15 Best Learning Management Systems (LMS) Software
Delve into the list of best LMS and choose the one that fits your needs
What is LMS?
What is Learning Management Systems?
A learning management system (LMS) is explicitly designed to create, manage and deliver educational content. LMS is used for online training, tracking, reporting and administering the learning activities. Rather than manually managing the learning programs and tracking the learning outcomes, LMS software automates the entire learning process, from start to finish. It streamlines online learning delivery for educational institutions and businesses, allowing for a more connected and accessible learning experience for learners. This learning technology improves overall learning experience with powerful features and tools. The best LMS software provides an effective way to improve employee engagement and retention while increasing employee skills.
LMS Chart
Comparison Chart of Top 15 LMS Software
| LMS Software | Integration | SCORM compliance | Pricing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paradiso | 100+ Integrations with CRM, HRIS, ERP, e-commerce and more | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | N.A. |
| Absorb | Salesforce, BambooHR, Zoom etc. | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | N.A. |
| Mindflash | Shopify, Salesforce, and more | SCORM Compliant | $3500/year. |
| SkyPrep | SSO, e-commerce, team management, webinars etc. | SCORM 1.2 | $199 – $499 USD per month |
| Knowmax | CRM, Salesforce, Zendesk etc. | SCORM Compliant | N.A. |
| TalentLMS | Zapier, BambooHR, e-commerce and more | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | $29 – $349 USD per month |
| Docebo | e-commerce, Lectora, web conference tools, and more | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | USD $10 per customer plus one-time registration fees |
| Moodle | SIS, ERPs, CRMs and more | SCORM Compliant | $80 – $500 USD per year |
| Litmos | Zendesk, BambooHR, Webinar platform etc. | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | $6 – $2500 USD |
| iSpring | Webinar, SSO | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | $167 – $677 USD per year |
| Canvas | LTI, Webinar | SCORM Compliant | USD $22.50 per user per year. |
| Continu | SSO, Zoom, Slack and more | SCORM Compliant | N.A. |
| Blackboard | LTI, Zoom, PowerSchool and more | SCORM Compliant | N.A. |
| Joomla | e-commerce, webinar, etc | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | $2500 USD per year for school. |
| LearnUpon | CRM, HRIS, webinar and more | SCORM 1.2, 2004 | N.A. |
LMS Works
How does an LMS works?
A well implemented learning management system automates the entire learning process from loading training materials to reporting and assessing the training program. How smooth this whole process works for you will depend on the type of LMS software you use for your organization or education institute. The LMS process includes the following functions:
Creating learning program or courses to educate your learners in a specific area or to teach certain skills
Tracking these learning programs' completion to check that student or employees have completed the training or not and how they fared on assessments.
Providing certification to learners who have completed the training program in areas relevant to their role.
Generating analytics and robust reporting to provide the organizations more understandings of the success of their training programs.
When you assign a specific course to your learner, they can take the course at their own pace and time and repeat the modules until they are ready to move on to the next one. As a teacher or training manager, you can add feature like blended learning, gamification and more to make learning engaging and interesting.
Best LMS
What is the reason you need an LMS?
A learning management system can provide many benefits to the organizations. It helps to streamline learning activities. Today most the organizations need an automated learning process to train their employee as it the most convenient way. We will discuss the advantages of using Best LMS platforms below.
Saves training cost
A learning management system is a cost-effective investment option as you don’t need to spend on instructors’ fees, conference hall, other admin costs and more. It certainly reduced the training cost and increased your profitability. LMS requires an initial investment and gives a good ROI and reduces L&D expenses.
Saves learning content in one place
This software lets you store all your content in one place and reducing the risk of losing important data. It also makes easy to organize and update the learning content easily with a single click. Users can access data, information, anything forms anywhere. You can easily update the learning material centrally, and the user can access the updated data easily.
Easy tracking and reporting
Top LMS platforms enables you to generate training reports easily, measure the learner’s performance and effectiveness by utilizing an LMS for online training, and easily track goal progress, knowledge gains, ROI, and more. It provides valuable insights and analytics which help you to make an important decision. Reporting tools can instantly compile real-time data and deliver it in detailed reports with charts and graphs.
Learn anytime anywhere
You can learn anytime, anywhere through mobile devices like smartphones, laptops, tablets and more. Modern LMS platforms have the portable technology and intuitive interfaces that will adapt to any screen’s size and shape. Some top LMS companies also provide a mobile app that can be downloaded with full or limited functionality. LMS provides more flexibility that makes it easier for employees to go through learning material at their convenience even when they travel.
Engage and motivate learners
You can add fun elements like gamification and social learning in the learning program to keep your learners motivated. It helps to create healthy competition among the users and encourage them to achieve the learning goals. To make your learners stay focused, add some interactivity and game-based learning like quizzes, awards, and internal competitions with an LMS help.
Better retention rate
Build your employees specific skills by offering online training programs that help them to gain more knowledge. Such a learning program gives them chance to focus more on career development, which ultimately improve employee retention rate. This can be a win-win situation if you build courses that improve company knowledge and help employees gain new competencies or develop their existing skills without moving to a different role.
Pros and Cons
What are the pros and cons of an LMS?
Pros
It makes learning easy and flexible as it allows you to learn anytime anywhere at your pace and time.
An LMS can make learning interesting and fun by using features like Gamification, Social learning, blended learning and more.
If you want to develop your employees' specific skill, you can assign specialized course to them and make the entire learning experience more personalized.
You can get detailed reports and analytics of employee performance, which help identify their expertise and where they are lacking.
With the help of an LMS the entire learning process becomes digital, thus it saves lots of money and time.
This learning software integrate collaborative learning that motivates the learner to achieve their goals and share it with other team members.
Cons
The biggest drawback of using LMS is that you can only teach virtually without personal touch, but there are many things or topics that need physical presence that could not be accomplished through it.
Traditional classroom brings more social interaction and lively group discussion such things is absent in online learning.
The eLearning concept is adopted by young generation but it is not easy for everyone and some adults cannot access it as it requires computer literacy.
List of Best LMS Software
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Paradiso LMS
Best for: If you are looking for best LMS platform for corporate training with customized learning needs, this LMS can meet your all learning goals. This LMS also offers best eLearning platform for educational institutes with lots of advanced options and plug-ins.
Outstanding features:
Paradiso LMS offers best features such as gamification, blended learning, multi-tenancy, mobile learning and more to deliver efficient online training programs.- This best LMS platform provides over 100 valuable integration with ecommerce, CRMs, HRIS, ERPs can simplify your online learning experiences.
- It offers customized learning paths, robust reports, and dashboards for reviewing performance.
Deployment type: Cloud hosted
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Absorb LMS
Best for: Absorb LMS is one of the best LMS which suited well for businesses training including onboarding and development of employees, customers and partners training, and more. It offers multiple languages and a content library with over 1000 prebuilt courses on various topics.
Outstanding features:
- Absorb LMS offer Social learning feature that keep your employee engaged and motivated
- A multilingual LMS with user friendly interface which offers sheer feature like scheduling reports, mobile learning and rich course library
- This LMS facilitates rapid onboarding programs and employee training.
Deployment type: On-Premise, Cloud hosted
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Mindflash
Best for: One of the best LMS software, Mindflash is ideal for training of customers, partners, resellers or employees of large companies. It allows you to edit live courses easily and utilize existing content including voice, video, animation and more.
Outstanding features:
- When it comes to Onboarding, Virtual Classroom, and Compliance Training, Mindflash LMS works best.
- It offers easy course creation and web conferencing tools to make learning more interactive.
- This LMS come up with blended learning, mobile learning and offers excellent integration with necessary systems.
Deployment type: Cloud hosted
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SkyPrep
Best for: Small companies with thousands of employees can benefit from this training platform. It is a great onboarding tool and is also a good fit for educational institutes. SkyPrep allows you to build and store an unlimited number of courses and assessments.
Outstanding features:
- It offers powerful integration that enhances learning experience. it supports multi languages, advanced reporting and allows for ease of tracking learner progress.
- SkyPrep offers with white-labeling options which allows you to customize your domain address, logo, and choose a different color scheme.
- This top LMS software provides course creation tools to unlimited training content with real-time reporting. It allows you to customize the course as per the customer’s requirement.
Deployment type: Open API and Cloud hosted
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Knowmax
Best for: It is best suited for SMBs and growing industries like Telecom & Media, Travel, Healthcare, ISP/DTH and other organizations who are looking beyond LMS & Quiz management. It helps in faster onboarding of employees that saves your time and reduces cost.
Outstanding features:
- Knowmax is one of the top LMS platforms which offers real time reporting and analytic of learning activities course wise, profile wise and assessment wise.
- This LMS comes up with white labeling option, where you can customize your LMS as per your choice and you can change logo, colors, theme and more.
- Create unlimited diversified content by suing its robust course creation tools and you can add quizzes and games for better learning outcomes.
Deployment type: Cloud, On-premise, Hybrid & Open APIs.
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TalentLMS
Best for: TalentLMS will fit the learning needs of any organization and academic institute no matter its size or training type. It provides best onboarding training experience and automatically issue certificates and re-assign training at the appropriate time.
Outstanding features:
- The automation engine feature of TalentLMS allows you to create automatic events without your supervision.
- It has powerful course creation tool that can create courses in just few clicks. to make more interesting you can use its best features like, gamification, blended learning, personalized learning path and more.
- A well-integrated LMS offers better mobile accessibility, user-friendly interface, and great flexibility to create custom reports.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted, Open API
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Docebo
Best for: With the power of Artificial Intelligence, this best LMS software is ideal for employee training and a good fit for academic institutions. Those who want to sell their courses online, Docebo offers a perfect market place to attract more customers.
Outstanding features:
- Docebo facilitates social learning, mobile learning, gamified training programs, and blended learning features that creates continuous learning environment in your organization.
- It offers robust reporting feature which allows you to generate scheduled reports and custom reports.
- This LMS offers customization functionality and you can create your own mobile app. It has built in market place where you
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted, Open API
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Moodle
Best for: It is the best free LMS suited well for educational institute, K-12 schools, higher education institutes, business, non-profit, government, and other institutions to meet their unique learning needs.
Outstanding features:
- Moodle provide advanced course creation tools and you can add quizzes, surveys, Wikis, glossaries, and more. It also facilitates collaborative learning and allows learners to learn together.
- It offers third-party plugins and integrations which provides learning analytics and enables you to learner’s track grades, activity, course completions, and competencies.
- Moodle offer mobile app that helps to learn even when you are offline. It has personalized dashboard and multilingual capabilities.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted, Open API
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Litmos
Best for: SAP Litmos is suited for large scale organization worldwide with more than hundred employees. It is also used by educational institutes, schools to small enterprises this LMS has end-to-end solutions for all types of organizations that want to provide effective training to the employees.
Outstanding features:
- SAP Litmos offer virtual instructor-led training sessions or webinar along with assessments and quizzes to benchmark knowledge retention
- It has amazing reporting feature that can be downloaded and scheduled for export to specific email address as CSV or PDF documents.
- you can add gamification in course to make it more appealing. This LMS comes up with simple mobile app, user friendly interface, many valuable integrations and add-ons.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted, Open API
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iSpring
Best for: iSpring works best for small to medium businesses and academic institutes. This is one of the top LMS platforms for corporate training which is ideal for onboarding employees, continuous training and provide online certification with honest results.
Outstanding features:
- It offers easy user interface, advanced content and user management, and robust reporting feature that makes this LMS popular.
- iSpring comes up with great flexibility to customize your LMS. It has seamless integration that provides advanced data of your learner along with advanced reporting.
- Get the enjoyable learning experience on both desktop and mobile with simple user interface which is not cluttered with too many buttons or menus.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted
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Canvas
Best for: Canvas is best open source LMS, suited well for education and specially designed to better engage users in the teaching and learning processes and increases the productivity of its users. Canvas has introduced Arc, a new-generation tool that makes educational videos more collaborative.
Outstanding features:
- It has powerful course creation tools to create engaging learning program. This LMS has features like collaborative learning, gamification and more to enhance the overall learning experience.
- Canvas LMS offers comprehensive and high-quality mobile learning experiences. It offers native mobile apps that allows you to get access from anywhere at any time.
- This LMS has integrated tools like Google documents, Ether pad and media reporting for better customer experience.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted
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Continu
Best for: Continu works best for Large scale organization with teams over 100 employees. It serves a wide range of industries and has a global client base. It allows you to create custom learning path, make data driven assessment, and centralized storage of learning content.
Outstanding features:
- This LMS comes up with several important features like, blended learning, Built-In course authoring tool, certification management, gamification, mobile learning, social learning, video conferencing tool and more
- With advanced reporting feature you can track and report learning activities of the users.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted
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Blackboard
Best for: Blackboard LMS works best for Director of Learning & Development, Operations, HR Directors, CLOs, Corporate Trainer, Instructional Designer, Sales Trainer. It offers collaboration tools, a mass-notification system and a social media manager for K-12 institutions.
Outstanding features:
- It has intuitive user interface and robust features like virtual classroom tools, social learning, advanced reporting and mobile learning that improves overall learning experiences.
- You can create course on blackboard easily with few clicks and add some interesting videos, text, images and note to make it engaging
- Blackboard has Open Content tool for creating, finding and sharing resources without having to import or export anything, even users can also insert copyrights to their content.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted, Open API
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Joomla
Best for: Joomla is the best LMS platform for professional individuals, educators, and organizations that are looking to provide effective online learning to their learners, employees, and customers. It has self-registration and self-enrollment, import export users, customizable user profiles, global and local user groups.
Outstanding features:
- Joomla LMS allows you to create powerful courses using wide range of file types like audio, video, web links, and more. You can also add some quizzes with built-in quizzes and surveys feature.
- You can easily track learner performance through grading and assessment scales, course status, learning paths and activity statistics. It has advanced reporting feature that will provide learner progress level to course completion time and material access details.
- This LMS has seamless integration with various platforms which enhances the overall learning experiences. You can even sell your courses on this LMS as it integrates with some well-known e-commerce apps.
Deployment type: On-Premise
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LearnUpon
Best for: LearnUpon is one of the best LMS software, works great for organizations that need to train partners, customers, and businesses. It delivers impactful training to SMBS, educational institute and other organizations.
Outstanding features:
- LearnUpon LMS enables you to create multiple learning portals for training employees, partners, and customers all in separate and personalized environments.
- It provides advanced social learning features and user can have their profile to participate in conversations and respond to learning topics in the discussion forum.
- This LMS comes up with several integration, multiple plugged-in, intuitive user interface and robust reporting features.
Deployment type: Cloud-Hosted, Open API
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LMS Pricing
Learning Management Systems Pricing
The cost of an LMS software plays a crucial role while selecting the one. It usually priced on two factors, The number of users and functionality. The more user using the system and the greater the depth and breadth of functionality, the higher the price. Below are LMS pricing alternative:
Pay per user
This pricing method is useful for those organizations who know the exact number of users taking online training.
Pay per active users
Unlike the previous price model, this method involves a payment based on active users and not for all the users registered, just for active users. You will only be charged for the users that log into the system and take the courses during the pay period.
Licensing
In this payment method, unlimited user can use the LMS by paying licensing fees for a fix period like, a month or a year.
On-premise
The LMS self-hosted on the company’s server or on third-party servers, which allows for more customization and scalability with other locally hosted apps. In this you need to pay a one-time upfront cost and setup fees for installing an LMS.
Free LMS
LMS companies also offer a Free LMS option for beginners or even small companies that require simple training with a great eLearning tool.
In cloud based LMS, you need to pay subscription fees where the LMS is accessed via web while perpetual licenses are more common with on-premise solutions. Most of the advanced LMS fall into cloud based and subscription-priced category. There are the variety of pricing plans available in the market but it is necessary for you to study your options and invest in the best one seriously. Paradiso solution, one of the best LMS providers, offers various options of pricing model, the option discussed above are also included in their pricing policy.
Wrapping Up
Wrapping up
These were some of the best learning management systems. These best LMS solutions come with their unique capabilities. Choosing the right option depends on your business requirements, budget, learning style, and size of your team. If you want to purchase an LMS and not sure which one is the best LMS software in the market, try Paradiso’s free demo today and see how easily you can deliver an effective online learning program for your organization.
