Here we provide a top corporate LMS comparison, looking at Totara vs Moodle Workplace vs imc Learning Suite – 3 of the most popular solutions on the market in 2023. All these options are learning management systems used by major global businesses.
What is a Corporate LMS?
The leading corporate LMS solutions now create a way for L&D teams to deliver online learning across a diverse, multinational and even multilingual workforce.
What makes the best corporate learning management systems distinct from your standard LMS is the ability to tailor the learning experience for different teams depending on their role, existing knowledge level, and local language culture. Advanced multi-tenancy LMS featured tend to be what differentiates the best corporate e-learning solutions from standard platforms that simply have the hosting capacity to deliver content to large numbers of users.
Until the last 5 years or so, online learning has been very much compliance led, with training often being limited to delivering must-have, need-to-know content. More recently though, good quality training as part of the employee experience and development has been uncovered as a potential strategic advantage, and even a recruitment and staff retention tool. Employees want to feel empowered and supported in their professional development.
This shift has given rise to the ‘learning experience platform’, which supports employee-led, optional learning, as opposed to the purely top-down, mandatory training. The very best corporate LMS solutions in 2021 combine the best of both these ideas, enabling:
- L&D teams to deliver rich, engaging training at speed and scale
- HR teams to support staff and help them to feel valued
- employees to explore new content and drive their own knowledge and career development.
Corporate Training Needs
Here we look at some of the corporate training needs within large organisations, where the top LMS for large companies can make the lives of L&D and HR managers much easier:
Enrolment Management
Especially when you’re getting up and running with a new learning management system, you want everything to be as frictionless as possible, so easy enrolment management is important for user adoption. Components of this include:
- Manual Enrolment
- Automated Enrolment
- Self-Enrolment of learners into courses
- Cohort and group based enrolment
- Competency-Based enrolment
Leader in this area – imc Learning Suite – which offers neat corporate LMS features in 2 step enrolment (by the manager and course admin), payments for enrolment (via Shopify and PayPal ecommerce integration), automatic enrolment rules and waitlist management.
Course Management
Key components of a good course management system include:
- Authoring tool (either built-in or via integration, in order to update, or even create, training content)
- Multiple course formats
- Activity completion management
- Course completion management
- Bulk update activity completion settings
Honed through many years of use across tens of thousands of virtual learning environment implementations worldwide, course management is an area where Moodle Workplace really shines, because all that experience has carried through from the open source Moodle LMS development.
In educational environments, speed of course management and ease of use has been a top priority because there are so many types of user with vastly different levels of technical ability needing to use the platform.
Having carried many of those fundamentals through to the corporate learning platform version, Moodle Workplace is a leader in course management.
Organised Learning / Compliance
In a business context, organised learning focused on specific company needs and legal / regulatory compliance training is the original, and still primary, driver for a corporate LMS solution. Components include:
- Organisational Learning
- Positions based onboarding and training
- Competency management
- Automated workflows
- Dynamic Rules based conditions and actions (ITTT)
In 2010, Totara took the core of the open source Moodle learning platform and developed it for the corporate environment. Moodle HQ have since had the chance to watch the evolution of Totara from afar, while being close to the implementation of Moodle in a corporate environment by many global brands. In launching Moodle Workplace in 2019, they took the best of both to create their own corporate training software.
imc on the other hand, is part of a larger corporate organisation and has been able to build their Learning Suite to meet such needs from the ground up.
In this category, there is justification for either Moodle Workplace or imc to be been seen as the best LMS for compliance training and organised learning for businesses.
Personalised Learning
When it comes the top-down online training delivery requirements of a compliance-led corporate LMS, all 3 are extremely strong personalised learning platforms. Key components here include:
- Program Management
- Certifications and compliance tracking
- Refresher training and re-certification management
- User Dashboards
- Learning Progress Reports
- Cohort tailored notifications and tasks
- Alerts and notifications
While Totara was originally an LMS, in 2020 the company separated its offering into Totara Learn LMS, Totara Engage LXP, and Totara Perform performance management system.
This modern focus on bottom-up, learner-led personalised learning through its LXP that integrates seamlessly with the LMS, perhaps gives Totara the edge when it comes to the personalised learning experience.
Extended Enterprise & Multi-Tenancy
An extended enterprise LMS will enable a tailored online learning experience for external partners, such as suppliers, distributors, sales agents or franchisees. This is in addition to your own employee training.
Whether across internal departments with differing needs according to roles, local culture and even different languages, a multi-tenancy LMS enables the creation and management of bespoke learning platform deployments from a central hub.
Key features in this aspect include:
- Shared Courses across tenants
- Shared Programmes across tenants
- Shared Certifications across tenants
- Shared Organisational Structure across tenants
- Shared Dynamic Rules across tenants
- Shared Custom Reports across tenants
- Shared Certificate Templates across tenants
- Updating content across tenants
The above capability is in addition to bespoke content and functionality created for each deployment in a multi-tenant LMS solution.
As a made-for corporate training solution, imc caters very much for the multi-tenancy LMS needs of global companies, including those delivering extended enterprise e-learning.
Mobile Learning App
Important features of a mobile learning app include:
- Client-branded app development
- Offline learning capabilities (important for remote workers who may not have internet access)
- Push mobile notifications
- Mobile use analytics
With the huge growth in mobile learning with smartphone over the last few years, Moodle Workplace was developed very much with the mobile app as a key strength, and is a leader in this respect.
Social Learning
With business training use in mind, Totara is less tailored to informal and social learning than both Moodle Workplace and its open source predecessor Moodle, both of which have a great deal of collaborative features to make peer to peer learning and content sharing easy. However, despite being very much a corporate training system, imc Learning Suite also prioritises social. Key features to look for in a social learning platform include:
- Forums
- Emojis within messaging (giving the informal feel of social media platforms that many learners will be familiar with)
- Group conversations
On top of these relatively common social learning features, imc have added User Communities, News Panels, blog creation and easy deep linking to content for social sharing, which make it a leader in this area.
Evaluation / Assessments
The importance of evaulation and assessments outside of the compliance side of things varies according to organisational culture, but for many companies, measuring training effectiveness is a big priority. Key features here can include:
- Opinion polls
- Feedback questions
- Quizzes and built-in assessment tools
- Certificates upon programme completion
- Rewards and other recognition
- Competency completion based badge
- Group membership based badges
- Gradebooks and grading
- Anonymous graders
- Leaderboards
Moodle Workplace benefits from many of the education-focused assessment features, while adding many that are beneficial within an LMS for compliance, making it a leading learning management system when it comes to training evaluation.
User Experience
When it comes to LMS user experience, L&D managers want ease of use, ease of implementation and learners to enjoy using the platform so that they don’t need to be forced / bribed / threatened to get involved with training. Features of an LMS with good UX include:
- Turnkey solution (ready to go, quickly)
- Fully customisable
- Brand theme customisation
- Custom main menus
- Built-in video conferencing
Having been built from the gound up as a corporate LMS, imc Learning Suite includes all thw above and much more for a great e-learning user experience.
Integrations & Interoperability
Large corporates can end up with an extensive tech stack, and adding additional software can lead to duplication of effort across L&D and HR teams. So it’s important for software products to interact and share data where possible, especially in the management of employee data, while doing so in a secure andf GDPR compliant manner. relavant features with this in mind include;
- Export / Import API
- Automatic conflict resolution
- Full-site migration
- Ready for 3rd party exporting and importing of data
In addition to the above, imc Learning Suite is built to manage SCORM content and work with common standards like AICC, LTI, QTI and the much-discussed xAPI.
More interesting though is imc’s ever growing list of integrations with popular 3rd party systems, such as Workday HCM software, PayPal and Shopify for ecommerce, GoToMeeting & GoToWebinar, SAP, YouTube and LinkedIn Learning for content, Salesforce CRM and man more.
Reporting & Analytics
For large organisations rolling out training at scale, reporting and learner analytics tools become increasingly important. Useful LMS reporting features include:
- Advanced Custom report builder
- Learner drop out report and notification
- Learner last login
- Course reports
- Admin reports
- Report column aggregation
All 3 solutions have very strong reporting and data analytics functionality, but Totara looks particularly impressive in this area, with ready to go and customisable tools a priority.
So, all these solutions are viable and powerful corporate LMS solutions, but if counting on the wins across these 11 categories, you could argue that imc Learning Suite is best placed to cater for the training needs of large organisations.
Top Solution By Sector
While feature sets are important, many organisations will ask of any software – “is it proven for companies like ours” or “… in our sector“? It’s a valid way to choose a corporate LMS, so here we look at the corporate LMS case studies across a range of sectors where e-learning is popular and / or important to deliver high-quality training at speed and scale.
Healthcare
Totara – healthcare LMS users include the NHS in the UK and the National Ambulance service in the UAE.
Technology & Telecoms
imc – technology and telecoms clients include Sky and Vodafone.
Retail
Moodle Workplace – users include Samsung and McGraw Hill.
Government / Public Sector
Totara – users include the US Federal Government and public sector bodies within the UK, Australia and New Zealand.
Automotive
imc – automotive industry clients include Audi and Daimler.
Business Services
(including accounting and finance, law and consultancy) – imc – clients include Deloitte and KPMG.
Travel, Catering & Hospitality
Totara – travel, catering and hospitality clients include Pizza Express and Red Lion Hotels.
Pharmaceutical
imc – pharmaceutical LMS users include BioNTech and Mundipharma.
Manufacturing
Totara – manufacturing training platform clients include Lely and Boss Paints.
Membership Organisations / Professional Bodies
imc – clients using this LMS for membership organisations and professional bodies include the ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) and RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects).
Choosing the Best Corporate LMS for Your Needs
Why Choose Totara?
Now that Totara has become 3 separate, but integrated products, with the LMS, plus a learning experience platform and a performance management system, it could be a great choice for companies looking for compliance led-training alongside personalised learning that will engage employees.
Totara has great strengths in reporting and learner analytics, and itis the real standout choice for those looking for an LMS for government organisations, as it is proven successful for the public sector at the highest level.
Visit the Totara website to learn more about this integrated learning and performance suite.
Why Choose Moodle Workplace?
While it’s the newest of these 3 learning management systems, Moodle Workplace is based on the open source Moodle, which is still the most widely used LMS globally, and developed with firm pedagogical principles from the education sector.
Moodle Workplace could be a great choice for an organisation that is using Moodle and wants to transition from that to a more corporate LMS to benefit from advanced functionalities, such as user hierarchies and multi-tenancy, but without the learning curve of an entirely new system.
Many people are familiar with Moodle, at least from their college or university days, so may be relatively comfortable in using it. Having only launched in 2019, Moodle Workplace hasn’t yet had the chance to demonstrate strengths and adoption in any one sector, but more strong case studies are sure to emerge over the coming years, and their are also some big-name brands in Retail using it.
If delivering training to learners working remotely and on the go, the Moodle Workplace mobile app is a strong feature.
Learn more about this corporate LMS at moodle.com/workplace/ and find a local Premium Certified Services Provider who can deliver its implementation.
Why Choose imc Learning Suite?
The fact that 2 of the 4 major global business services consultancies – Deloitte and KPMG – both use imc Learning solutions says a lot. Both have a global presence with bases in over 150 countries and both advise some of the world’s biggest companies on improving efficiency and gaining competitive advantages.
So they are no mugs when it comes to procuring the best corporate solutions and managing tech projects, including digital transformation.
imc Learning is a go-to corporate training solution provider for them, and for many other global companies, including the likes of Audi, Sky, Daimler, Vodafone and other household-name brands.
Learn more about the imc Learning Suite here on the company’s website
In Summary
So in the battle to be the best corporate LMS solution with Totara vs Moodle Workplace vs imc Learning Suite, who wins? Based on the business training needs criteria above, imc Learning Suite comes out top in our corporate LMS comparison.
However, the best learning management system and provider for your organisation depends on your unique requirements, your sector, and if you’re looking for a company near you – possibly even your location.
from Learning Light