Absorb LMS Competitors: Why Acorn is a Worthy Consideration

In the realm of learning management system offerings, you’ve found your way to Acorn LMS and Absorb LMS. Both are cloud-based solutions, and Absorb is a great learning management system who we tip our hat to for their achievements—but interestingly enough, that’s where we start to diverge.

As a Absorb LMS competitor, this blog covers Acorn LMSs core differentiators:

Guiding principles
Multi-tenancy and the extended enterprise
White labelling
Reporting and analytics
Pricing, before value and transparency

So, just what makes Acorn and Absorb LMS different?

The real distinction is in our guiding principles.

Absorb LMS openly talks about how thoughtful design is how we help companies unleash their talent. Elegant engineering is how we help them flourish. (their words), whilst we don’t know what elegant engineering means, thoughtful design we tip our hat to as an important starting point.

With Acorn, our vision is anchored on helping you measure the true ROI of your learning investments, while giving you deep insights into learner capabilities and gaps. Our system is designed to optimise learning for maximum impact, and we’re passionate about linking learning to performance. We believe that building capability is critical to the success of any organisation, whether that be their own people, partners or customers, and our LMS is designed to help you do just that.

Need a little more clarity? Read on, we’ve hit all the major points of comparison below.

Absorb LMS vs Acorn: Multi-Tenancy and Extended Enterprise

Absorb LMS multi-tenancy (or segregating by departments) does not function as expected for certain customers causing them to have to adjust their offering and prices for clients. When assigning courses you can only assign to a whole or sub-department. So if 99 customers get the library and one doesn’t, you have to allow 99 clients instead of just restricting one. When restricting departments you can manage only the users and courses within their department. However, this does not apply to the mercury module, Global Resources, Competencies, Categories, Message Templates, Ecommerce, and Public Catalogs. So you have to disable access to department admins for these features otherwise they would see other departments (clients in this case). Which creates a privacy problem.

So straight off the bat, Acorn can do all the above and not have the same problems. But multi-tenancy and the extended enterprise is much more about your companies why. We believe less learning is more, rather focus on creating the right learning to have impact in an optimal way helps you win. And this has to be reflected in how stream-lined your extended enterprise is. We’re fortunate in that we serve 70% of the federal government, and they were amongst some of our first customers in 2014. As we built the system out we started with extended enterprise, meaning we know the nuance of what is and isn’t needed for multiple use cases.

Ask us how: BOOK A DEMO.

Absorb LMS vs Acorn: White Labelling

Look, we both do white labelling. But there is doing white labelling, and there is actually doing white labelling. Our understanding is they are at the beginning of their white labelling journey, and this is true at time of writing in late 2022. But what it means to us having done this for years, is when you take up our white label option, you can rebrand and customise Acorn to make it look like your own product, with your own name and branding. This can include customising the login page, dashboard, email notifications, and other parts of Acorn. All done yourself, using elements such as our widgets,

Just back on the extended enterprise point above. White labelling an LMS is a common practice among companies that truly provide online training or education programs to their employees, partners, or customers, but want the platform to appear as if it was developed in-house… you need your LMS to truly be extended enterprise and not say it as a bolt on.

Absorb LMS vs Acorn: Reporting and Metrics That Matter

Absorb is still investing in getting to an advanced stage, we found that their reporting features still need a bit of development to allow for more control and options for what should be saved in the report export document.

Acorn is in a fortunate position that we are able to do all those things after 8 years of product R&D, and in early 2023 released our reporting overhaul with a significant amount of self serve widgets and dashboards available.

See reporting in action: BOOK A DEMO.

Absorb vs Acorn: Pricing

At Acorn, we don’t profess to be the cheapest. We are acknowledged in the market as a value disruptor, and are priced accordingly. We sit around the middle of the pack of the top 10 LMSs for price, and are happy with this position. For a guide, you’ll be looking at somewhere around the $3 per user, per month mark. All our pricing is published on our pricing page. We believe in transparency.

Absorb LMS pricing is harder to find, they don’t have a pricing page on their website with pricing information. We did find “Small businesses can purchase an Absorb LMS licensing fee for $800 per month plus a 12-month user fee of $16 per active user. A setup fee that includes training and support is another $3,200. This plan gives users a custom website that’s hosted by Absorb”.

Like all good comparison articles, ensure you do all your own research and validate that you have the latest Acorn information directly with us, and ensure you contact Absorb LMS direct to validate their point of view and latest updates. All the above was fair and accurate as of late 2022.

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