Start with who you're training. If it's your own staff, a company LMS or an onboarding tool fits best. If it's customers or partners learning your product, a customer education platform is built for that job. Then check how easily your own experts can build courses, because that's where most switches stall.
Training your own team and teaching your customers look alike in a demo, but they're different jobs once you're running them every week. 360Learning sells itself on collaborative learning, where the people who know the work help build the courses. The eight alternatives below are in no particular order and split by the audience each one is built around.
Eight training platforms compared
| Tool | Kind of platform | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Continu | AI training platform | training staff, partners and customers from one place |
| Docebo | Workforce readiness platform | large organisations linking skills data with learning |
| Easygenerator | Course authoring tool | letting anyone in the company build training |
| Litmos | Learning platform | building skills across staff, customers and partners |
| Skilljar | Customer education LMS | external training for customers and partners |
| TalentLMS | Cloud LMS | moving in-house training online without fuss |
| Thought Industries | Customer academy platform | product guidance from quick answers to full courses |
| Trainual | Training and operations software | onboarding staff and writing down how work gets done |
Who each platform is built to train
Your own employees
TalentLMS is a cloud LMS for getting in-house training out of the meeting room and into courses you run yourself. Trainual keeps training next to your operating procedures and performance, which suits a business that wants its ways of working written down in the same place staff learn them. Easygenerator focuses on course authoring, so your subject experts can build training without waiting in a queue for the learning team.
Customers and partners
Skilljar is an external LMS for customer education, built for training the people who use your product rather than the people who build it. Thought Industries covers everything from a one-line answer to a complete academy course, and connects that help to whether customers keep using the product. If your training exists to help customers succeed, start here.
Several audiences at once
Docebo is pitched at larger organisations that want training tied to skills insight, so they can plan who takes on what next. Litmos covers employees, customers and partners on one platform. Continu frames its AI platform around enablement for every group you train. These make most sense when one team looks after training for staff and customers alike.
Course building is where moves stall
360Learning presents itself as a big-company LMS that mixes peer-built courses with AI agents, so the know-how already inside your business becomes training you can measure. In plain terms, it expects your experts to help write the training, not just the learning team.
So the question to ask of any replacement is less about the course catalogue and more about the workflow. How are courses built, and by whom? How are they assigned to the right people, or sold and shared with customers? And how is learner progress tracked once they're live? If your experts wrote half your courses under the old system, make sure the new one lets them keep doing that without a training course of their own on how to use the tool.
Reporting is the other half. A platform can make building courses easy and still leave you exporting spreadsheets to see who's finished, who's overdue and who's struggling. Ask to see the reports with real-looking data before you sign anything.
All eight, in alphabetical order
Here they are by name, A first. Every Best for line is my summary of the platform's own description of itself.
Continu
Best for: Companies training several groups at once; the vendor pitches its AI platform for partner, customer and employee enablement that scales with the business.
Docebo
Best for: Big organisations matching people's skills to the work coming next; the vendor pitches one platform for any audience, with skills insight and AI agents built in.
Easygenerator
Best for: Teams where subject experts write the training themselves; the vendor says it's designed so anyone can share knowledge without adding to the learning team's workload.
Litmos
Best for: Organisations building skills across employees, customers and partners, which the vendor frames as learning that keeps pace with AI.
Skilljar
Best for: Software companies running customer education, with the vendor's external LMS also covering partners and internal team members.
TalentLMS
Best for: Firms shifting classroom or slide-deck sessions into self-paced courses; the vendor's pitch is a cloud LMS where you build and run courses yourself.
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Thought Industries
Best for: Product teams that want customers (and AI agents) given consistent product help at any depth, which the vendor links to adoption and renewals.
Trainual
Best for: Businesses that want staff training, day-to-day operations and performance kept in one system, as the vendor describes its software.
My advice on moving training platforms
Move one live course first, not the whole library. Pick a course with real learners and a real deadline, rebuild it in your shortlisted tool, assign it and look at what the reports show you a week later. That single course will tell you more about authoring, assignment and tracking than any sales call. Most of these vendors don't state a free plan on their homepage as of Nov 2026, so ask for a trial or a sandbox to run it in.
Export completion records from your current system before you cancel anything. Some industries need training history kept for audits, and what you must keep depends on your sector and where you operate, so ask the relevant regulator if compliance training is involved. Then bring in two or three of the experts who build courses today and let them try the editor themselves, because they'll spot the friction a buyer won't.
Still weighing it up? My round-up of LMS picks for corporate training goes wider, and there's a list of free LMS options. If you also sell courses to the public, my list of the best online course platforms covers that side.
Do you make training or LMS platforms? Tool makers can ask to be considered for a featured place on this list.
Want your tool on this list? Featured spots and reviews here are paid partnerships. Here's how to partner with me.
Frequently asked questions
How is an LMS different from a course authoring tool?
An LMS hosts courses, assigns them to learners and tracks progress. An authoring tool is where courses are built. Some platforms do both, while others expect you to build content elsewhere and upload it.
Will my SCORM files import into another LMS?
Often, if your courses are in a standard package format such as SCORM. Content built inside a platform's own editor may need rebuilding, so ask each vendor how imports work before you commit.
Should customer training sit on its own platform?
Only if it matters to revenue. When customers just need a few short guides, your staff LMS may cope. If customer education drives product adoption, a platform built for external learners gives you sign-up, branding and reporting that suit that job.
What sets the timeline for an LMS switch?
Mostly the size of your course library, your learner count and the systems the LMS talks to. A small team with a handful of courses can move quickly; a company with years of history and links to its HR system should plan the move in phases.
What reports should a training platform give me?
At minimum: who's enrolled, who's finished, who's overdue and how people scored on assessments. If you train customers, you'll also want to see whether trained accounts use the product more.
Is collaborative learning possible on other platforms?
In different forms, yes. Look for features that let staff suggest edits, comment on lessons or build short courses themselves, and check who approves changes before they go live.


