Comparisons

Onboarding is the one training job where every learner logs in once and never comes back, and most platforms are priced for people who come back. This guide compares 13 onboarding platforms on what they count as a user, the smallest company each will sell to, and what a year of new hires costs on each billing model.

Pendo sells three things on one bill – product analytics, in-app guides, and session replay with sentiment surveys – and bills all three against a single monthly-active-user count. Most teams who leave are only using one of the three. This guide splits the question into those jobs, puts each alternative’s published price next to what that price is counted against, and says plainly which vendors publish no number at all.

An LCMS fixes one problem well: the same change repeated across dozens of copies of a course. It doesn’t fix re-uploading packages to every LMS. Here’s how to count both on your own catalog, and what to buy for each.

WalkMe’s pricing page carries no dollar figure, and the company has been an SAP subsidiary since September 2024. These eleven alternatives are split on the line no other guide draws: not one vendor in this category publishes a price for covering software you bought, and the tools that do print a ladder install only in software you built. Each one carries the meter, the trial, and what the vendor does not publish.

Teachable’s Starter plan takes 7.5% of every sale on top of card processing, so a $100 course leaves you $89.30. Above $533 a month of sales the $40 upgrade to Builder is cheaper than the fee, and below it the cheapest move is no move at all. These eight platforms are compared on the three things that actually differ: the shape of the fee, who controls your buyers’ refunds, and what you can take with you.

An LMS keeps the record of training people must finish; an LXP helps them find training they choose. Here is the side-by-side table, the question that decides the purchase, and a decision table by situation.

Kajabi’s entry plan is $179 a month, and it takes no percentage of your sales when you use Kajabi Payments; route payments elsewhere and its own pricing table charges 2% on that entry plan. At roughly $1,870 a month in sales, Kajabi Basic and Teachable Starter cost the same. Ten platforms compared on what each takes per sale, the plan caps that force the next tier, and which parts of Kajabi’s bundle you would have to rebuild somewhere else.

Two quotes that both say “active user” can differ by more than ten times. One vendor means people simultaneously logged in, another means anyone who touched tracked content, a third means any account with a working password. This guide compares 13 extended enterprise platforms on what each one counts and what a second audience costs.

IT asks who hosts the LMS, and there are three answers: SaaS, vendor-managed hosting and self-hosted. Each one decides who patches it, whose certificate covers it, what uptime is promised and how you leave. A comparison table and a worked cost-line example in hours show which jobs land on your team.