Thinkific vs Cornerstone LMS

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Our analysts compared Thinkific 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

Thinkific is a software platform that creates, sells, markets and delivers online courses. It enables people to learn online and turn unique skills and expertise into a sustainable business. Users can quickly customize an online class’s look, feel, and functionality and create content that aligns with a company, brand and vision with the system’s App Store. Some of the content includes PDF, audio, files HTML, quizzes, surveys and resources such as Articulate, Storyline and Typeform.

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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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$49/Feature, Monthly
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$6/User, Monthly
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Windows
Mac
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Chromebook
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Android
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Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
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On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
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24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Easy to Set Up: Get complete control of content and data and make decisions about online course business based on what’s best for the brands and audiences. Customize every platform part to match the brand and continue to scale without missing a beat. 
  • Bonus Resources: Access premium training templates, programs and unique opportunities after subscribing to the Basic or Pro plan. 
  • Expert Advice: Get in-depth guidance on finding the most suitable course topic, pricing, creating content, marketing and selling. Access content and training from industry leaders in the online education business. Sell online courses at a professional level and ensure more students get success during the learning experience. 
  • Quick and Effective: Explore downloadable guides, templates and use the swipe copy capability to take all the guesswork out of structuring and launching new online courses. 
  • Convenient: Review workshops and summit replays and watch videos of industry experts as per convenience to level up online education business. 
  • More Secure: Take advantage of reliable, 24/7 monitoring and safe cloud hosting with SSL certificates. 
  • Exclusive Opportunities: Get unique discounts and offers on popular content creation tools and stand unique among competitors. 
  • Flexible: Sell knowledge in bundles, standalone courses, memberships and digital downloads. 
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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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  • Live Lessons and Cohorts: Deliver world-class learning experience on live, blended or on-demand classes. 
  • Assessments and Certificates: Gain access to a wide range of engagement surveys, comprehensive quizzes, assignments, exams and certificates that offer a premium learning experience. 
  • Progress Tracking: Track student progress through in-depth reporting and provide certificates to validate their efforts. 
  • Drag-and-Drop Website Builder: Create a customized school or storefront or to display class and course value and advantages.
  • E-Commerce: Accept payments in more than 100 countries with NIL transaction fees. 
  • Website Themes: Rest easy with beautiful and easy-to-use website themes and advanced customizations and deliver a professional look to the website without the extra cost. 
  • Connect Tools: Add professional and personalized domain to the website, mailing lists or CRM. 
  • Academy: Access premium webinars and courses curated by industry experts who help in taking courses to the next level. 
  • A Community of Experts: Share inspiration and strategy with a community of more than 50,000 course creators and get ideas to make the product more comprehensive and effective. 
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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

#57

among all
LMS Software

#25

among all
LMS Software

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

69
79
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43
70
71
58
67
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eCommerce
Platform Capabilities
Content and Course Management
Mobile Capabilities
Mobile Capabilities
Reporting and Dashboard
User Management and Gamification
eCommerce
Platform Capabilities

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Thinkific
Cornerstone LMS
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-based Capabilities Assessments Collaboration Compliance Content And Course Management ECommerce Learning Delivery Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting And Dashboard User Management And Gamification 7 70 58 0 93 100 67 87 98 77 77 43 71 67 67 91 100 76 100 96 100 100 0 25 50 75 100
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43%
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67%
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67%
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33%
87%
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87%
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38%
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88%
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93%
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64%
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36%
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

57%
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43%
71%
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29%

User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 491 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1306 reviews
91%
of users recommend this product

Thinkific has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 491 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.

n/a
5.0 (21)
4.7 (171)
4.1 (495)
4.49 (155)
n/a
4.6 (133)
4.3 (220)
n/a
4.3 (137)
4.2 (32)
4.1 (433)

Awards

Thinkific 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

Ease of Use: Thinkific is known for its user-friendly interface and intuitive design, making it easy for both course creators and students to navigate the platform and manage their learning experience.
Customization Options: The platform offers a wide range of customization options, allowing course creators to tailor their courses to their specific branding and style preferences. This includes the ability to customize the look and feel of the course, as well as the content and structure.
Marketing and Sales Tools: Thinkific provides built-in marketing and sales tools to help course creators promote their courses and reach a wider audience. These tools include features such as email marketing, coupons and discounts, and affiliate marketing.
Community and Support: Thinkific has a strong community of users and offers excellent customer support. Course creators can connect with other users, share ideas, and get help from the Thinkific team.
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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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Limited Course Design Options: Thinkific's course builder might feel restrictive for users who want to create highly customized learning experiences. The platform's strengths lie in delivering content in a straightforward manner, but it may lack the flexibility needed for intricate branching scenarios or complex gamification elements.
Marketing and Sales Features: While Thinkific provides basic marketing tools, users seeking advanced features like sophisticated email marketing automation or intricate sales funnels might find the platform's capabilities somewhat limited. Integrating third-party tools can address this, but it may introduce additional complexity and costs.
Pricing Structure: Thinkific's pricing structure, particularly for higher-tier plans with advanced features, can be a concern for budget-conscious users or smaller organizations. Evaluating the cost-benefit ratio and exploring alternative platforms with more competitive pricing for similar features is recommended.
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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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Thinkific has garnered a reputation as a user-friendly and affordable platform that empowers businesses and individuals to create and deliver online courses. Users appreciate the intuitive drag-and-drop course builder, built-in payment system, and comprehensive reporting dashboard, making it a breeze to get started. The platform's flexibility allows for customization to match individual teaching styles and content requirements, while its affordability makes it accessible to a wide range of users. However, some users have expressed concerns about limited customer support and a lack of advanced features compared to competitors like Kajabi or Teachable. Thinkific's strength lies in its simplicity and ease of use, making it ideal for those new to online course creation or who prioritize a straightforward platform. Thinkific is best suited for solopreneurs, small businesses, and educators who are looking for an easy-to-use and affordable platform to create and deliver online courses. Its intuitive interface and essential features make it a great starting point for those new to the world of e-learning. However, users with more complex needs or who require extensive customer support may want to explore alternative options with more robust feature sets and dedicated assistance.

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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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