able to provide support to our faculty with very little extra effort. While Sakai is not as well-known as platforms like Blackboard or Canvas, because we're one of just a few clients, requests to our host for second or third tier assistance are resolved pretty quickly. We recently had an instance where all of our users were unable to login; this turned out to be an issue with host configuration rather than Sakai itself. Sakai is not perfect: "Auto-saved draft" text disappears sometimes, question pools are difficult to share among faculty, the forums interface could be modernized and progress analytics surfaced more easily to students.

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.

Incentivized

• User friendly, easy to navigate
• Interactive friendly. You can link other resources to help students learn the course concepts better.
• Stable platform. There are a few updates from time to time but it has never gone down in my years of using the LMS.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• While the check box to send an email when you send a message is helpful, there have been times that teachers forgot to check that box, so students didn't get important assignments/announcements.
• Discussion forums can be fun, but it's annoying to read other people's comments since you have to click into each person's comment, & it always marks the comments as new, even if you've read them.
• I think it would be helpful if Sakai warned you before submitting an assignment how many submissions or when the assignment is due, before hitting submit.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Sakai is a good general learning management system - it is not leading edge but rather a stable system with standard learning management system features. It can be fairly easily customized and is fairly easy to learn from both student learning and faculty administrative vantage points. New paradigms for online learning though are emergent so the current field should also be investigated with competitors.

Incentivized

I like what you are using and how we are doing it. Also, changing systems is a lot of work

Incentivized

When faculty are preparing courses from term to term, a portion of the content is static within a specific discipline. The time it takes to import past lessons into new versions of Sakai can be an inefficient use of my time. When I want to add new content and edit from the old content, it's reliant upon me to cut and paste the content from term to term rather than simply import and edit from a backup.

Incentivized

The overall usability is great as the software is very easy to learn and navigate. After just 1 week of "playing" around in the system I felt very comfortable using it and teaching others to use it as well. Customers have also mentioned Skilljar is a much better than out previous vendor

Incentivized

Since Sakai is open-source their documentation is often lacking and support is absolutely needed onsite. Internal documentation is more important with Sakai than other services. The Sakai community is fun, passionate, engaged, and absolutely doing their best, but it's an uphill battle against the current market and trends.

Incentivized

The support team is great at Skilljar. Not perfect, but that can't be expected. Everyone I've worked with has been friendly, attentive, and fairly quick to respond/act. They also have a pretty sturdy set of Knowledge Base articles as well to self serve.

Incentivized

No, I don't

Incentivized

Do a good job of preparing your internal teams (IT, Salesforce, etc.) about the work they will have in the process

Incentivized

Before using Sakai, we used Blackboard. Ultimately, I think moving to Sakai was a financial decision (it was cheaper), but I believe it ended up being better accepted by faculty and students as well. At the time (this was several years ago), Blackboard's UI wasn't as user-friendly and there were issues with administrating it. I don't think most of campus used it, actually. We changed to Sakai and haven't looked back.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Our Sakai costs are about 10% (ten percent) what it would cost for the big name LMS. For a school with a budget. this is a deciding factor.
• We can more easily afford more online programs to attract more students.
• Hard-won resources can go to needy places in the institution rather than to the online infrastructure.

Incentivized

• Having Skilljar is improving retention—customers who completed recommended training made up 85% of our Q2'23 renewals.
• Customers who completed the recommended training make up 84% of our healthiest accounts and we've seen a 15% decrease in support ticket volume.
• Since launching Skilljar, we've seen a 16% increase in active users.