Home > LMS Software > PowerDMS > PowerDMS vs Cornerstone LMS

PowerDMS vs Cornerstone LMS

Last Updated: November 18th, 2024

Our analysts compared PowerDMS 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.

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Product Basics

PowerDMS software effectively manages policies, training, and accreditation processes, making it ideal for organizations seeking to streamline these crucial functions. A key strength of PowerDMS lies in its ability to connect policies, training materials, and accreditation requirements, ensuring that employees have easy access to the latest information and resources. The software facilitates efficient employee training by offering features such as course creation, progress tracking, and mobile accessibility. User reviews consistently highlight the platform's user-friendly interface, comprehensive reporting tools, and ability to adapt to evolving organizational needs. With a mid-range pricing structure based on a per-user monthly fee, PowerDMS presents a compelling option for businesses seeking a robust and user-friendly solution for managing their training and development programs.

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.

$4,000 Annually

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$6/User, Monthly

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Product Insights

Provide a User-friendly Interface: Provides an intuitive experience that’s suitable for non-technical users. The software doesn’t have unnecessary features, making it simple to use.
Adopt Automation: Configure settings to send out reminders to users when training is required. The system also has the option to automatically score tests and log training.
Leverage Accreditation Support: Training records, lesson plans, certificates and other documents simplify the accreditation process.
Access Flexible Training: Offering online courses enables learners to work through material after hours. This prevents training from taking away from on-the-job training and provides convenience for employees.
Use Blended Learning: Organizations can conduct a blend of online and classroom training. It supports the in-person format by publishing and collecting course registrations.
Try a Free Trial: The product offers a 14-day free trial. Test real-world scenarios to determine if the system is a good fit.

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.

Course Management: Create courses using a WYSIWYG editor. Course elements include documents, videos, presentations, audio files, surveys and more. The system also supports embedding videos and web pages. Divide courses into sections for individual offerings based on different times for a classroom setting. Reorder individual course elements using the drag-and-drop capability.
Tests: Customize tests to describe fields such as timed or untimed pass/fail, graded and open book or close book. Add due dates, number of retakes, images and text boxes, and enable auto grading. Create question banks, set mandatory questions and preview the test before publishing.
Reports: Generate reports to segment on-training and non-training employees. Document the type and amount of training each employee has received, associated costs of training, credit hour summaries and more.
Certifications: Award employees with certifications to designate receipt of job training after completing courses.
Surveys: Gather employee feedback using different question types, such as true/false and multiple choice. Assign surveys directly to individuals or include them in a course for better accessibility.
Content Hub: Connect with publisher sites to access and share content. Import single files or entire folders, bulk import items and edit documents in case of site changes. Get notified via email as content on the publisher site is added or updated.

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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Analyst Rating Summary

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User Sentiment Summary

96%

of users recommend this product

PowerDMS has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 96% when considering 835 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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4.7 (107)

4.1 (495)

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Awards

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Centralized Document Management: PowerDMS excels at keeping documents organized and accessible, eliminating the need to search through emails or shared drives. It acts as a single source of truth for policies, procedures, and other critical documents, ensuring everyone has access to the latest versions.

Streamlined Training and Compliance: The platform simplifies assigning, tracking, and reporting on training activities. Automated reminders and notifications help ensure that employees complete required training on time, reducing the risk of non-compliance.

Efficient Collaboration and Communication: PowerDMS facilitates collaboration by allowing users to share documents, provide feedback, and track changes. Discussion forums and messaging features enable clear communication and knowledge sharing among team members.

Enhanced Security and Control: The platform offers robust security features to protect sensitive information. Role-based access controls ensure that only authorized individuals can view or edit documents, while audit trails provide a record of all activity.

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.

Limited LMS Functionality: PowerDMS is primarily a policy management system, so its features for delivering and tracking training content are less robust than dedicated learning management systems (LMS). For example, it may lack advanced features like SCORM compliance, gamification, or detailed learning analytics.

Usability Challenges: Some users find the interface to be clunky and unintuitive, particularly when creating and managing training courses. Navigating the platform and finding specific information can be time-consuming, especially for new users.

Customer Support Concerns: There have been reports of slow response times and difficulty reaching customer support, which can be frustrating for users who need assistance with technical issues or have questions about the platform.

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.

PowerDMS is a popular choice for businesses looking for a user-friendly and feature-rich learning management system (LMS). Users appreciate its intuitive interface, robust functionality, and responsive customer support. PowerDMS simplifies policy and training management, allowing for efficient distribution of critical information and seamless tracking of employee progress. However, some users note that the software can be pricey and may require some initial setup effort. PowerDMS stands out from the competition with its emphasis on compliance and accreditation management. This makes it a top pick for organizations in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare, public safety, and education. Its ability to streamline document control, automate workflows, and ensure adherence to industry standards is a major draw for these users. While PowerDMS may require a larger investment compared to some other LMS options, its comprehensive features and focus on compliance make it a worthwhile choice for organizations seeking a powerful and reliable solution to manage their learning and compliance needs.

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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