Brightspace vs Cornerstone LMS

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Our analysts compared Brightspace vs Cornerstone LMS 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

Brightspace is a cloud-based LMS that supports personalized learning for educational institutions, corporations, healthcare institutions, nonprofits and more. For K-12 schools, it offers blended and virtual learning options, along with tools for professional learning. For companies, it provides an engaging learning platform to train employees, customers and partners.


Key features include tools for tailored learning experiences, intelligent agents, analytics for tracking progress, course authoring and a gradebook with a mastery view. You can choose from flexible options to build and curate content, and use its mobile-friendly design for on-the-go learning.

Users praise Brightspace for its extensive features, user-friendly interface and proactive support. A large number of reviews mention its exceptional implementation and onboarding process, praising the responsiveness and speed of the support team. While the majority of users are impressed by the solution’s capabilities, some mentioned that it may have a learning curve for new users.

The exact pricing of the solution isn’t mentioned online. For accurate pricing details based on the size and requirements of your institution, you can contact the vendor for a custom quote.

On the bright side, you can access the 30-day free trial to get hands-on experience with the platform. It includes a variety of pre-loaded courses to explore and a sandbox area where you can experiment with creating your own course.

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Cornerstone LMS is designed to help organizations create, deliver and manage employee training programs. It lets you create personalized learning experiences, facilitate real-time collaboration, and track learner and team performance. Features include content management, personalized learning, HR integration, reporting and insights, and compliance training.

User reviews generally commend its ease of use, scalability and effectiveness in improving employee engagement and knowledge retention. When compared to other LMS platforms, Cornerstone stands out with its strong focus on user experience, diverse feature set and insightful reporting capabilities.

While its pricing varies based on the specific modules and features chosen, it typically falls within the mid-range of similar products, offering a good balance of value and functionality.

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Product Insights

  • Revolutionizes Learning with AI: D2L Lumi uses AI to simplify tasks for both teachers and admins in Brightspace. It can automatically generate practice questions and custom learning paths for students, speeding up course setup. For learners, Lumi provides personalized feedback and helps with note-taking, making learning more efficient and boosting training outcomes.
  • Digitizes Courses: Brightspace’s Content Experience platform makes it easy to build interactive courses with videos, images and even external tools like Google Drive and OneDrive. Pre-made templates simplify course design, and tools like Video Note come with automatic captions, ensuring accessibility for learners with special needs.
  • Facilitates Performance Review With Grading Tools: Based on our data, Brightspace scores 93 for the Assessments module. Its Gradebook and Mastery View make it easy to grade and track student progress in one place. With the Creator+ add-on, AI helps you by automatically generating quizzes and practice questions, saving you time. Advanced Analytics give you clear insights into student engagement and performance, so you can quickly spot who may need extra support and adjust your teaching to fit their needs.
  • Improves Decision-Making: With predictive models, you can actually forecast how learners will perform and fill in any knowledge gaps with personalized learning paths. Plus, real-time reports and visualizations give you a clear view of how effective your courses are and how engaged learners are.
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  • Exceptional Online Course Selling and Learning Analytics Features: In our analysis, Cornerstone scored exceptionally well for features that help you sell courses online, generate analytical reports, enable learning on the mobile app and gamify training activities. All the basics are available out of the box — from course selling and subscription management to mobile course tracking and custom reports.
  • Helps Identify and Fill Skill Gaps: Identify top talent and create development paths today with Cornerstone Succession.
    • Bird’s Eye View: Visualize employees on a customizable grid with filters and intuitive color-coding to easily spot high-potential talent and those at risk.
    • Resume Profiles: Use highly configurable pages to specify and view the qualifications, interests and career aspirations of employees.
    • Succession Snapshot: Access key succession metrics such as performance, successors, impact of loss, potential and probability of loss on a configurable dashboard.
    • Succession Tasks: Set up forms and workflows to collect relevant succession information from managers throughout the year.
    • Talent Search: Conduct attribute-based searches using resume data to find matches among high-potential employees.
    • Talent Pools: Filter and search within manually created collections of employees based on your talent searches.
  • Powers AI-driven Learning: Identify skills gaps, develop skill development opportunities and retain top talent with Cornerstone Galaxy, the AI-powered Workforce Agility platform. By leveraging AI, Galaxy provides actionable insights into your employee’s skills, and helps you make data-driven decisions about your training program.
  • Award-Winning LMS: In the SelectHub Awards 2024, Cornerstone won best-in-class honors for assessments, user management and gamification, and integrations and extensibility.
  • Helps Deliver Immersive Learning Experiences: Cornerstone leverages XR simulations to immerse employees in realistic work scenarios and develop their skills. It offers secure, effective simulations of customer service situations and builds emotional confidence through authentic, controlled conversations. Additionally, the platform facilitates virtual hands-on learning, allowing employees to acquire new skills and adapt to new tools without interrupting their current workflows.
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  • Roles and Permissions: Create, define, modify and delete user roles, and assign permissions to control access to features like creating discussions or editing navigation bars. Apply roles to users for specific org units to determine their access levels, and use cascading roles to extend permissions to all subordinate org units for easier management.
  • Calendar: Display all upcoming events to learners in one central location. Post essential dates like project deadlines, office hours, in-class events and more on the calendar.
  • Assignments: Create and edit assignments using the Assignments tool, track submission times and review work directly. Associate assignments with rubrics and competencies, and return them with grades and feedback. Organize them into categories, and set restrictions by date, group membership or special access.
  • Mobile App: Use the Brightspace Pulse mobile app to let learners access course calendars, assignments, grades and announcements from one place. Send real-time alerts for cancellations, room changes, and new content or grades. Allow them to view schedules and weekly tasks with built-in visualization tools to track what’s due today, this week and later.
  • Portfolio: Use the Portfolio tool to help learners capture and showcase their learning journey. Create and update digital portfolios to track progress over time. Use the app to collect evidence, record audio and video reflections, and document achievements.
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  • Content Creation: Tailor existing Grovo courses or create new ones to fit your organization’s needs quickly.
    • Use various media types, including documents, videos, images and PowerPoint slides to enrich your content.
    • Enhance learning with interactive elements like quizzes to reinforce key concepts.
    • Design responsive, mobile-friendly courses using an intuitive interface.
    • Create, manage and analyze custom training materials efficiently.
  • Integrations Marketplace: Browse and select from a variety of partner-built integrations, including APIs, import loads and content subscriptions. Use pre-built integrations, connectors and flexible APIs to manage integrations easily, with a self-service platform for efficient data handling.
  • Immersive Learning: Use the Immerse tool to build personalized learning experiences in extended reality (XR) simulations of real-life work situations.
    • AI-Powered Content Authoring: Design immersive simulations with a range of environments, avatars and voices without needing coding or animation skills.
    • Skills Analytics Dashboard: Manage learning content and evaluations all from one dashboard.
    • Immersive Learning Content: Develop essential soft skills like leadership and communication through roleplay with virtual characters. Access a variety of pre-made content or create your own to fit your needs.
  • Surveys: Use various question types and response formats to collect information beyond course-based evaluations. Create detailed reports on individual survey responses or track trends over time with recurring surveys. Gather valuable information, such as employee interest in development opportunities or skills assessments for new roles.
  • Products: The company offers several solutions. Learning is the training, education and informational tool. However, several other applications with complementary goals are provided through the same company. All integrate with Learning and each other as part of the larger suite.
    • Careers: This coaching software helps managers praise over performers and give extra help to underperformers. Staff can use them to figure out their interests and build a path to growth within a company.
    • Content Anytime: For organizations looking to supplement their information with pre-made content, it has classes aimed at skill building in subjects such as communication, leadership and coaching, customer services, emotional intelligence, listening, personal growth, stress management and more.
    • Development: This helps with continuous growth by suggesting content so employees can build valuable skills. Whereas coaching is more geared toward building career goals, this focuses on the information from preferred sources whether that be books, podcasts, videos or something else.
    • HR: It provides HR data management to aid in decisions about the workforce, management and other organization-wide initiatives. The platform manages the human capital component of a business.
    • Performance: As a performance and workforce management platform, this aids in the high-level work of seeing the broader trends in skill gaps, performance and the overall talent pipeline. It has tools for giving staff reviews and ensuring performance processes are compliant.
    • Recruiting: Aimed at solving talent acquisition issues, this program helps with the discovery, acquisition and onboarding of talent. Some of its capabilities include attracting qualified candidates, AI insights for recruiting and showcasing a company’s unique brand and culture.
    • Other Solutions: It also has applications for SMB talent management, compliance, e-commerce, sales and other integrations.
  • Instructor-Led Training (ILT): ILT sessions are available in both virtual and physical classroom settings. This includes interest tracking, reservation capabilities, session rosters and waitlists. The solution has a wide range of delivery options including audio, digital files and documents, instructor-led classes, video and VR.
  • Grovo Microlearning Content: Use Grovo’s exclusive microlearning content through Cornerstone to provide impactful training on key topics that engage employees and support business goals.
    • Modify existing content or build new materials with the Grovo Create tool to fit your organization’s needs.
    • Access a wide range of content, including professional skills, leadership and management, modern compliance, diversity, equity, inclusion, and remote work essentials and fundamentals.
  • Mobile App: The Cornerstone CSX app allows you to access key features and a fast, intuitive learning experience on your device.
  • Core Features
    • Learner Home: View a personalized dashboard with company banners, training metrics and recommended content driven by machine learning.
    • Learning Search: Quickly find and filter courses by topic and duration to view relevant training options.
    • Learning Transcript: Manage your training history, track progress, and access ongoing and completed courses.
  • Use Cases
    • Log In: Switch language settings based on company preferences after logging in.
    • Learner Home: Receive personalized content recommendations and interact with training on your dashboard.
    • Learning Search: Locate and filter short courses to find relevant training.
  • Check-ins: Use Check-Ins to hold regular meetings and discussions with teams, focusing on alignment, coaching and performance development. Set up templates to guide discussions, help employees set goals, discuss career development and provide feedback. Schedule one-on-one or regular Check-Ins to ensure continuous communication and manage performance effectively.
  • Engage: Set up and schedule recurring feedback campaigns to capture employee satisfaction, engagement and commitment, and gain a complete view of workforce dynamics. Allow managers with the right permissions to access and review campaign results through a dedicated dashboard without creating or editing campaigns.
  • Assessments: Create tests and assignments to assess learner performance.
    • Use the Search bar to find specific assessments quickly.
    • View all assessments in the table, including their title, version, number of questions, last updated date and last updater.
    • Edit assessments, view current and previous versions, and manage version status (Draft or Published).
    • Publish assessments to make them available in the Course Console and Learning Assignment Tool. Note that once published, assessments are locked and cannot be edited.
  • Course Catalog: Manage and update metadata for learning objects (LOs) in your system. Adjust details like titles, keywords, subjects, recurrence settings, recommendations and email notifications.
  • Security: Keep your data safe on a foolproof learning platform.
    • Protect your data with 256-bit TLS encryption for secure data in transit.
    • Authenticate clients to control application access and ensure users only see what they’re authorized to view.
    • Benefit from FedRAMP authorization and regular audits to meet global and regional compliance requirements.
    • Use advanced cloud security measures to support heavy workloads.
    • Align with data protection regulations through integrated privacy features and commit to responsible AI technology in the workplace.
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Product Ranking

#11

among all
LMS Software

#25

among all
LMS Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

82
79
43
43
93
71
100
67
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Collaboration
Compliance
Learning Delivery
Reporting and Dashboard
Assessments
Mobile Capabilities
Reporting and Dashboard
User Management and Gamification
eCommerce
Platform Capabilities

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Brightspace
Cornerstone LMS
+ Add Product + Add Product
AI-based Capabilities Assessments Collaboration Compliance Content And Course Management ECommerce Learning Delivery Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting And Dashboard User Management And Gamification 43 93 100 100 86 92 100 87 93 100 81 43 71 67 67 91 100 76 100 96 100 100 0 25 50 75 100
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100%
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87%
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87%
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88%
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82%
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18%
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

71%
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29%
71%
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29%

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 911 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1306 reviews
87%
of users recommend this product

Brightspace has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 911 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

83%
of users recommend this product

Cornerstone LMS has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 83% when considering 1306 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

n/a
5.0 (21)
4.4 (598)
4.1 (495)
4.3 (217)
4.3 (220)
4.1 (18)
4.3 (137)
4.4 (78)
4.1 (433)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Brightspace and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Assessments, Compliance and Learning Delivery.

Assessments Award
Compliance Award
Learning Delivery Award

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Cornerstone LMS and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Mobile Capabilities.

Mobile Capabilities Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Comprehensive Feature Set: Brightspace gets major props for its "all-in-one" feature set that includes tools for creating and managing courses, delivering content in various formats (videos, quizzes, documents) and promoting collaboration. Users appreciate its support for different instructional approaches, whether it's entirely online, blended or traditional classroom settings.
User-Friendly Interface: The platform's interface is generally described as clean and intuitive, which is crucial for both instructors and students. This minimizes the learning curve, allowing users to focus on teaching and learning rather than navigating a complex system.
Customization: Institutions and instructors like the ability to tailor the platform to their branding and specific needs. This includes customizing themes, layouts and navigation.
Analytics and Reporting: Brightspace provides detailed analytics and reporting tools that allow instructors to track student progress, identify areas where students might be struggling and measure the effectiveness of their teaching methods.
Accessibility: Brightspace is built with accessibility in mind, complying with standards like WCAG 2.1, Section 508 and EN 301 549. Features like screen reader compatibility, keyboard navigation and alternative text for images ensure that all learners, including those with disabilities, have equal access to educational content.
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Easy to Learn: Users adjusted well to the system and navigated it easily in about 40% of reviews.
Satisfactory Features: Between 30% and 40% of users were happy with the features and 20% felt the platform frequently added improved functionality. The most popular features included customization options, course and content creation tools, third-party integrations and communication capabilities.
Excellent Reporting: Around 20% found the reporting comprehensive, usable and suited to their needs.
Fair Pricing: In 20% of user reviews, administrators felt they got good value for their money.
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Learning Curve: While the interface is generally user-friendly, some users, especially those new to Brightspace or transitioning from another LMS, may find the initial setup and learning process to be challenging.
Limited Customization in Certain Areas: Although Brightspace offers extensive customization in many areas, some users have reported limitations in specific areas, such as fine-grained control over page layouts and graphics.
Cost: Depending on your organization's size and requirements, the cost of Brightspace can be a significant factor. Additional costs for add-ons or premium features can further increase the overall investment.
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Poor Customer Support: By far, the biggest complaint was the customer service, with almost 40% of reviewers complaining about slow turnaround times, ineffective solutions or other issues.
Unintuitive User Experience: Around 30% of users disliked the overall user experience, with the most common complaints surrounding glitches, the data importing process, integration and reporting.
Overwhelming and Confusing: Between 10% and 20% found the number of features hard to learn.
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Brightspace is one of our top-rated LMSs with a solid analyst score of 92. It’s designed for large organizations and is popular for both education and corporate training. According to our data, Brightspace has a high score for several LMS modules. These include:  Collaboration: 100 Compliance: 100 Reporting and Dashboard: 100 Assessments: 93One of its standout features is the flexible course builder, allowing you to create interactive courses without technical expertise. With Creator+, you can use ready-made templates to quickly build professional-looking content, complete with quizzes and polls to keep learners engaged.Brightspace also makes it easy to add videos and multimedia, giving courses a dynamic feel. Built-in design styles help ensure that everything looks consistent and polished. The platform’s grading system, including the Gradebook, simplifies the grading process by automatically pulling in scores from assignments, quizzes and discussions. Setting up grading is easy with a step-by-step wizard, and you can provide feedback through text, audio or even annotations.Brightspace’s predictive analytics helps you spot students who might need extra support by analyzing grades, engagement, and activity. Performance+ adds even more reporting power, letting you generate detailed reports, track learning patterns and set up personalized learning paths for each student based on their progress.If you need advanced reporting across courses, the Achievement+ package includes tools for tracking learning outcomes and viewing results over time. This package includes features like the Outcome Achievement Dashboard and the Course Achievement Overview, which offer visual reports that can also be exported for offline use.Brightspace integrates with third-party tools like video conferencing and student information systems. Plus, its mobile-friendly design allows students to access courses from any device, anytime. Based on our data, Brightspace stands out in collaboration, compliance and reporting. Its Performance+ suite offers real-time training insights, and it complies with standards like WCAG and SCORM, while providing strong security measures like encryption and backups.However, compared to other platforms like Docebo or LearnUpon, Brightspace lacks certain AI-powered features such as AI-based tagging and content recommendations, which could be a disadvantage for organizations wanting advanced AI tools. Absorb LMS also offers more options for subscription management and interactive learning, which Brightspace doesn’t fully support — potentially making it less ideal for businesses looking to monetize training or enhance engagement with interactive features.Although Brightspace excels in core features like tracking, reporting, and compliance, it’s missing some capabilities like workload balancing and lesson gating, which can help manage learner progress. Pricing varies by organization size, making it scalable, though some users note a steeper learning curve than with other platforms.For organizations that need a customizable LMS with strong analytics, Brightspace is a worthwhile investment, especially for businesses focused on data-driven training and development strategies.

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Cornerstone Learning is an all-in-one LMS that brings together learning, growth, skills and capabilities into a personalized, curated experience for employees. Trusted by thousands of organizations across all sizes and industries, it supports employees from hire to retire.Users generally find the system easy to learn and navigate and praise its frequent updates and improved functionality. They also find the reporting comprehensive and usable and feel it provides good value for their money.The biggest drawback of Cornerstone among users is poor customer support, with reviewers complaining about slow turnaround times and ineffective solutions. Some users also reported issues with glitches, data importing, integration and reporting.Overall, Cornerstone Learning is a comprehensive and customizable LMS that helps organizations provide personalized, engaging and compliant learning experiences for their employees. It’s particularly well-suited for organizations looking to boost productivity with version management and smooth inline content workflows

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Screenshots

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