Udemy vs Seismic Learning

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Our analysts compared Udemy vs Seismic Learning 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

Udemy is an online learning platform with over 40 million students. Over 80% of the top Fortune 100 companies use it. Lessons are self-paced and recorded by industry specialists. The subjects include business, design, developing and programming, marketing, music, personal development, photography, IT and more. Other courses are more tailored to specific, in-demand and professional skill sets like cyber security, ethical hacking, financial analysis, graphic design, machine learning, Adobe Photoshop, PMP, SQL and web development.

Once purchased, classes are available to the user indefinitely. Learners can reference them for a refresher. Overall, it has 50,000 instructors and 130,000 courses taught in more than 60 languages from over 190 different countries. To date, it’s seen over 245 million enrollments.
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Seismic Learning (formerly called Lessonly) is a software platform designed to help businesses manage their learning and development programs. It caters to companies seeking to enhance employee training and development, offering features like course creation, content management, and reporting. Seismic Learning is particularly well-suited for medium and large businesses aiming to improve employee training, engagement, and retention while reducing training costs.

The platform boasts popular features such as course creation, content management, reporting, analytics, and social learning. Users appreciate its ease of use and customer support. Seismic Learning's pricing structure is not publicly available, so interested businesses should contact Seismic directly for pricing details.

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Product Insights

  • Upskilled Workforce: Identifies staff with the right abilities and navigates the continuously changing duties in the modern workplace. Provides an easy, affordable talent upgrade for organizations with competency gaps. Courses are skill-based and taught by experts.
  • Culture of Learning: Teaches and trains employees with a variety of self-paced classes. This allows an organization to promote education affordably. Allows companies to give more time and focus to development opportunities. Creates a culture of continuous improvement.
  • Increased Efficiency: Allows workers to improve skills and become more efficient at their job. Increased automation levels make it a massive time and money saver, especially given the fast rate at which jobs change in the modern era. Lets HR staff focus less on manual information input and more on advanced staff development.
  • Happier Workforce: Lets employees acquire new skills and grow in their job, one of the top requests for employees in any workforce. Through a course library, users can expand their minds, meet career goals and feel better about their place of employment. Showcases the level of dedication with an investment in people.
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  • Simulate Real-World Scenarios: Seismic Learning helps learners master skills by providing tools that help them practice situations similar to their daily activities. For example, users can pitch on video, give a presentation, practice chat conversations and ticket support, and more. For each lesson, you can provide feedback via a star-rating system and comments. 
  • Uncover Insights: The system lets you view a range of metrics related to training. Visual charts and graphs make information easy to digest. You can track things like satisfaction and engagement rates, course assignment and completion totals, quiz results, popular searches, event attendance, active users, overdue modules, and more. 
  • Add More Capabilities: Seismic Learning integrates with several popular applications to extend the system’s functionality to tools for HR, collaboration, sales, customer service and more. Supported integrations include Slack, Chrome, Zendesk, BambooHR, Zenefits, Namely and Salesforce. 
  • Manage Roles and Groups: Permission settings allow you to define the role each user falls under: learner, manager, creator or admin. This determines their access within the platform. When creating new users, you can also assign them to custom groups. By grouping users according to teams, you can ensure they all receive the right training. 
  • Support In-Person Training: The events feature is a means for conducting live, offline or instructor-led training. You can invite learners by giving them the link directly, sending an email, or publishing the event on the event dashboard. 
  • Create Unlimited Lessons: There’s no limit to the number of courses, learning paths and lessons you can build. Such flexibility lets you customize your training to the extent your organization needs. 
  • Organize Content: A tagging feature lets you organize each lesson and makes searching for specific information easy. It also allows you to group content together based on which team it’s for or the purpose it serves. 
  • Access Seismic Learning on Mobile: The Seismic Learning platform is mobile-friendly so users can access it from phones and other devices besides a desktop or laptop. This gives them freedom to log in to the site anywhere with an internet connection. 
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  • Class Creation and Management: Manages and creates lectures, text, multimedia, slides, videos and additional resources bundled together for lessons. Offers testing and assignment options like quizzes, practice tests and coding exercises. The license for courses never expires and learners can finish at their own pace.
  • Instructor Capabilities: Sells classes and accepts payment through the solution via PayPal or Payoneer when students enroll. Designs lessons to help people advance skills, upgrade careers or explore hobbies. Offers training that details how to build units, curriculum pages, an instructor dashboard and others. Last, allow students to connect with instructors via messaging, Q&As and announcements. Instructors own all the rights to the class material.
  • Devices: Operates on laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile. Works on both iOS and Android. By downloading classes, users can watch them offline and view them with Chromecast or Apple TV.
  • Certifications: Sends a certificate of completion when users complete paid classes for reimbursement. Showcase talent or dole out bragging rights. Certifications aren’t available for free courses or ones that only have practice exams.
  • Affiliates: Promotes an affiliate program for organizations or individuals who want to promote courses on their blog or website. Users make a commission for each sale.
  • Subjects: Offers a variety of courses on different topics such as:
    • IT and Tech: Provides courses in IT AWS certification, ethical hacking, hardware, networking, operating systems, security and others. It also provides information needed for IT certification like Microsoft Azure, Cisco CCNA, CompTIA A+, CompTIA Security+, Windows Server and others.
    • Marketing: Teaches useful marketing competencies in areas such as copywriting, digital marketing, Facebook ads and marketing, Google AdWords, Instagram marketing, SEO, social media marketing and more.
    • Design: Covers subjects such as animation and 3D, architectural design, fashion, game design, graphic design, interior design, user experience and web design.
    • Business: Offers courses that cover communication, entrepreneurial skills, finance, management, Microsoft Power BI, project management, sales, stock trading, strategic thinking and others.
    • Music Education: Provides classes such as music fundamentals, instruments, production, software, techniques, vocals and others.
    • Health and Fitness: Offers art therapy, aromatherapy, CBT dance, dieting, first aid, fitness, general health, herbalism, massage, meditation, mental health, nutrition, safety, self-defense, sports and yoga.
    • Teaching & Academics: Comes with calculus, engineering, English, German, humanities, IELTS, Japanese, math, online ed, science, Spanish, test prep and more.
    • Office Productivity: Teaches learners how to increase efficiency and get trained in key office tech. Offers classes in Data Analysis, Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft and others.
    • Finance & Accounting: Comes with accounting, blockchain, bookkeeping, compliance, cryptocurrency, day trading, economics, finance certification, financial modeling, investing, money management, taxes and more.
    • Lifestyle: Offers several classes that apply other areas of life, such as arts and crafts, beverage and food, beauty, gaming, home improvement, makeup, neuro-linguistic programming, pet care, pet training, portraiture, travel and others.
    • Personal Development: Teaches skills focused at soft skills or life skills. Provides health and wellness, increasing learning and memory or financial issues. Some course categories include energy healing, life coaching, memory, mindfulness, neuro-linguistic programming, reiki, speed reading, stock trading and technical analysis.
  • Udemy for Business: For organizations looking for ways to host corporate training, this coexisting platform is an option. It supports company training, creates learning paths for employees and provides over 2,000 courses. For more information, see its separate product page.
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  • Lesson Builder: A visual drag-and-drop interface enables you to build lessons. You can add elements like images, videos, text, test questions and more. The system also supports SCORM files, including xAPI, AICC and cmi5. 
  • Learning Paths: This feature lets you build different learning paths to fit the needs of your company and ensures every learner receives relevant lessons. For example, you could create a learning path for sales reps with courses that pertain to their role. 
  • Content Hub: Seismic Learning University contains templates and best practices you can use. It also acts as a repository for pre-built courses, which your organization has full access to. Let Seismic Learning know which content you’d like to use and the support team will copy it to your platform. 
  • Single Sign-On (SSO): This capability allows users to log in to Seismic Learning with their credentials from another application. The platform integrates with Google Suite, SAML 2.0 and Azure Active Directory to provide this option. 
  • Admin Tools: Seismic Learning has several admin tools that make it easier to perform common tasks. Bulk uploads let you add a large number of employees at once, and PDF exporting lets you download files for offline use. The program also has webhooks for automatically sending information like reports to another database. 
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Product Ranking

#15

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#2

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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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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 675 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 923 reviews
91%
of users recommend this product

Udemy has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 675 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

94%
of users recommend this product

Seismic Learning has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 94% when considering 923 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

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5.0 (14)
4.5 (559)
4.7 (576)
4.9 (9)
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4.9 (102)
5.0 (145)
3.9 (5)
4.4 (188)

Awards

Udemy stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

Seismic Learning stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Useful Functionality: Over 90% of users who discussed features were pleased with the system’s components, notably self-paced learning capabilities.
Upskills Workforce: Users felt that the classes helped train employees in necessary skills in over 90% of reviews that discussed it.
Great for Training: More than 80% of reviewers who discussed using it as a training tool were pleased.
Excellent Courses: Learners loved the quality of the courses themselves in over 70% of comments that talked about it.
Skilled Instructors: Over 60% of users who discussed the teachers felt they were communicative and well-versed in the topics.
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Intuitive UI: Over 95% of all reviewers who mentioned the ease of use found it simple to learn and adopt the system.
Friendly Customer Service: Reviewers who mentioned the customer service loved the staff and felt well-supported more than 90% of the time.
Pricing: A total of 90% of users who mentioned price were happy with it and felt they got a good value for their money.
Excellent for Company Training: The reviews felt this solution was excellent for training and onboarding over 80% of the time.
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Refund Issues: Just under 80% of users who talked about refunds said they had problems getting their money back and didn’t like the policy.
Price: While over 50% of users felt it was reasonably priced, 46% of users who talked about price felt they were overcharged or didn’t like the pricing structure.
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Poor Customization Options: Just under 60% of all reviewers who mentioned customization said there weren’t enough options – and they couldn’t even access the CSS.
Formatting Issues: Around 60% of reviewers couldn’t get the font or color options they wanted and didn’t feel the design was adaptable enough.
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Udemy is an online learning solution that provides instructor-led learning classes. Users can pick from a varied selection of topics and train at their own pace. Most reviewers were especially pleased with the features, especially the ability to control the speed of learning. Reviewers left overwhelmingly positive comments on the quality of the classes. Many learners said they were still able to contact their instructors when needed. Most users felt their teachers were skilled and knew their subjects well. Users praised its skill-building both in personal and corporate environments. Though users did like the classes, they also recommended heavily screening for quality. Some complained that the platform didn’t vet what was on the site well. Udemy has reviews for all of its classes left by users. Most people recommended weeding out the good ones from the bad ones. The most significant criticism by far came from people trying to get refunds. They said they had trouble contacting customer support or didn’t receive their money back. Others disliked the 30-day refund policy and felt cheated by it. Users were split on the price of the courses. Classes often came with discounts and some felt they were reasonably priced. Others felt they were too expensive or got angry when they paid for a class that was later offered for free. Udemy is a helpful resource for self-paced learners who have a specific set of skills they want. Vet the courses carefully, wait for discounts and look for details if the price isn’t satisfactory. It doesn’t have HR functionality as it’s more of a content library than a full LMS. Larger organizations who want to take an analytics-driven approach to learning should look elsewhere.

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Seismic Learning is an LMS that works particularly well for corporate training. Reviewers liked how easy it was to use and adopt. Many used it to spread information to their employees and partners. They felt it was especially great at spreading new product information and helped train sales staff and customer service teams. Course and lesson creation were said to be extremely easy with this solution and users like the testing facilities in over half of the comments that mentioned it. On the other side, users weren’t happy with the customization and formatting options. They said that they weren’t able to find the options in text, colors and other design elements they wanted. It was also hard to adapt to all devices and change the more general look and feel of the platform. This solution is suited for small and medium businesses looking to train employees, especially in the sales and customer service departments.

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