What do you like best about TalentLMS?
The team at Epignosis have been great to work with over the year that we have been using TalentLMS. Our pricing tier doesn't give us a dedicated customer success manager, so all our support queries are handled by their general support team. Both their frontline and technical support staff have been amazing at helping resolve any questions that have been raised.
As an LMS, TalentLMS does the job. As an organisation, we didn't know exactly what we wanted and so picked TalentLMS initially on price point from a shortlist of other much more expensive systems that offered similar functionality. We particularly wanted a multi-tenant solution. We don't see ourselves changing in the short term.
The LMS is super easy to get started. The free option lets you get started and evaluate whether it will work for you, and there is no time limit on this. I also loved the fact that you can just get in and do things - so many vendors insist on demos before they give you access to a system and layer on the hard sell in that process. The team at Epignosis are not like this, they are not in your face at all. Set up your domain and try it, so much more simple and easy.
In terms of the features of TalentLMS, I particularly like how much customisation you can do with Javascript and CSS. I understand that the TalentLMS+ system that is being developed won't have that same degree of customisation - I understand why, but it will be a real loss for teams like ours that have very specific requirements that are not easily met without writing customisations. Many of the customisations that we have developed ourselves will become redundant as the TalentCraft functionality is extended and will likely be better than we have done. For example, I spent quite some time developing a flip card interaction where the text automatically resizes so it doesn't overflow the card and that is now a standard feature in TalentCraft. To be honest, we would switch tomorrow to the new interface if Epignosis introduced one new feature, the ability to do code highlighting. We have integrated the prism.js code highlighter in our domain and it works perfectly well but because it requires custom Javascript and CSS, it doesn't work in TaentLMS+.
Overall, the system is easy to set up and use. The learner experience is perhaps not as slick as it could be out of the box, but we have addressed that with our customisations. There were some challenges getting SSO set up, it wasn't quite as easy to do as the TalentMS knowledge base suggested - but we got there in the end. Course and user management are fine and it is possible to create custom user types and access permissions to a very fine level of detail. Mechanisms such as groups and branches work, but perhaps could be a bit more slick. We've ended up not using branches for that reason which has gone away from our original multi-tenant brief. Some things that don't work as well as you might hope can be worked around because the integration with Zapier lets you set up your own automations. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about TalentLMS?
The branches mechanism could be improved. It basically works fine, but the process of manually adding users to branches is a bit painful and switching between branches is ok but not perfect. The real pain for us is that each branch needs its own SSO configuration and login portal. What I would really love to see here would be a single login screen and then using the SSO credentials to send learners automatically to a given branch, for example based on their email address. That would make things so much more slick for those of us offering training to other organisations. I think that I can work around this using Zapier, but using an integration engine to link TalentLMS back to TalentLMS is a bit ridiculous (even through I do that for a few things).
Something that is really important for us as we are training software developers is to present highlighted code snippets. The page editor in TalentLMS is not great, and the default style for code is just preformatted HTML. It is easy to work around, we inject custom CSS and Javascript from the prism.js library and it works a charm. However, our concern moving forward is that the TalentLMS+ product is not going to support that degree of customisation. So code formatting using prism.js or highlight.js really needs to be incorporated in as standard functionality.
There are other issues with the editor - pasting from other applications produces really messy html. Even if you "paste as plain text" it doesn't work well. Most people probably won't notice, but I am editing the html to make our other customisations work and am always cleaning things up. Of particular note, there is an issue with pasting images into the UI. If you do this, it embeds the binary file into the text and there are limitations on file size as a result. It is easy to work around, you just need to upload the image file and thn select it from the course files. Some course instructors / authors won't do this as a matter of course.
The product doesn't deal with images and media shared across courses. I would love to see a central library of content (currently it is per course). You can work around the per-course organisation of files if you know html. But what I would love to be able to do is set an image in CSS that then applies across all pages. For example, we have icons that we add into the blockquote style - I need to do each and everyone manually, whereas the whole point of CSS is to do it centrally. Again, it is a simple change and will greatly improve the authoring experience.
Groups in TalentLMS are also a bit clunky. Groups essentially create an overlapping set of users and courses and are the mechanism for applying discounts, creating bundles etc. It's not functionality we use because it isn't just quite right. Ideally, we would want a group to be a way of limiting access to a course. We would have a group for Customer A and a group for Customer B. The courses they have paid for are accessible to them, but no other courses. It's just not set up for that and there is no way to restrict a learner from a course. You can create a paywall to do this, or use voucher codes and so on, but they are just difficult to do well as you end up with a lot of admin to set up and manage, I get that branches is the way to go for what we want, but as already noted that has it's own drawbacks.
At the end of the day, I just don't think that the multi-tenancy features are best in class.
If you want a simple LMS for a relative simple scenario, then you wont really have any real complaints with TalentLMS. But the more complex your situation, the more you need to take advantage of the fre pricing tier to check that it actually does what you want it to do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
