Brightspace vs Cornerstone OnDemand

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

Cornerstone OnDemand Software Tool

Product Basics

Brightspace is a cloud-based LMS that supports personalized learning for educational institutions, corporations, healthcare institutions, nonprofits and more. For K-12 schools, it offers blended and virtual learning options, along with tools for professional learning. For companies, it provides an engaging learning platform to train employees, customers and partners.


Key features include tools for tailored learning experiences, intelligent agents, analytics for tracking progress, course authoring and a gradebook with a mastery view. You can choose from flexible options to build and curate content, and use its mobile-friendly design for on-the-go learning.

Users praise Brightspace for its extensive features, user-friendly interface and proactive support. A large number of reviews mention its exceptional implementation and onboarding process, praising the responsiveness and speed of the support team. While the majority of users are impressed by the solution’s capabilities, some mentioned that it may have a learning curve for new users.

The exact pricing of the solution isn’t mentioned online. For accurate pricing details based on the size and requirements of your institution, you can contact the vendor for a custom quote.

On the bright side, you can access the 30-day free trial to get hands-on experience with the platform. It includes a variety of pre-loaded courses to explore and a sandbox area where you can experiment with creating your own course.

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Cornerstone OnDemand is a cloud-based talent and performance management product. Together with its subsidiaries, it helps companies cater to their people development and management needs, handling the employee lifecycle from start to end. Five modules support recruiting, learning, performance and content management. It can be accessed from anywhere at any time, regardless of the user’s location or device type.
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Product Insights

  • Revolutionizes Learning with AI: D2L Lumi uses AI to simplify tasks for both teachers and admins in Brightspace. It can automatically generate practice questions and custom learning paths for students, speeding up course setup. For learners, Lumi provides personalized feedback and helps with note-taking, making learning more efficient and boosting training outcomes.
  • Digitizes Courses: Brightspace’s Content Experience platform makes it easy to build interactive courses with videos, images and even external tools like Google Drive and OneDrive. Pre-made templates simplify course design, and tools like Video Note come with automatic captions, ensuring accessibility for learners with special needs.
  • Facilitates Performance Review With Grading Tools: Based on our data, Brightspace scores 93 for the Assessments module. Its Gradebook and Mastery View make it easy to grade and track student progress in one place. With the Creator+ add-on, AI helps you by automatically generating quizzes and practice questions, saving you time. Advanced Analytics give you clear insights into student engagement and performance, so you can quickly spot who may need extra support and adjust your teaching to fit their needs.
  • Improves Decision-Making: With predictive models, you can actually forecast how learners will perform and fill in any knowledge gaps with personalized learning paths. Plus, real-time reports and visualizations give you a clear view of how effective your courses are and how engaged learners are.
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  • Attract the Right Talent: Showcase brand values and company culture via interactive media. An intuitive application mechanism, along with creative media, helps attract more quality job seekers and brings the right talent. 
  • Identify the Best Fit: Talent managers have a comprehensive view of the talent pool. They can receive suggestions and analyze candidates based on set requisition criteria to identify the best fit applicants. 
  • Simplified Hiring Process: Create automated workflows that simplify hiring procedures. Leverage detailed insights in a central place for candidate requisition purposes. 
  • Effective Employee Onboarding: Talent managers can create customized onboarding portals for hiring. Having a tailor-made, self-paced and interactive content platform helps eliminate challenges associated with onboarding. 
  • Data-Driven Decision Making: Track employee performance and visualize data with configurable analytics to make faster and more informed decisions. 
  • Optimized Employee Training: Provide a modern and optimized learning experience with automated assignments, optional and recommended content, powerful searching, self-driven browsing for employee development and more. 
  • On-Going Performance Development: Engage, inspire, motivate and coach employees to improve performance, achieve organizational alignment and build business agility. 
  • Easy Deployment: Easily deploy content in any form, like interactive assignments, quizzes, videos and more, using self-developed content or content curated by Cornerstone OnDemand. 
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  • Roles and Permissions: Create, define, modify and delete user roles, and assign permissions to control access to features like creating discussions or editing navigation bars. Apply roles to users for specific org units to determine their access levels, and use cascading roles to extend permissions to all subordinate org units for easier management.
  • Calendar: Display all upcoming events to learners in one central location. Post essential dates like project deadlines, office hours, in-class events and more on the calendar.
  • Assignments: Create and edit assignments using the Assignments tool, track submission times and review work directly. Associate assignments with rubrics and competencies, and return them with grades and feedback. Organize them into categories, and set restrictions by date, group membership or special access.
  • Mobile App: Use the Brightspace Pulse mobile app to let learners access course calendars, assignments, grades and announcements from one place. Send real-time alerts for cancellations, room changes, and new content or grades. Allow them to view schedules and weekly tasks with built-in visualization tools to track what’s due today, this week and later.
  • Portfolio: Use the Portfolio tool to help learners capture and showcase their learning journey. Create and update digital portfolios to track progress over time. Use the app to collect evidence, record audio and video reflections, and document achievements.
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  • Enable an Integrated Ecosystem: Select from a range of pre-built integrations and quickly plug in to the most suitable choice. Having an integrated and holistic ecosystem helps support organizational needs effectively. 
  • Applicant Experience: Recruiting tools include applicant tracking and an easy-to-configure website that help improve the overall experience of applicants. 
  • Learning Management: Offers numerous learning experiences. Consists of informal learning, delivery method management and reporting, all in one place. 
  • Machine Learning: Recommends content to learners, helping them improve self-driven development via quality content. 
  • Robust Partner Ecosystem: Helps extend the life of systems existing at partner organizations, minimizes disruption, and maintains effective localizations and customizations. 
  • Audit Insights: Supports administering and auditing employee record changes. Audits are carried out with minimal risk and aim to align talent management to the organization's talent strategy. 
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Product Ranking

#11

among all
LMS Software

#51

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 93 100 100 86 92 100 87 93 100 81 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 911 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1252 reviews
87%
of users recommend this product

Brightspace has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 911 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

84%
of users recommend this product

Cornerstone OnDemand has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 1252 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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5.0 (21)
4.4 (598)
4.1 (464)
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4.3 (211)
4.3 (217)
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4.1 (18)
4.3 (157)
4.4 (78)
4.2 (399)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Brightspace and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Assessments, Compliance and Learning Delivery.

Assessments Award
Compliance Award
Learning Delivery Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Comprehensive Feature Set: Brightspace gets major props for its "all-in-one" feature set that includes tools for creating and managing courses, delivering content in various formats (videos, quizzes, documents) and promoting collaboration. Users appreciate its support for different instructional approaches, whether it's entirely online, blended or traditional classroom settings.
User-Friendly Interface: The platform's interface is generally described as clean and intuitive, which is crucial for both instructors and students. This minimizes the learning curve, allowing users to focus on teaching and learning rather than navigating a complex system.
Customization: Institutions and instructors like the ability to tailor the platform to their branding and specific needs. This includes customizing themes, layouts and navigation.
Analytics and Reporting: Brightspace provides detailed analytics and reporting tools that allow instructors to track student progress, identify areas where students might be struggling and measure the effectiveness of their teaching methods.
Accessibility: Brightspace is built with accessibility in mind, complying with standards like WCAG 2.1, Section 508 and EN 301 549. Features like screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation and alternative text for images ensure that all learners, including those with disabilities, have equal access to educational content.
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Reporting: The reporting feature is simple to use and intuitive, with several options to choose from, according to 90% of reviews on reporting.
Robust Learning Module: It constantly stays up-to-date with the latest and effective learning trends to provide a better user experience, as indicated by 100% of reviews mentioning learning features.
All-in-One Solution: Cornerstone OnDemand is a complete solution for all performance management needs of companies in all industries, according to all reviews on this aspect.
Regular Updates: The platform consistently releases updates to serve users better, according to all reviews on software updates.
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Learning Curve: While the interface is generally user-friendly, some users, especially those new to Brightspace or transitioning from another LMS, may find the initial setup and learning process to be challenging.
Limited Customization in Certain Areas: Although Brightspace offers extensive customization in many areas, some users have reported limitations in specific areas, such as fine-grained control over page layouts and graphics.
Cost: Depending on your organization's size and requirements, the cost of Brightspace can be a significant factor. Additional costs for add-ons or premium features can further increase the overall investment.
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Customer Service: All reviews on customer service indicated that the response and resolution times are slow.
Learning Curve: According to 80% of reviews on this feature, there’s a steep learning curve and adapting to the system is time-consuming and complex for new users.
Mobile App: It has a slow and underdeveloped mobile app compared to the web platform, according to all reviews referring to this feature.
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Brightspace is one of our top-rated LMSs with a solid analyst score of 92. It’s designed for large organizations and is popular for both education and corporate training. According to our data, Brightspace has a high score for several LMS modules. These include:  Collaboration: 100 Compliance: 100 Reporting and Dashboard: 100 Assessments: 93One of its standout features is the flexible course builder, allowing you to create interactive courses without technical expertise. With Creator+, you can use ready-made templates to quickly build professional-looking content, complete with quizzes and polls to keep learners engaged.Brightspace also makes it easy to add videos and multimedia, giving courses a dynamic feel. Built-in design styles help ensure that everything looks consistent and polished. The platform’s grading system, including the Gradebook, simplifies the grading process by automatically pulling in scores from assignments, quizzes and discussions. Setting up grading is easy with a step-by-step wizard, and you can provide feedback through text, audio or even annotations.Brightspace’s predictive analytics helps you spot students who might need extra support by analyzing grades, engagement, and activity. Performance+ adds even more reporting power, letting you generate detailed reports, track learning patterns and set up personalized learning paths for each student based on their progress.If you need advanced reporting across courses, the Achievement+ package includes tools for tracking learning outcomes and viewing results over time. This package includes features like the Outcome Achievement Dashboard and the Course Achievement Overview, which offer visual reports that can also be exported for offline use.Brightspace integrates with third-party tools like video conferencing and student information systems. Plus, its mobile-friendly design allows students to access courses from any device, anytime. Based on our data, Brightspace stands out in collaboration, compliance and reporting. Its Performance+ suite offers real-time training insights, and it complies with standards like WCAG and SCORM, while providing strong security measures like encryption and backups.However, compared to other platforms like Docebo or LearnUpon, Brightspace lacks certain AI-powered features such as AI-based tagging and content recommendations, which could be a disadvantage for organizations wanting advanced AI tools. Absorb LMS also offers more options for subscription management and interactive learning, which Brightspace doesn’t fully support — potentially making it less ideal for businesses looking to monetize training or enhance engagement with interactive features.Although Brightspace excels in core features like tracking, reporting, and compliance, it’s missing some capabilities like workload balancing and lesson gating, which can help manage learner progress. Pricing varies by organization size, making it scalable, though some users note a steeper learning curve than with other platforms.For organizations that need a customizable LMS with strong analytics, Brightspace is a worthwhile investment, especially for businesses focused on data-driven training and development strategies.

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Cornerstone OnDemand’s cloud-based talent and performance management solutions deliver robust learning capabilities alongside comprehensive performance tools. Slow customer service, a steep learning curve and an underdeveloped mobile application are some of the most repeated cons among user feedback. However, users thought highly of its regular updates and simple, intuitive reporting. Those, along with the learning and performance features make it a good option for companies with a high priority in those particular areas.

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