What do you prefer to quickly onboard employees and customers:
🤔 Learning management systems?
🤔 Product adoption tools?
Or maybe even other alternative products?
Skilljar is a cloud-based learning management system software that aims to bring all the advantages of such tools together. Let’s see if they succeeded, or if you need the alternative products.
In today’s article, I will be covering:
- What Skilljar is,
- Why you might need an alternative for it,
- The top six alternative products of Skilljar,
- A quick summary and last words about the comparisons.
So without further ado, let’s get started with our main product:
What is Skilljar?
Skilljar Customer Education is a user and customer training platform that focuses on external education and customer engagement.
Skilljar’s customers describe the tool as a partner rather than a tool. That is because, unlike any other traditional learning management system, Skilljar focuses on partner engagement and customer retention rather than the training material itself.
Also, Skilljar’s strongest suit is probably the number of integration options it provides.
If you are migrating from another tool, Skilljar won’t make you start all over again. With over 50 different integrations, you won’t have to worry about losing your data.
Although this sounds great, you can see that you have to sacrifice a lot to benefit from the tool thoroughly when it comes to practice.
For instance, since the tool puts customer experience above learning experience, using Skilljar for long-term training projects might disappoint you.
Before I get into detail about the cons of Skilljar, let’s hear it from actual customers:
Skilljar Pricing
Skilljar gives custom quotations to each customer according to their needs.
Skilljar Reviews
Here are some public reviews from Skilljar’s Capterra Page:
👍 Pros:
“The customer service and support is amazing and they also have a huge portal of learning videos and reading material to quickly learning things yourself.”
👎 Cons:
“Looks very old school, we got a lot of negative feedback on this from employees, and management wasn’t going to let us use it as-is for client training.”
Why you need a Skilljar Alternative
1- Steep Learning Curve
Skilljar users agree that the product has a complex UI with many layers to build before your training can go live. The tool has a demo library, the Skilljar Academy, to inspire and guide you, but it’s still a bit tricky to get used to their educational technology.
2- The Design Is Outdated
Skilljar does provide personalized design options and claims to be perfect for a customizable user experience flow.
Still, according to this customer of the business, the tool doesn’t have an easily customizable interface – let alone no-code advanced customization capabilities. So if you are looking for a tool that is not obviously an LMS, Skilljar is not the one for you.
3- Not the Most Comprehensive Learning Platform
It is challenging to get data out of the platform without the help of an API expert, as this customer of Skilljar would agree. As a result, their analytics and activity tracking features might be outperformed by any other software company that provides the same value without needing technical input.
Also, from what seems to be the case based on my research and user reviews, the tool is neither a complete LMS nor a perfect digital adoption and personnel training platform.
For most businesses, Skilljar is unable to help with both learning management and customer guidance fully, and various products honestly do a better job.
Top Skilljar Alternatives
So, after hearing it from real customers and comprehensive research, here are the top 6 alternatives to Skilljar:
- UserGuiding
- Whatfix
- Docebo
- Talent LMS
- Thought Industries
- Learn Upon
Each of these tools has its own strengths and is better in at least one aspect. I’ll go over each tool, how it compares to Skilljar, and when you should prefer them.
Without further ado, let’s start with our first product:
1- UserGuiding – No-code Interactive User Onboarding
UserGuiding is an all-in-one user onboarding system to drive product adoption by helping you create interactive content without a single line of coding.
UserGuiding is far better for automated and continuous onboarding than Skilljar in many ways:
👉 UserGuiding is easy to set up and go live. You can create online training flows in minutes and have a full training program ready in under an hour, using the chrome extension, all by yourself. Skilljar, on the other hand, takes a long time to set up since you need to create a whole new interface all by yourself.
👉 UserGuiding has all the essential features needed to increase revenue with lifetime customers. Some of those features are Checklists, Goal Tracking, Detailed analytics including active users and user-based activity, Checklists, Resource Centers, and Training Portals. Skilljar is also feature-rich, but most of the features are only sales-oriented.
👉 UserGuiding is fully customizable and segmentation-friendly. With its built-in segmentation feature, you can easily create different segments according to profession, language, goal, or training consistency, and customize your guides to blend into your website to have seamless training content, therefore, higher training success.
👉 UserGuiding is one of the most affordable tools on the market, compared to its competitors, and the value it provides, starting from $82/month. Skilljar gives custom pricing upon request. Therefore, deciding whether it will increase your ROI is not clear.
UserGuiding Pricing
- 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
- Basic Plan: $89/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU
- Professional Plan: $389/month when billed annually for up to 20000 MAU with unlimited guides
- Custom Quotation Available for Larger Companies
UserGuiding Reviews
Here are some public reviews of UserGuiding from Capterra:
👍 Pros:
“It’s the easiest tool I’ve used, and the greatest costumer service! You can reach the team any time you want and they’ll help you in a second.”
👎 Cons:
“I initially disliked the pricing, but they have reduced it to a reasonable amount”
UserGuiding also offers free migration services for your in-app content created using other software to minimize your switching costs.
Schedule a demo with one of our experts or start your free trial now:
Don’t Pay a Fortune for Other Tools!
UserGuiding starts from only $89/month.
Create tours, tooltips, and surveys without coding
2- Whatfix vs Skilljar
Whatfix is another customer success tool that focuses on providing advanced data-driven insights.
Just like UserGuiding, Whatfix doesn’t let you create online courses, but it can scale training resources and increase your long-term revenue.
Unlike UserGuiding, Whatfix isn’t non-technical-friendly, and it’s not as easy to maintain. However, the tool might be worth a shot if you have a spare developer and a reasonable amount of time.
Whatfix is definitely a better option than Skilljar if your company is not a small business and can afford extra help. That’s because Whatfix is a seasoned company that is working mostly with enterprises, and is experienced in the field.
Whatfix Pricing
Whatfix doesn’t provide a fixed price, they offer each customer a customized plan, but their prices are said to be starting from $200/month for minimum features.
Whatfix Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Since we created a platform with so much content in TravelContact, Whatfix helps our customers know every detail we offer.”
👎 Cons:
“We would like the information inside the Whatfix platform to have different views, since they use very large boxes that take up a lot of space on the screen.”
3- Docebo vs Skilljar
Docebo Learning Suite is a multi-product LMS and customer education platform to simplify user, customer, and partner training.
Docebo is everything that Skilljar isn’t. Here’s what I mean:
☛ Docebo focuses on sales by increasing content types and class tools, and Skilljar focuses on sales by promoting discounts and up-sell messages.
☛ Docebo has AI and automation support, while Skilljar focuses on integrations and data migration.
☛ Docebo has a great interface and a good design.
☛ Docebo is easy to learn but difficult to master, Skilljar isn’t that easy to learn according to many users, but once you get through the basics, there isn’t much to master.
Docebo Pricing
Docebo gives custom quotations to each customer according to their needs.
Docebo Reviews
👍 Pros:
“We’ve completely bent Docebo to our desires and set up various views for different roles and departments, as well as customer reporting.”
👎 Cons:
“The software is growing and evolving quickly, it sometimes feels like they are moving quickly onto the next product rather than fully developing what they were working on.”
4- TalentLMS vs Skilljar
TalentLMS is one of the most popular and most successful LMS software on the market.
If your customer base expects a regular LMS and not an onboarding tool, TalentLMS could be a good alternative to Skilljar.
The core capabilities of TalentLMS are:
- Designing courses for various kinds of students
- Assigning work
- Gathering up assignments
- Implementing blended learning strategies
- Monitoring their progress
- And commenting on their progress.
TalentLMS Pricing
- Free Plan: Up to 5 users and ten courses
- Starter Plan: $59/month, up to 40 users
- Basic Plan: $129/month, up to 100 users
- Plus Plan: $249/month, up to 500 users
- PremiumPlan: $429/month, up to 1000 users
TalentLMS Reviews
👍 Pros:
“We can customize the branches to our clients’ needs and it is fast and easy to set up.”
👎 Cons:
“The inability to add any content, including a video with the mobile app, is a real bummer.”
5- Thought Industries vs Skilljar
Thought Industries is another hybrid platform that focuses on both learning management and onboarding/education solutions.
If you are happy with what Skilljar provides but want it to look more modern, you should consider giving Thought Industries a go.
The two tools are surprisingly similar, with both pros and cons.
What makes Thought Industries better is its UX/UI. The tool has a modern look and is easier for the user to follow.
But lust like Skilljar, this tool has a steep learning curve, might give you API and data extraction problems, and is not non-technical friendly.
Thought Industries Pricing
Thought Industries provides custom quotations to each customer according to their needs.
Thought Industries Reviews
👍 Pros:
“The platform offers a robust content building and management interface. We don’t need to purchase another tool to create our courses, we can do it all within TI.“
👎 Cons:
“The developer experience isn’t great. No deep theming options, Git integration for code/change management, deployments, etc.”
6- Learn Upon vs Skilljar
Learn Upon is another one of the online training providers on our list that provides beautiful training experiences.
To be honest, Learn Upon is neither the most beautiful nor the most affordable tool on this list.
Learn Upon is better than Skilljar because of its extraordinary customer service.
The Learn Upon team is the most friendly that you can find, leaving no room for errors or dissatisfaction. That’s why more than ten users indicated they switched to Learn Upon after trying other LMS tools, including Docebo and SAP Litmos.
Learn Upon Pricing
- Essential Pack: 1,249/month for 2 portals and up to 150 MAU
- Premium Pack: 1,999/month for 3 portals and up to 500 MAU
- Enterprise Pack: custom quotation for more than 500 MAU
Learn Upon are billed annually by default
Learn Upon Reviews
👍 Pros:
“They are integral to my business now and I deeply appreciate the ongoing support and product developments which make the system bigger and better every year.”
👎 Cons:
“I have noticed a few issues where users are enrolled in learning paths or courses and their dashboard will not display the content.”
Conclusion
Skilljar is not a bad tool, it’s just not good enough.
- UserGuiding can help you create better and easier onboarding flows for partners, users, and customers while keeping your budget happy.
- Whatfix can provide you with LMS-quality customer service while providing you with better onboarding options.
- Docebo can be your lifesaver if you need a traditional LMS but don’t like Skilljar at all.
- TalentLMS is an affordable option for those who are new to the LMS industry.
- Thought Industries is the most modern-looking if you need customization options.
- Learn Upon has the best customer support among all the LMS.
Simple, Affordable, and Powerful User Onboarding & Survey Software.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who uses Skilljar?
Training managers, customer success managers, customer education teams, and anyone else who needs an LMS or an onboarding platform can use Skilljar Customer Education.
Who is the CEO of Skilljar?
A former member of the Amazon team, Sandi Lin is the co-founder and CEO of Skilljar.
Who owns Skilljar?
The CEO and Co-Founder, Sandi Lin, founded Skilljar in 2013 along with two other colleagues after leaving her position at Amazon.
