Blackboard Learn vs Trainual

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Our analysts compared Blackboard Learn vs Trainual based on data from our 400+ point analysis of LMS Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Product Basics

Blackboard is an educational management tool used commonly in K-12, higher education, online education and corporate training. It’s cloud-based and has several add ons including Learn, Open LMS, Classroom, Predict, Intelligence, Ally, Collaborate and more. All have different specialties that add to the primary online education functions.

The core product, Blackboard Learn, includes course management, mobile accessibility and insights into data and analytics. Upgraded versions have more robust facilities, including advanced web conferencing, virtual classrooms and more in-depth reporting.
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Trainual is a cloud-based solution designed to automate onboarding and training processes for growing businesses. Its centralized setup helps users document procedures, processes, policies and delegate roles and responsibilities to every staff member. It is fast to install and accessible from anywhere.

It helps companies develop their training manuals, standard operating procedures, playbooks, handbooks and more. It automates the onboarding process by assigning processes and content to new employees based on their roles, department or location. It lets managers add to their teams, create subjects and assign roles. It supports customization with colors and logos.

It automatically notifies staff about any modifications to their completed training packs and ensures that they review the revised content. Employees can easily look for training modules and SOPs using its Chrome browser extension, desktop inclusion or mobile support.
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$9,500 Annually
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Tailored to your specific needs
$249 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Insights

  • Mass Communications: A message can be written and then sent via social media, email, voice message, SMS or push notification to everyone who needs to see it.nbsp;
  • Student Retention: It provides data on incoming and outgoing students, which helps with the development of student retention strategies. Some functions within the dashboard are also specifically geared toward targeting at-risk learners. 
  • Accessibility: Not only does it allow for accessible file formats such as semantic HTML, audio files, ePub and electronic braille, but it can audit content sent out by instructors and return with annotations to improve accessibility. It is also fully compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. 
  • Parental Involvement: Parents get access to see how students are doing and address potential problems early in the process. 
  • Multiple Translations: Over 15 different languages are available, including Arabic, English, Chinese (both simplified and traditional), Dutch, Russian, Korean and more. 
  • Implementation: Through a partner program, users can get help with implementation through technical support and strategy analysis. 
  • Accreditation Tracking/Documentation: The assessment and accreditation solution makes institutional reporting automatic, helps provide documentation where needed and streamlines evidence collection. 
  • Partnerships: More services are available for buyers who use partner programs. This support may be technical, marketing or strategic and varies depending on the different levels of partnership.  
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  • Keeps Teams Up-to-Date: rainual notifies staff members about changes made to a previously completed training module. It sends notifications when new content is added to a course or the module undergoes a change and ensures that they review the changes. These notifications keep employees up-to-date with the most relevant changes to completed training modules and accelerates their learning. 
  • Responsive Web Application: ts centralized organizational knowledge is easy to access from the workplace or on-the-go. It is designed to let businesses, team leads and training managers organize SOPs and processes, centralize knowledge, automate training processes and develop training modules for growing, scalable and saleable organizations. 
  • Fully Customizable: Trainual can be fully customized to suit a company’s outlook and branding. Users can add their logos and choose a color scheme to customize their accounts when they first log in. Employees can build their accounts with personalized content by inviting other staff members and selecting a pre-built process or procedure template from the template library. 
  • Makes Training Fun: Businesses can add zing to their training processes by embedding GIFs and images from Trainual’s free stock library. Administrators can also add videos, customized forms and surveys to the training material and arrange it sequentially and by employees’ role and responsibilities. It has a built-in screen recorder tool to record videos, making it easier for employees to get trained. 
  • Affordable: Trainual is an affordable alternative to costly enterprise LMS and is ideal for growing businesses. It empowers employees to put in their best efforts and can capture an organization’s tribal knowledge. It automates onboarding, enhances training and simplifies the hiring process. 
  • Integrations: It seamlessly integrates with third-party productivity tools like Zapier, Gusto, Google Docs, Teamwork, Slack, Asana, Basecamp, Sheets, Dotloop, Dropbox, Linkedin, Typeform and more. Integrations help businesses automate time-consuming onboarding and training processes while enhancing productivity. Its admin panel grants permissions to relevant users for editing and subject updates. It helps organizations crowdsource content and organize tribal knowledge. 
  • Mobile Responsive: Trainual offers a responsive mobile interface for organizations with a varied workforce. Its user interface provides a consistent experience, regardless of the device. It is easy to update, access and track from anywhere. 
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  • Integration: It can be integrated with other essential educational programs such as Student Information Systems, lunch systems, online grade books and others to make collecting data easy. 
  • Collaboration: Through web conferencing and virtual classrooms, students, peers and coworkers can collaborate on projects and content creation. 
  • Mobile App: The app, which is available across several devices, offers mobile-friendly content that’s been adjusted to flip less on a phone screen. Learners can access tests, quizzes, notes and more. 
  • SaaS: It’s a software-as-a-service or cloud-based product. This means the hosting is online and not local. 
  • Templates: When instructors create courses, they can choose from several pre-made templates and customize as needed. 
  • Strategic Planning: Extra services include strategic planning, which comes with market research, help to develop a comprehensive strategy, deployment support and more. 
  • E-Commerce: It allows users to buy or sell courses, training materials and other content. This can be used as a revenue source or to find more information for a program. 
  • Sales Training and Development: In addition to its uses in K-12 and higher education, it helps with the training of employees to keep them in compliance or certified in a corporate setting. Individual workers can be tracked, and areas of improvement can be easily identified. 
  • Registration: It manages learners throughout the enrollment process and can help them sign up along pre-defined learning paths or prerequisites. 
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  • Centralized Knowledge: By centralizing organizational knowledge, Trainual stores all information on the hows and whys of a business in one place. Once a growing business starts to document their expertise, it helps them create operations manuals and memory banks. 
  • Automates Training and Onboarding: Trainual automates cumbersome training and onboarding processes for businesses. It groups content and processes by department, role and location to build templates and automate onboarding. It assigns grouped content to the right staff members and tracks their progress. It also assigns relevant content to newly hired employees. It lets employees access all the information required to handle day-to-day work. 
  • Performance Management: Trainual evaluates employees’ knowledge and expectations from them with simple tests that are created into automated sequences. It monitors user progress and tracks their logins. It also tests prospective and newly hired employees on their commitment and understanding about their organization. Organizations can create tests in different subjects to enhance their teams’ preparedness.  
  • Retains Talent:  It makes it easier for companies to retain talented employees by ensuring that they don’t feel stagnated and unappreciated. It helps businesses nurture talented employees and improve their skill sets by keeping them updated on training in progress. 
  • Powerful SOP Search: Trainual offers powerful keyword searching for SOPs and training materials. Users can search for any topics or keywords across their organization’s training library to find reference materials and SOPs when required. 
  • Makes Live Changes: It lets companies make real-time changes to their documents and save any modifications. Users can develop knowledge flows and subjects, automatically assign content to employees according to their roles, upload pictures, video content or existing documents to make training easier. It also weeds out the possibility of inconsistencies in training material. ;
  • FEATURE: It lets companies make real-time changes to their documents and save any modifications. Users can develop knowledge flows and subjects, automatically assign content to employees according to their roles, upload pictures, video content or existing documents to make training easier. It also weeds out the possibility of inconsistencies in training material. 
  • Industry Compliance: Trainual offers training solutions that are compliant with industry regulations like government, healthcare, manufacturing, law enforcement and more. It offers its users a course marketplace to access and consume content online. 
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Product Ranking

#6

among all
LMS Software

#46

among all
LMS Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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82
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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Blackboard Learn
Trainual
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AI-based Capabilities Assessments Collaboration Compliance Content And Course Management ECommerce Learning Delivery Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting And Dashboard User Management And Gamification 14 82 100 100 91 0 68 78 87 100 91 0 43 50 0 81 50 67 65 65 57 55 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

71%
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64%

User Sentiment Summary

Good User Sentiment 1521 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 1193 reviews
79%
of users recommend this product

Blackboard Learn has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 79% when considering 1521 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

95%
of users recommend this product

Trainual has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 95% when considering 1193 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (18)
n/a
3.9 (789)
4.7 (503)
4.1 (456)
4.78 (333)
n/a
4.8 (340)
4.2 (54)
4.5 (2)
3.8 (204)
4.6 (15)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Blackboard Learn and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Compliance.

Compliance Award

Trainual stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Grading: A total of 80% of users who mentioned the grading capabilities felt it worked well and saved them time.
Effective Communication: Over 70% of users who mentioned communications features were thrilled with the discussion boards, messaging, live classrooms and other features.
Great Customer Support: More than two-thirds of reviewers who mentioned the customer support had good experiences with the staff.
Easy to Use: Users felt that the UI worked well in over 50% of reviews.
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Easy to Use: Users appreciate the platform's intuitive interface and straightforward design, making it simple to navigate and find necessary information. The user-friendly nature of Trainual reduces the learning curve for both administrators and employees, allowing for quick adoption and implementation.
Customization Options: Trainual provides flexibility in tailoring the platform to specific organizational needs. Users can create custom content, workflows, and branding elements to align with their unique training requirements and company culture. This adaptability ensures that the platform can effectively support diverse training programs and objectives.
Content Creation Tools: The platform offers a variety of tools for creating engaging and interactive training materials. Users can incorporate various media formats, such as videos, images, and quizzes, to enhance the learning experience and cater to different learning styles. These tools empower organizations to develop comprehensive and effective training content.
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Poor Mobile Function: Around 75% who mentioned the app said they had issues with the design, especially on mobile.
Issues with Features: Over 41% of users said there were holes in the functionality of the integrations, grading features and said there was too much text on the website.
Steep Learning Curve: While many said the UI was easy-to-use, over 40% of those mentioned it said it took a long time to learn.
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Limited Customization: Trainual's customization options for branding and theming are quite restricted, making it challenging for companies to align the platform's appearance with their unique brand identity.
Reporting Features: The platform's reporting capabilities are relatively basic, lacking the depth and flexibility needed for comprehensive data analysis and insights into training effectiveness.
Integrations: Trainual's integrations with other business tools and platforms are somewhat limited, potentially hindering seamless workflows and data exchange with existing systems.
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Blackboard is an online learning solution used most commonly in educational institutions. As one of the biggest players in the market, its users appreciate its features, useability, grading functions and the different channels of communication. The most common complaint was that it’s hard to learn. However, many said it was easy to navigate after getting over the initial learning curve. Though many people liked its features, there were gaps and additional functionalities wished for in almost every category. Its lack of accessibility was also an issue for some users. This solution is good for institutions looking to implement a standardized learning solution. However, it’s important to compare it to its big competitors as some complained it was generic or too similar to other systems. Still, this can be an extremely efficient platform for online and blended learning.

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Trainual provides a one-stop shop for businesses to onboard, train, and scale their teams. Users rave about its user-friendly interface and intuitive design, making it a breeze to create and manage training materials. The platform's flexibility shines, allowing businesses to tailor content to their specific needs, whether it's for onboarding new hires or upskilling existing employees. Trainual's strength lies in its ability to streamline the training process, saving businesses time and resources. However, some users note the platform's limitations in advanced features compared to competitors like Lessonly and TalentLMS. Trainual may not be the best fit for organizations requiring complex learning paths or intricate assessments. Additionally, while Trainual integrates with popular tools like Slack and Google Workspace, some users desire more extensive integration options. Trainual's sweet spot lies with small to medium-sized businesses seeking a user-friendly and efficient solution to manage their training needs. Its simplicity and affordability make it an attractive option for growing companies looking to establish a solid training foundation without breaking the bank. For larger enterprises with complex training requirements, exploring more robust platforms might be necessary.

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