TalentLMS is a learning management system (LMS), solely used for employee training. Trainual, on the other hand, is an LMS alternative. It’s a business playbook — meaning it trains your team and serves as a searchable, 24/7 resource for company knowledge, policies, processes, standard operating procedures (SOPs), team structure, employee roles and responsibilities, and more.
Of course, there is quite a bit of overlap between the TalentLMS and Trainual platforms. But there are even more significant differences between them — influencing how they will each support you and the founders, managers, and operational leaders in your org.
👉 So, which is better: Trainual or TalentLMS?
If you’re looking for a one-sentence answer, you’ll want to go with Trainual.
TalentLMS is restricted as a simple training platform. Trainual offers businesses significantly more beyond training. You can document your entire operational structure (including roles and responsibilities; an employee directory; and org and role charts) using time-saving features like an AI content generator; over 300 robust templates; a chrome extension that captures your processes as you do them; a Google Doc importer; and more.
Plus, they have many additional resources, like setup support, and an award-winning customer service team that’s only an email or chat away. Sound like what you’re looking for? Start a free 7-day trial now.
Trainual and TalentLMS are two of the leading software solutions for small-to-medium-sized businesses that need to provide employee training. Both equip organizational leaders with the tools they need to build out onboarding and offboarding flows, and document other company information.
They both also offer a broad array of features to help businesses streamline their training processes. You’ll find similar experiences with the following features, available in both Trainual and TalentLMS:
Now with the big similarities out of the way, let’s take a dive into the larger variations between the two that may make one better suited for your small-to-medium-sized business than the other.
Trainual is a comprehensive solution for entrepreneurs and leaders who want to grow and scale their businesses. Of course, this isn’t done by generating reusable onboarding and training materials alone. It’s by making people-centric decisions, aligning employees on their responsibilities and expectations, and documenting SOPs and processes so your company runs like a well-oiled machine. Trainual’s features — uniquely crafted for small-to-medium-sized businesses — make it the perfect tool for just that. Companies that choose Trainual have anywhere between less than 10, and up to 5K employees (though most teams using it have between 10 and 250 employees).
Let’s go over the features that this TalentLMS alternative has over its competition.
In TalentLMS, you’re stuck creating most of your documentation from scratch. Since this can be very time-consuming, consider the massive time benefit you’ll get from choosing a platform that offers powerful template starters that help get your documentation up and running in no time.
Trainual provides 400+ robust and fully-built templates — including policies, processes, and roles (descriptions and responsibilities included). This gives the ultimate jumpstart you need for your documentation and content. Just give them your personal touch, and they’re ready to share with the rest of your team.
👉 Check out some of Trainual’s most popular templates:
Note that if you’re willing to nearly double the cost of your subscription in TalentLMS, you can get access to some general pre-built courses. Unfortunately, they can’t be edited to contain the specific training you need for your unique business.
When your small business composition is constantly changing (via hiring, promotions, role changes, and so on) you need to help your team members keep it all straight. So it’s no surprise that many small-to-medium-sized businesses look for more than training documentation in their system.
While TalentLMS is solely a documentation platform, Trainual offers more long-term strategies to success — AKA, systems that invest in your people and answer all their questions about who they work with. Here are some built-in resources Trainual uses to foster team connection:
You have to choose the highest-tiered plan to receive live chat support or “priority” support in TalentLMS. (Which you’ll probably need since LMSs are known to be finicky.)
Trainual’s top-notch customer experience team provides every customer with a multitude of resources and ongoing support. Here are just a few of the unique levels of support they provide:
If you choose TalentLMS, there’s a chance you’ll be left out to dry. Their level of resources and ongoing support doesn’t even come close to the level of customized care Trainual offers every customer. So If customer care is important to you, Trainual is the clear winner here.
Ever wish your processes could just document themselves? When you use the Trainual Capture Chrome extension, you can literally capture what you're doing as you do it — making process documentation nearly 2x faster.
All you have to do is click start, run through your process, and click finish. And just like that, your step-by-step process will be 100% documented — complete with screenshots and written descriptions for every action you took.
With the Trainual Chrome extension, your team can surface the exact processes, policies, and business knowledge they need — right where they're working. (We're talking anywhere on the web.)
Link how-to information to any webpage, and a help icon will appear when your employees navigate to that webpage. When your employees click it, the exact information they need to carry out the online process on that page will slide right out. They can reference it right on the webpage they’re working on, helping them carry out online processes over three times faster.
You can add your payment collection process to your billing platform, PTO guidelines to your benefits homepage, customer FAQs to your chat software — the options are endless.
If you don’t want your training to be a snooze fest, you need to include some engaging elements throughout every piece of content. Fortunately, you can add fun GIFs and stock photos quick as a flash right in the Trainual app — as these options are readily available in the text editor toolbar.
If you choose Trainual, you can leverage adhesive tags equipped with cutting-edge near-field communication (NFC) technology. AKA, tech that allows for two-way communication with phones.
With a quick tap of your phone to an NFC tag, you can pair the tag with an important SOP, policy, or process. Then anyone (like a team member, customer, or prospect) can tap the tag with their own phone and pull up the content in a fraction of a second.
You can stick tags anywhere:
Chances are you’re either:
Sound familiar? Then you need the Trainual Delegation Planner.
The Trainual Delegation Planner is your snapshot of where employees should — and shouldn’t — spend their time. Helping you build a more engaged and productive team, optimize resources, streamline operations, and so much more.
Here’s how the Delegation Planner works:
👉 Learn how to transform the way you delegate with the Delegation Planner.
If you wanna put away those sticky notes and whiteboard markers, you'll wanna go with Trainual — it's the only playbook-building software with a built-in delegation tool.
Testing is one of the best ways you can ensure your team is retaining what they learn. When the average person forgets 50% of what they learn within an hour of learning it, you know you need to: 1) Document training in one centralized place so your team can go back and reference the material (ahem — Trainual), and 2) Hone in on the most important bits of information — and make sure your team has retained them — using tests. AKA, knowledge-retention checks, quizzes, exams — whatever you want to call them!
But coming up with the right questions to ask can be tedious. Which is why you can use AI in Trainual to generate a complete, multiple-choice test based on what’s documented in a subject. From there, you can add, edit, or remove questions as needed and hit publish! It’s giving *effortless.*
Bonus: You can incorporate presentations and mock exercises into your quizzing too — helping you evaluate your employees' deeper understanding of what they've learned. Just use the video response option. All your team has to do is click, record, and submit.
Ever wish you could ask your training manual a question about your policies or processes and have it pull up the exact answer you’re looking for — without wading through pages of results? Lucky for you, Trainual does just that.
You can surface company knowledge in a matter of seconds with Trainual's AI-powered search. It understands the actual meaning and intent behind what you’re searching for (not just the search terms). Giving you ultra-accurate, relevant search results — and even answering any question you put in the search bar (using the information you have documented in your account).
Now that we’ve got a good idea of the feature differences between Trainual and TalentLMS, let’s analyze the cost differences.
Think of a process you’d like to document. Got it? Now picture it outlined in an easy-to-follow visual guide that captures each step from start to finish. Wanna see this in action? Build an interactive, dynamic flowchart right in Trainual!
You’re about to forget everything you thought you knew about flowcharts. By mapping your flows where all your business knowledge is centralized, you can link people, groups, and more training right where they’re needed most.
When you create a flowchart in Trainual, you can:
The cost-effectiveness of either of these systems will depend on your company’s needs. The cost of Trainual is based on the the number of employees you have. On the other hand, TalentLMS offers different plan tiers, where the number of features you get increases as you go up to the next tier. Both platforms offer discounted prices if you choose annual billing as opposed to monthly billing.
View TalentLMS's pricing model by visiting talentlms.com/prices.
After comparing plan options side by side, you’ll find that Trainual takes the cake with the features it offers for its price. But let’s get into the specific plans you’ll want to go with depending on your goals and ideal price point.
The cheapest plan you can get between these two platforms is TalentLMS’s free plan. But before you get too excited, understand that the free TalentLMS plan has very minimal features (like, next to nothing). And you can only create ten courses and have five people in the account. You may be able to get by on this plan for a few weeks, but it’s only a matter of time before you need to invest in a paid plan that actually gets your team on the same page and helps you delegate your own responsibilities. So you’ll want to take a close look at the features that each software offers in their tier options.
When looking for a “basic” playbook builder, you’ll definitely get the most bang for your buck with Trainual — largely due to its robust reporting features. At the end of the day, your software needs to keep employees informed on business changes and (more importantly) help you hold them accountable for following current policies and procedures. And the only way to make sure everyone is progressing through their assigned content, passing their assigned quizzes, and staying up to date is through advanced reporting.
Believe it or not, advanced testing, tracking, and reporting options are available in all Trainual plans. Trainual helps you deep dive into each employee’s onboarding and training progress, as well as how well they’re keeping up with company updates. Individual employee reports show what’s overdue, in progress, not started, and completed — plus comprehensive breakdowns of content completion and test progress — all in one snapshot.
While the reporting capabilities in Trainual are extensive, they’re easy to navigate. And a must-have — even if you’re seeking cheapest plan option out there.
When you choose any Trainual plan, you get playbook-building add-ons beyond built-in screen recording, a mobile app, custom branding, and AI-powered content generation (available in select TalentLMS plans). You get all those features, plus a roles and responsibilities builder; a team directory; role and org charts, over 400 customizable templates, personalize setup support, a process-capturing tool, responsibility delegation and planning, and more — features that aren’t available in even the priciest TalentLMS plan.
Small-to-medium-sized business leaders with 10 to 250 employees typically want to have as many features as they can get their hands on. After all, they’re looking to free up their time so they can lead their business to success. And their best bet to get there is investing in a documentation system with features that help them save time, prioritize their people, and hit the ground running (so they can delegate their responsibilities ASAP). So, they opt for the Trainual plan that fits their team size — since it delivers the most impactful features at an outrageously reasonable price.
Now that you understand the feature and pricing differences between Trainual and TalentLMS, you have everything you need to make an informed decision about which platform to go with.
When deciding between Trainual and TalentLMS, you need to understand what benefits and features each provides, that’ll help you and your team reach your growth potential.
Choose Trainual if:
Choose TalentLMS if:
Ultimately, Trainual has way more valuable features, provides better customer support, and has been intricately built (by a small business, for small businesses) to help you keep your whole team informed and connected.
Are you an entrepreneur, founder, manager, or operational leader looking to scale your business? Sign up for a free 7-day Trainual trial today.
TalentLMS is a learning management system (LMS), solely used for employee training. Trainual, on the other hand, is an LMS alternative. It’s a business playbook — meaning it trains your team and serves as a searchable, 24/7 resource for company knowledge, policies, processes, standard operating procedures (SOPs), team structure, employee roles and responsibilities, and more.
Of course, there is quite a bit of overlap between the TalentLMS and Trainual platforms. But there are even more significant differences between them — influencing how they will each support you and the founders, managers, and operational leaders in your org.
👉 So, which is better: Trainual or TalentLMS?
If you’re looking for a one-sentence answer, you’ll want to go with Trainual.
TalentLMS is restricted as a simple training platform. Trainual offers businesses significantly more beyond training. You can document your entire operational structure (including roles and responsibilities; an employee directory; and org and role charts) using time-saving features like an AI content generator; over 300 robust templates; a chrome extension that captures your processes as you do them; a Google Doc importer; and more.
Plus, they have many additional resources, like setup support, and an award-winning customer service team that’s only an email or chat away. Sound like what you’re looking for? Start a free 7-day trial now.
Trainual and TalentLMS are two of the leading software solutions for small-to-medium-sized businesses that need to provide employee training. Both equip organizational leaders with the tools they need to build out onboarding and offboarding flows, and document other company information.
They both also offer a broad array of features to help businesses streamline their training processes. You’ll find similar experiences with the following features, available in both Trainual and TalentLMS:
Now with the big similarities out of the way, let’s take a dive into the larger variations between the two that may make one better suited for your small-to-medium-sized business than the other.
Trainual is a comprehensive solution for entrepreneurs and leaders who want to grow and scale their businesses. Of course, this isn’t done by generating reusable onboarding and training materials alone. It’s by making people-centric decisions, aligning employees on their responsibilities and expectations, and documenting SOPs and processes so your company runs like a well-oiled machine. Trainual’s features — uniquely crafted for small-to-medium-sized businesses — make it the perfect tool for just that. Companies that choose Trainual have anywhere between less than 10, and up to 5K employees (though most teams using it have between 10 and 250 employees).
Let’s go over the features that this TalentLMS alternative has over its competition.
In TalentLMS, you’re stuck creating most of your documentation from scratch. Since this can be very time-consuming, consider the massive time benefit you’ll get from choosing a platform that offers powerful template starters that help get your documentation up and running in no time.
Trainual provides 400+ robust and fully-built templates — including policies, processes, and roles (descriptions and responsibilities included). This gives the ultimate jumpstart you need for your documentation and content. Just give them your personal touch, and they’re ready to share with the rest of your team.
👉 Check out some of Trainual’s most popular templates:
Note that if you’re willing to nearly double the cost of your subscription in TalentLMS, you can get access to some general pre-built courses. Unfortunately, they can’t be edited to contain the specific training you need for your unique business.
When your small business composition is constantly changing (via hiring, promotions, role changes, and so on) you need to help your team members keep it all straight. So it’s no surprise that many small-to-medium-sized businesses look for more than training documentation in their system.
While TalentLMS is solely a documentation platform, Trainual offers more long-term strategies to success — AKA, systems that invest in your people and answer all their questions about who they work with. Here are some built-in resources Trainual uses to foster team connection:
You have to choose the highest-tiered plan to receive live chat support or “priority” support in TalentLMS. (Which you’ll probably need since LMSs are known to be finicky.)
Trainual’s top-notch customer experience team provides every customer with a multitude of resources and ongoing support. Here are just a few of the unique levels of support they provide:
If you choose TalentLMS, there’s a chance you’ll be left out to dry. Their level of resources and ongoing support doesn’t even come close to the level of customized care Trainual offers every customer. So If customer care is important to you, Trainual is the clear winner here.
Ever wish your processes could just document themselves? When you use the Trainual Capture Chrome extension, you can literally capture what you're doing as you do it — making process documentation nearly 2x faster.
All you have to do is click start, run through your process, and click finish. And just like that, your step-by-step process will be 100% documented — complete with screenshots and written descriptions for every action you took.
With the Trainual Chrome extension, your team can surface the exact processes, policies, and business knowledge they need — right where they're working. (We're talking anywhere on the web.)
Link how-to information to any webpage, and a help icon will appear when your employees navigate to that webpage. When your employees click it, the exact information they need to carry out the online process on that page will slide right out. They can reference it right on the webpage they’re working on, helping them carry out online processes over three times faster.
You can add your payment collection process to your billing platform, PTO guidelines to your benefits homepage, customer FAQs to your chat software — the options are endless.
If you don’t want your training to be a snooze fest, you need to include some engaging elements throughout every piece of content. Fortunately, you can add fun GIFs and stock photos quick as a flash right in the Trainual app — as these options are readily available in the text editor toolbar.
If you choose Trainual, you can leverage adhesive tags equipped with cutting-edge near-field communication (NFC) technology. AKA, tech that allows for two-way communication with phones.
With a quick tap of your phone to an NFC tag, you can pair the tag with an important SOP, policy, or process. Then anyone (like a team member, customer, or prospect) can tap the tag with their own phone and pull up the content in a fraction of a second.
You can stick tags anywhere:
Chances are you’re either:
Sound familiar? Then you need the Trainual Delegation Planner.
The Trainual Delegation Planner is your snapshot of where employees should — and shouldn’t — spend their time. Helping you build a more engaged and productive team, optimize resources, streamline operations, and so much more.
Here’s how the Delegation Planner works:
👉 Learn how to transform the way you delegate with the Delegation Planner.
If you wanna put away those sticky notes and whiteboard markers, you'll wanna go with Trainual — it's the only playbook-building software with a built-in delegation tool.
Testing is one of the best ways you can ensure your team is retaining what they learn. When the average person forgets 50% of what they learn within an hour of learning it, you know you need to: 1) Document training in one centralized place so your team can go back and reference the material (ahem — Trainual), and 2) Hone in on the most important bits of information — and make sure your team has retained them — using tests. AKA, knowledge-retention checks, quizzes, exams — whatever you want to call them!
But coming up with the right questions to ask can be tedious. Which is why you can use AI in Trainual to generate a complete, multiple-choice test based on what’s documented in a subject. From there, you can add, edit, or remove questions as needed and hit publish! It’s giving *effortless.*
Bonus: You can incorporate presentations and mock exercises into your quizzing too — helping you evaluate your employees' deeper understanding of what they've learned. Just use the video response option. All your team has to do is click, record, and submit.
Ever wish you could ask your training manual a question about your policies or processes and have it pull up the exact answer you’re looking for — without wading through pages of results? Lucky for you, Trainual does just that.
You can surface company knowledge in a matter of seconds with Trainual's AI-powered search. It understands the actual meaning and intent behind what you’re searching for (not just the search terms). Giving you ultra-accurate, relevant search results — and even answering any question you put in the search bar (using the information you have documented in your account).
Now that we’ve got a good idea of the feature differences between Trainual and TalentLMS, let’s analyze the cost differences.
Think of a process you’d like to document. Got it? Now picture it outlined in an easy-to-follow visual guide that captures each step from start to finish. Wanna see this in action? Build an interactive, dynamic flowchart right in Trainual!
You’re about to forget everything you thought you knew about flowcharts. By mapping your flows where all your business knowledge is centralized, you can link people, groups, and more training right where they’re needed most.
When you create a flowchart in Trainual, you can:
The cost-effectiveness of either of these systems will depend on your company’s needs. The cost of Trainual is based on the the number of employees you have. On the other hand, TalentLMS offers different plan tiers, where the number of features you get increases as you go up to the next tier. Both platforms offer discounted prices if you choose annual billing as opposed to monthly billing.
View TalentLMS's pricing model by visiting talentlms.com/prices.
After comparing plan options side by side, you’ll find that Trainual takes the cake with the features it offers for its price. But let’s get into the specific plans you’ll want to go with depending on your goals and ideal price point.
The cheapest plan you can get between these two platforms is TalentLMS’s free plan. But before you get too excited, understand that the free TalentLMS plan has very minimal features (like, next to nothing). And you can only create ten courses and have five people in the account. You may be able to get by on this plan for a few weeks, but it’s only a matter of time before you need to invest in a paid plan that actually gets your team on the same page and helps you delegate your own responsibilities. So you’ll want to take a close look at the features that each software offers in their tier options.
When looking for a “basic” playbook builder, you’ll definitely get the most bang for your buck with Trainual — largely due to its robust reporting features. At the end of the day, your software needs to keep employees informed on business changes and (more importantly) help you hold them accountable for following current policies and procedures. And the only way to make sure everyone is progressing through their assigned content, passing their assigned quizzes, and staying up to date is through advanced reporting.
Believe it or not, advanced testing, tracking, and reporting options are available in all Trainual plans. Trainual helps you deep dive into each employee’s onboarding and training progress, as well as how well they’re keeping up with company updates. Individual employee reports show what’s overdue, in progress, not started, and completed — plus comprehensive breakdowns of content completion and test progress — all in one snapshot.
While the reporting capabilities in Trainual are extensive, they’re easy to navigate. And a must-have — even if you’re seeking cheapest plan option out there.
When you choose any Trainual plan, you get playbook-building add-ons beyond built-in screen recording, a mobile app, custom branding, and AI-powered content generation (available in select TalentLMS plans). You get all those features, plus a roles and responsibilities builder; a team directory; role and org charts, over 400 customizable templates, personalize setup support, a process-capturing tool, responsibility delegation and planning, and more — features that aren’t available in even the priciest TalentLMS plan.
Small-to-medium-sized business leaders with 10 to 250 employees typically want to have as many features as they can get their hands on. After all, they’re looking to free up their time so they can lead their business to success. And their best bet to get there is investing in a documentation system with features that help them save time, prioritize their people, and hit the ground running (so they can delegate their responsibilities ASAP). So, they opt for the Trainual plan that fits their team size — since it delivers the most impactful features at an outrageously reasonable price.
Now that you understand the feature and pricing differences between Trainual and TalentLMS, you have everything you need to make an informed decision about which platform to go with.
When deciding between Trainual and TalentLMS, you need to understand what benefits and features each provides, that’ll help you and your team reach your growth potential.
Choose Trainual if:
Choose TalentLMS if:
Ultimately, Trainual has way more valuable features, provides better customer support, and has been intricately built (by a small business, for small businesses) to help you keep your whole team informed and connected.
Are you an entrepreneur, founder, manager, or operational leader looking to scale your business? Sign up for a free 7-day Trainual trial today.
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