Udemy vs Cornerstone LMS

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Our analysts compared Udemy vs Cornerstone LMS based on data from our 400+ point analysis of LMS Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

Udemy is an online learning platform with over 40 million students. Over 80% of the top Fortune 100 companies use it. Lessons are self-paced and recorded by industry specialists. The subjects include business, design, developing and programming, marketing, music, personal development, photography, IT and more. Other courses are more tailored to specific, in-demand and professional skill sets like cyber security, ethical hacking, financial analysis, graphic design, machine learning, Adobe Photoshop, PMP, SQL and web development.

Once purchased, classes are available to the user indefinitely. Learners can reference them for a refresher. Overall, it has 50,000 instructors and 130,000 courses taught in more than 60 languages from over 190 different countries. To date, it’s seen over 245 million enrollments.
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Cornerstone LMS is designed to help organizations create, deliver and manage employee training programs. It lets you create personalized learning experiences, facilitate real-time collaboration, and track learner and team performance. Features include content management, personalized learning, HR integration, reporting and insights, and compliance training.

User reviews generally commend its ease of use, scalability and effectiveness in improving employee engagement and knowledge retention. When compared to other LMS platforms, Cornerstone stands out with its strong focus on user experience, diverse feature set and insightful reporting capabilities.

While its pricing varies based on the specific modules and features chosen, it typically falls within the mid-range of similar products, offering a good balance of value and functionality.

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Product Insights

  • Upskilled Workforce: Identifies staff with the right abilities and navigates the continuously changing duties in the modern workplace. Provides an easy, affordable talent upgrade for organizations with competency gaps. Courses are skill-based and taught by experts.
  • Culture of Learning: Teaches and trains employees with a variety of self-paced classes. This allows an organization to promote education affordably. Allows companies to give more time and focus to development opportunities. Creates a culture of continuous improvement.
  • Increased Efficiency: Allows workers to improve skills and become more efficient at their job. Increased automation levels make it a massive time and money saver, especially given the fast rate at which jobs change in the modern era. Lets HR staff focus less on manual information input and more on advanced staff development.
  • Happier Workforce: Lets employees acquire new skills and grow in their job, one of the top requests for employees in any workforce. Through a course library, users can expand their minds, meet career goals and feel better about their place of employment. Showcases the level of dedication with an investment in people.
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  • Exceptional Online Course Selling and Learning Analytics Features: In our analysis, Cornerstone scored exceptionally well for features that help you sell courses online, generate analytical reports, enable learning on the mobile app and gamify training activities. All the basics are available out of the box — from course selling and subscription management to mobile course tracking and custom reports.
  • Helps Identify and Fill Skill Gaps: Identify top talent and create development paths today with Cornerstone Succession.
    • Bird’s Eye View: Visualize employees on a customizable grid with filters and intuitive color-coding to easily spot high-potential talent and those at risk.
    • Resume Profiles: Use highly configurable pages to specify and view the qualifications, interests and career aspirations of employees.
    • Succession Snapshot: Access key succession metrics such as performance, successors, impact of loss, potential and probability of loss on a configurable dashboard.
    • Succession Tasks: Set up forms and workflows to collect relevant succession information from managers throughout the year.
    • Talent Search: Conduct attribute-based searches using resume data to find matches among high-potential employees.
    • Talent Pools: Filter and search within manually created collections of employees based on your talent searches.
  • Powers AI-driven Learning: Identify skills gaps, develop skill development opportunities and retain top talent with Cornerstone Galaxy, the AI-powered Workforce Agility platform. By leveraging AI, Galaxy provides actionable insights into your employee’s skills, and helps you make data-driven decisions about your training program.
  • Award-Winning LMS: In the SelectHub Awards 2024, Cornerstone won best-in-class honors for assessments, user management and gamification, and integrations and extensibility.
  • Helps Deliver Immersive Learning Experiences: Cornerstone leverages XR simulations to immerse employees in realistic work scenarios and develop their skills. It offers secure, effective simulations of customer service situations and builds emotional confidence through authentic, controlled conversations. Additionally, the platform facilitates virtual hands-on learning, allowing employees to acquire new skills and adapt to new tools without interrupting their current workflows.
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  • Class Creation and Management: Manages and creates lectures, text, multimedia, slides, videos and additional resources bundled together for lessons. Offers testing and assignment options like quizzes, practice tests and coding exercises. The license for courses never expires and learners can finish at their own pace.
  • Instructor Capabilities: Sells classes and accepts payment through the solution via PayPal or Payoneer when students enroll. Designs lessons to help people advance skills, upgrade careers or explore hobbies. Offers training that details how to build units, curriculum pages, an instructor dashboard and others. Last, allow students to connect with instructors via messaging, Q&As and announcements. Instructors own all the rights to the class material.
  • Devices: Operates on laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile. Works on both iOS and Android. By downloading classes, users can watch them offline and view them with Chromecast or Apple TV.
  • Certifications: Sends a certificate of completion when users complete paid classes for reimbursement. Showcase talent or dole out bragging rights. Certifications aren’t available for free courses or ones that only have practice exams.
  • Affiliates: Promotes an affiliate program for organizations or individuals who want to promote courses on their blog or website. Users make a commission for each sale.
  • Subjects: Offers a variety of courses on different topics such as:
    • IT and Tech: Provides courses in IT AWS certification, ethical hacking, hardware, networking, operating systems, security and others. It also provides information needed for IT certification like Microsoft Azure, Cisco CCNA, CompTIA A+, CompTIA Security+, Windows Server and others.
    • Marketing: Teaches useful marketing competencies in areas such as copywriting, digital marketing, Facebook ads and marketing, Google AdWords, Instagram marketing, SEO, social media marketing and more.
    • Design: Covers subjects such as animation and 3D, architectural design, fashion, game design, graphic design, interior design, user experience and web design.
    • Business: Offers courses that cover communication, entrepreneurial skills, finance, management, Microsoft Power BI, project management, sales, stock trading, strategic thinking and others.
    • Music Education: Provides classes such as music fundamentals, instruments, production, software, techniques, vocals and others.
    • Health and Fitness: Offers art therapy, aromatherapy, CBT dance, dieting, first aid, fitness, general health, herbalism, massage, meditation, mental health, nutrition, safety, self-defense, sports and yoga.
    • Teaching & Academics: Comes with calculus, engineering, English, German, humanities, IELTS, Japanese, math, online ed, science, Spanish, test prep and more.
    • Office Productivity: Teaches learners how to increase efficiency and get trained in key office tech. Offers classes in Data Analysis, Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft and others.
    • Finance & Accounting: Comes with accounting, blockchain, bookkeeping, compliance, cryptocurrency, day trading, economics, finance certification, financial modeling, investing, money management, taxes and more.
    • Lifestyle: Offers several classes that apply other areas of life, such as arts and crafts, beverage and food, beauty, gaming, home improvement, makeup, neuro-linguistic programming, pet care, pet training, portraiture, travel and others.
    • Personal Development: Teaches skills focused at soft skills or life skills. Provides health and wellness, increasing learning and memory or financial issues. Some course categories include energy healing, life coaching, memory, mindfulness, neuro-linguistic programming, reiki, speed reading, stock trading and technical analysis.
  • Udemy for Business: For organizations looking for ways to host corporate training, this coexisting platform is an option. It supports company training, creates learning paths for employees and provides over 2,000 courses. For more information, see its separate product page.
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  • Content Creation: Tailor existing Grovo courses or create new ones to fit your organization’s needs quickly.
    • Use various media types, including documents, videos, images and PowerPoint slides to enrich your content.
    • Enhance learning with interactive elements like quizzes to reinforce key concepts.
    • Design responsive, mobile-friendly courses using an intuitive interface.
    • Create, manage and analyze custom training materials efficiently.
  • Integrations Marketplace: Browse and select from a variety of partner-built integrations, including APIs, import loads and content subscriptions. Use pre-built integrations, connectors and flexible APIs to manage integrations easily, with a self-service platform for efficient data handling.
  • Immersive Learning: Use the Immerse tool to build personalized learning experiences in extended reality (XR) simulations of real-life work situations.
    • AI-Powered Content Authoring: Design immersive simulations with a range of environments, avatars and voices without needing coding or animation skills.
    • Skills Analytics Dashboard: Manage learning content and evaluations all from one dashboard.
    • Immersive Learning Content: Develop essential soft skills like leadership and communication through roleplay with virtual characters. Access a variety of pre-made content or create your own to fit your needs.
  • Surveys: Use various question types and response formats to collect information beyond course-based evaluations. Create detailed reports on individual survey responses or track trends over time with recurring surveys. Gather valuable information, such as employee interest in development opportunities or skills assessments for new roles.
  • Products: The company offers several solutions. Learning is the training, education and informational tool. However, several other applications with complementary goals are provided through the same company. All integrate with Learning and each other as part of the larger suite.
    • Careers: This coaching software helps managers praise over performers and give extra help to underperformers. Staff can use them to figure out their interests and build a path to growth within a company.
    • Content Anytime: For organizations looking to supplement their information with pre-made content, it has classes aimed at skill building in subjects such as communication, leadership and coaching, customer services, emotional intelligence, listening, personal growth, stress management and more.
    • Development: This helps with continuous growth by suggesting content so employees can build valuable skills. Whereas coaching is more geared toward building career goals, this focuses on the information from preferred sources whether that be books, podcasts, videos or something else.
    • HR: It provides HR data management to aid in decisions about the workforce, management and other organization-wide initiatives. The platform manages the human capital component of a business.
    • Performance: As a performance and workforce management platform, this aids in the high-level work of seeing the broader trends in skill gaps, performance and the overall talent pipeline. It has tools for giving staff reviews and ensuring performance processes are compliant.
    • Recruiting: Aimed at solving talent acquisition issues, this program helps with the discovery, acquisition and onboarding of talent. Some of its capabilities include attracting qualified candidates, AI insights for recruiting and showcasing a company’s unique brand and culture.
    • Other Solutions: It also has applications for SMB talent management, compliance, e-commerce, sales and other integrations.
  • Instructor-Led Training (ILT): ILT sessions are available in both virtual and physical classroom settings. This includes interest tracking, reservation capabilities, session rosters and waitlists. The solution has a wide range of delivery options including audio, digital files and documents, instructor-led classes, video and VR.
  • Grovo Microlearning Content: Use Grovo’s exclusive microlearning content through Cornerstone to provide impactful training on key topics that engage employees and support business goals.
    • Modify existing content or build new materials with the Grovo Create tool to fit your organization’s needs.
    • Access a wide range of content, including professional skills, leadership and management, modern compliance, diversity, equity, inclusion, and remote work essentials and fundamentals.
  • Mobile App: The Cornerstone CSX app allows you to access key features and a fast, intuitive learning experience on your device.
  • Core Features
    • Learner Home: View a personalized dashboard with company banners, training metrics and recommended content driven by machine learning.
    • Learning Search: Quickly find and filter courses by topic and duration to view relevant training options.
    • Learning Transcript: Manage your training history, track progress, and access ongoing and completed courses.
  • Use Cases
    • Log In: Switch language settings based on company preferences after logging in.
    • Learner Home: Receive personalized content recommendations and interact with training on your dashboard.
    • Learning Search: Locate and filter short courses to find relevant training.
  • Check-ins: Use Check-Ins to hold regular meetings and discussions with teams, focusing on alignment, coaching and performance development. Set up templates to guide discussions, help employees set goals, discuss career development and provide feedback. Schedule one-on-one or regular Check-Ins to ensure continuous communication and manage performance effectively.
  • Engage: Set up and schedule recurring feedback campaigns to capture employee satisfaction, engagement and commitment, and gain a complete view of workforce dynamics. Allow managers with the right permissions to access and review campaign results through a dedicated dashboard without creating or editing campaigns.
  • Assessments: Create tests and assignments to assess learner performance.
    • Use the Search bar to find specific assessments quickly.
    • View all assessments in the table, including their title, version, number of questions, last updated date and last updater.
    • Edit assessments, view current and previous versions, and manage version status (Draft or Published).
    • Publish assessments to make them available in the Course Console and Learning Assignment Tool. Note that once published, assessments are locked and cannot be edited.
  • Course Catalog: Manage and update metadata for learning objects (LOs) in your system. Adjust details like titles, keywords, subjects, recurrence settings, recommendations and email notifications.
  • Security: Keep your data safe on a foolproof learning platform.
    • Protect your data with 256-bit TLS encryption for secure data in transit.
    • Authenticate clients to control application access and ensure users only see what they’re authorized to view.
    • Benefit from FedRAMP authorization and regular audits to meet global and regional compliance requirements.
    • Use advanced cloud security measures to support heavy workloads.
    • Align with data protection regulations through integrated privacy features and commit to responsible AI technology in the workplace.
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Product Ranking

#15

among all
LMS Software

#25

among all
LMS Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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AI-based Capabilities Assessments Collaboration Compliance Content And Course Management ECommerce Learning Delivery Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting And Dashboard User Management And Gamification 43 71 67 67 91 100 76 100 96 100 100 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 675 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1306 reviews
91%
of users recommend this product

Udemy has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 675 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

83%
of users recommend this product

Cornerstone LMS has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 83% when considering 1306 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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5.0 (21)
4.5 (559)
4.1 (495)
4.9 (9)
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4.9 (102)
4.3 (220)
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4.3 (137)
3.9 (5)
4.1 (433)

Awards

Udemy stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Cornerstone LMS and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Mobile Capabilities.

Mobile Capabilities Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Useful Functionality: Over 90% of users who discussed features were pleased with the system’s components, notably self-paced learning capabilities.
Upskills Workforce: Users felt that the classes helped train employees in necessary skills in over 90% of reviews that discussed it.
Great for Training: More than 80% of reviewers who discussed using it as a training tool were pleased.
Excellent Courses: Learners loved the quality of the courses themselves in over 70% of comments that talked about it.
Skilled Instructors: Over 60% of users who discussed the teachers felt they were communicative and well-versed in the topics.
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Easy to Learn: Users adjusted well to the system and navigated it easily in about 40% of reviews.
Satisfactory Features: Between 30% and 40% of users were happy with the features and 20% felt the platform frequently added improved functionality. The most popular features included customization options, course and content creation tools, third-party integrations and communication capabilities.
Excellent Reporting: Around 20% found the reporting comprehensive, usable and suited to their needs.
Fair Pricing: In 20% of user reviews, administrators felt they got good value for their money.
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Refund Issues: Just under 80% of users who talked about refunds said they had problems getting their money back and didn’t like the policy.
Price: While over 50% of users felt it was reasonably priced, 46% of users who talked about price felt they were overcharged or didn’t like the pricing structure.
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Poor Customer Support: By far, the biggest complaint was the customer service, with almost 40% of reviewers complaining about slow turnaround times, ineffective solutions or other issues.
Unintuitive User Experience: Around 30% of users disliked the overall user experience, with the most common complaints surrounding glitches, the data importing process, integration and reporting.
Overwhelming and Confusing: Between 10% and 20% found the number of features hard to learn.
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Udemy is an online learning solution that provides instructor-led learning classes. Users can pick from a varied selection of topics and train at their own pace. Most reviewers were especially pleased with the features, especially the ability to control the speed of learning. Reviewers left overwhelmingly positive comments on the quality of the classes. Many learners said they were still able to contact their instructors when needed. Most users felt their teachers were skilled and knew their subjects well. Users praised its skill-building both in personal and corporate environments. Though users did like the classes, they also recommended heavily screening for quality. Some complained that the platform didn’t vet what was on the site well. Udemy has reviews for all of its classes left by users. Most people recommended weeding out the good ones from the bad ones. The most significant criticism by far came from people trying to get refunds. They said they had trouble contacting customer support or didn’t receive their money back. Others disliked the 30-day refund policy and felt cheated by it. Users were split on the price of the courses. Classes often came with discounts and some felt they were reasonably priced. Others felt they were too expensive or got angry when they paid for a class that was later offered for free. Udemy is a helpful resource for self-paced learners who have a specific set of skills they want. Vet the courses carefully, wait for discounts and look for details if the price isn’t satisfactory. It doesn’t have HR functionality as it’s more of a content library than a full LMS. Larger organizations who want to take an analytics-driven approach to learning should look elsewhere.

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Cornerstone Learning is an all-in-one LMS that brings together learning, growth, skills and capabilities into a personalized, curated experience for employees. Trusted by thousands of organizations across all sizes and industries, it supports employees from hire to retire.Users generally find the system easy to learn and navigate and praise its frequent updates and improved functionality. They also find the reporting comprehensive and usable and feel it provides good value for their money.The biggest drawback of Cornerstone among users is poor customer support, with reviewers complaining about slow turnaround times and ineffective solutions. Some users also reported issues with glitches, data importing, integration and reporting.Overall, Cornerstone Learning is a comprehensive and customizable LMS that helps organizations provide personalized, engaging and compliant learning experiences for their employees. It’s particularly well-suited for organizations looking to boost productivity with version management and smooth inline content workflows

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