What do you dislike about Absorb LMS?
Overall, Absorb's base LMS product feels like a patchwork of functional, yet inconsistent and poorly architected features. Combined with frequently misleading (or missing) documentation, poor support, and a development pipeline that seems to be prioritizing flashy AI features over solving real user-reported problems, I would have a hard time recommending this product to most businesses, especially multilingual ones.
The biggest weakness has been the support received, particularly post-launch. When making one adjustment to our contract and one new feature purchase, we needed to repeat the request five times (three times directly with our account manager) as well as remind them for a follow-up on two additional occasions. The standard technical support and documentation has also been abysmal. Support staff would often contradict the information found in the docs. On one occasion, a (human) support staff mentioned a part of the platform that simply didn't exist, which was presumably an AI-hallucination that they simply didn't read before sending to me.
I've also encountered four small issues with the base Absorb LMS, which I confirmed as being bugs by their support. Despite being fairly small bugs (a custom field displaying incorrectly on certificates, a font/CSS issue in a nav menu, an undeletable course, and an infinite redirect loop that required clearing my browser data to regain access to my LMS), the time required to address them was insane (5 months, 6 months, and 2 months respectively for the first three bugs). The fourth was never resolved, and instead of passing along my report of the redirect loop to their QA team, I was invited to "make a feature request" about it.
Speaking of feature requests, it should be noted that, in all likelihood, these won't be implemented. I've made a few feature requests and voted on dozens more, and they've all been dismissed as "for future consideration." Many of these feature requests (not just my own) aren't niche new features; they're requests to have the platform work fully and consistently, such as a feature request to have password-reset emails be sent to the user in the user's own language rather than, for some odd reason, the language of the admin who clicked the "send password reset email" button. The radio silence on these is especially frustrating when many of the new-feature rollouts are AI functionality that isn't responding to real user needs.
If you choose to use Absorb, know that when the platform encounters bugs or a feature isn't fully thought out, you'll either be out of luck or will be waiting for many months for resolution.
On another note, prospective clients requiring a multilingual LMS should likely steer clear of Absorb. While Absorb technically supports this use case at a base level (the main UI/buttons, course content, and notification emails do support translation), most customization options and features beyond this don't support multiple languages. For example, the "welcome" container block on the user dashboard is the only part of the interface that supports custom translated content. Footers, custom tiles, custom user fields, FAQs, terms & conditions, and others I'm likely forgetting do not support translation. This makes Absorb usable for this use case, but multilingual site owners will be missing out on many of Absorb's features, since these seem to be developed independently from one another and without consideration for the multilingual use case.
The cost is quite high compared to alternative approaches, and the limited customization options outside the course builder itself make Absorb's value questionable.
I'll also mention that SSO integration isn't very well thought-out; you can have SSO enabled on one domain, but it's not enforced based on a user's email across other domains. In practice, this means that a user granted access via SSO on one domain could log in via a username and password on another domain, circumventing the SSO. For organizations that expect to just have a single domain with SSO enabled for all users, this is fine. But organizations that rely, for example, on SSO for employees but user/password authentication for clients might see this as a problematic security loophole. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
