Schoology vs Brainier

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

Schoology Software Tool

Product Basics

Schoology is an online learning platform that focuses on K-12 students. Overall, it serves over 1,600 customers, 60,000 schools and boasts more than 20 million users. It aids in course creation, content curation, lesson design, personalized instruction, testing, assessment and more. Learners can use it on PCs, mobile, tablet, iOS, Android or Kindle.

There’s an enterprise edition with greater functionality for organizations with more robust needs. The functionality includes increased assessment abilities, communications, administrative control and integrations to allow for more customization and advanced analytics for a larger or more complicated organization.
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Brainier helps organizations of all sizes create and manage employee training programs. It’s cloud-based, mobile-compatible, and designed to support collaboration and building a broader community around development efforts.

The solution offers personalized learning experiences through features such as certification and compliance management, content authoring and social learning capabilities. It also provides insights into learner progress and program effectiveness through data reports and a mobile app that lets users access learning materials anytime and anywhere.

Brainier Cultivate, its talent management platform, offers built-in tools, including assessments, certification planning and goal tracking. Administrators can create self, 180, and 360 assessments, set dynamic certification plans, and track goals for individuals or teams. The platform also allows learners to receive personalized learning recommendations and track progress with gamified leaderboards.

The LMS is praised for its content creation, reporting tools and user-friendliness. Its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop functionality make course building easy, even for those with limited technical expertise. You can contact the vendor for a personalized quote.

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$10/Student, Monthly, Freemium
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Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
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Videos
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Email
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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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Product Insights

  • Increased Organization: Organize and centralize a content library with assessments, text, video, multimedia and more that students, teachers and administrators can access. Make it easier to find essential assets like logos, policy information and more.
  • Better Connected Campus: Open valuable opportunities for learners and faculty to continue discussions after class, ask questions regularly and join collaborative groups. Allow educators to speak with learners, create discussions and speak with other teachers and parents. Provides a window for parents into their child’s progress and what they’ve been doing or not doing. Keep everyone on the same page with consistent messaging through a clear line of communication across the district. Last, moderated discussions encourage creative collaboration.
  • More Engaged Students: Cultivate more engaged and invested learners through the use of multimedia, group discussions and many opportunities for collaboration. Access images, video and other elements to enrich the content as well as increase retention.
  • Greater Efficiency: Free up instruction time through automation for grading, commenting, testing and sharing data. Eliminate the tedium of manually inputting information.
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  • Offers Needs-Specific Resources: Access thousands of courses from top industry content providers to meet your learning goals. Whether you need training in business skills, compliance or safety, Brainier simplifies the process by partnering with extensive content libraries. These libraries feature hundreds of high-quality, up-to-date courses covering leadership development, managerial skills, mindset training and various soft skills topics, so you don't have to start from scratch.
  • Market Leader: Brainier ranks among our top 10 LMS solutions. It holds its own among industry leaders such as LearnUpon and Docebo, and offers a range of features, including eCommerce, reporting and dashboards, and content and course management, available right out of the box.
  • Comes With Excellent Course Management Capabilities: If you’re seeking an LMS with outstanding content and course management, and mobile capabilities, Brainier is our top choice. In our analysis, it scored exceptionally well for its features that assist users in creating and managing courses, learning offline, tracking courses on the mobile and learning materials. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools out of the box, including course cataloging, authoring, learning paths and progress tracking.
  • Offers AI-Powered Recommendations: The Daily Snapshot highlights featured learning objects, and transforms the LMS into your daily hub for relevant training, events and information. It considers due dates for assigned training, completion status, upcoming events and assignment progress. You can provide personalized suggestions to groups or individual learners, helping them prioritize their time in the system based on various factors.
  • Improves Coaching Delivery: Video coaching helps learners develop practical and soft skills on a large scale. It uses three main methods: spaced skill practice, personalized feedback and real-world application of knowledge. By recording and sharing videos, you can get an accurate picture of your learners' understanding and abilities.
  • Easily Integrates with Third-Party Software: For companies looking for HR tools, succession software, talent management, CRMs or other workforce technology, Brainier has many partners to broaden its capabilities. This includes Bullseye Engagement, Ceridian, Edcomm, ExponentHR, HR Performance Solutions, iCIMS, J.J. Keller, Media Partners, Prositions, Salesforce, Skillsoft, TalentGuard, Ultimate Software, U.S. Learning and Vado.
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  • Intuitive UI: Navigate a clean and easy-to-use interface for quick onboarding and easy adoption across organizations. Lets students move through lessons more naturally with instructional tools designed for K-12 usage.
  • Web Conferencing: Offers a virtual conferencing system with video capabilities for long-distance learning, parent-teacher conferences, questions, additional tutoring and other cases where one-on-one instruction is needed.
  • Collaboration: Create communication channels, make and join groups, curate group content libraries, share resources within a course and more. Access a public content library of assignments, tests and lessons from other educators. The content is great for educators looking for additional materials. Connect with a professional learning community where faculty can get help from other educators, coaches and education thought leaders.
  • Data and Analytics: Analyze multiple metrics to test the effectiveness of courses, lessons and quizzes. Gauge student engagement and performance data to conduct high-level research. Examine data at the class, institution or district level and turn metrics into an action plan to address problem areas. Standardize the metrics and tests to ensure a more fair comparison. Gather reliable information to inform policy. Build assessments or download tests that were built by multiple individuals or sourced from the larger community. Check curriculum against different standards such as Common Core, NGSS and others while identifying gaps in learning and skills.
  • Instructor Feedback: Give learners immediate feedback after tests and quizzes. Understand where learners are competent as well as areas that need more attention. Leave comments for teachers as well to better coordinate learning.
  • Course Management: Manage and develop courses and necessary materials like assignments, quizzes, tests, assessments and more. Assign due dates for assignments and activities. Create text lessons and then embed materials from Google Drive, Microsoft Office, YouTube and other places for better learner engagement.
  • Personalized Instruction Track students individually or in groups with different learning methods. See what works and what doesn’t for each student, and design a path that plays to their strengths.
  • Single Sign-On: Cut down on password management and long log-in times with an SSO. Help organizations that have multiple apps integrated into the solution. Makes adoption easier since administrators and learners can navigate it more easily.
  • Mobile App: Allow learners, educators and administrators to work on the go. Grade, message, learn and communicate through the app. For grading, the UI makes it easier to swipe between assignments, manage edits and filter by lateness. Inspect performance next to rubrics and use comments and annotations for written and video feedback.
  • Integrations: Access over 200 apps already integrated into the program. This includes external sites, games, authoring tools and student information systems. Enable easier movement between programs, cutting down on loading times. Link programs such as Aeries, BrainPOP, Edpuzzle, Google Drive, Khan Academy, OneDrive, Scrible, Skyward, Vimeo and more to the tech stack.
  • Interoperability: Use published content from other vendors like McGraw Hill, CK12 and others. Find content that’s compliant with LTI, QTI, Common Cartridge and SCORM should integrate easily. Automate passing data between an SIS and other systems for data consistency. Plug in a variety of custom options with the program’s open API.
  • Assessment Management: Store and use high-level assessments within the workflow from one centralized location. Create a more in-depth analysis of the creation of personalized teaching. It provides an assessment management platform to control testing distribution and analysis across districts. Access a broader learning community allows teachers to collaborate and improve the ways they measure progress.
  • Enterprise Administration: Give administrators a higher level of control. Manage roles, permission, privacy grading and more. See system analytics, extract data, develop and share centralized resources and create custom SSOs, URLs, logos and colors.
  • Enterprise Integrations: Let users make courses, accounts and enrollments from SIS data and give them all functionality from the core program. Integrate with grade books and over 100 third-party educational apps. Import content that follows IMS Global LTI and Common Cartridge standards
  • Enterprise Class Management: Access additional resources to help and develop courses. This can record audio and video into assignments, comments and testing. It can also create an online portfolio to show off student work, view materials on mobile and use technology-enhanced testing. Last, it provides mastery reports to measure learner progress against national, state or institution goals.
  • Enterprise Communications: Connect all faculty in departmental, PD or other groups to encourage collaboration and sharing across more than 130 countries. Give advisors access to their students’ attendance, enrollments, schedule and grades. Parents can see overdue notifications and get email summaries of their children’s activity. The solution can also send messages to the entire system in an instant.
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  • Content Creation: Use Chameleon Cloud to transform your PowerPoint presentations and video library into tailored learning content.
    • Customize your training materials to fit your organization’s specific needs.
    • Incorporate full-motion video, study materials, discussion questions and multiple-choice tests into your content.
    • Ensure compatibility with AICC, SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004 formats.
  • Embedded AI: Use AI-powered tools to enhance and contextualize the learning experience.
    • AI Coach & Auto Analysis: Use AI Coach for real-time feedback on speech content and delivery during video coaching. This tool provides quantitative and qualitative feedback, including keyword analysis and delivery metrics.
    • Content Creation: Automate quiz, survey and object description creation with generative AI.
    • Auto-Tagging Learning Objects: The system scans content to suggest relevant tags, and efficiently categorizes learning objects by topics, subjects and competencies.
    • Learning Content Recommendations: AI analyzes tags and actions to recommend relevant content, helping learners bridge knowledge gaps and follow a guided learning path.
  • Ecommerce: Turn your learning content into a revenue stream by selling courses internally and externally.
    • Set custom pricing rules easily using your organizational chart.
    • Offer flexible payment options, such as credit cards, PO numbers and promo codes.
    • Process payments securely through PayPal without storing credit card information.
  • Gamification: Engage learners with built-in gamification features that inspire friendly competition and reward top performers.
    • Create leaderboards to identify top performers using a points system and customizable goals.
    • Unlock badges and ranks through activities like completing courses and sharing content, with easy admin customization.
    • Recommend relevant courses based on job titles, locations and completed courses.
  • Assessments: Use built-in assessment tools for comprehensive evaluations, including self-assessments and 180 and 360-degree reviews.
    • Use a variety of question types, such as linear scales, radio buttons, drop-down menus, essays and text boxes.
    • Configure different sections and points within assessments to map competencies.
    • Recommend relevant learning content based on assessment results to address skill gaps.
  • Content Library: Use the built-in content library featuring essential topics and expand it further with top content providers for extensive off-the-shelf learning options. Course topics include:
    • HR Compliance: Ensure compliance with state and industry regulations.
    • Finance: Enhance financial literacy with Banker’s Academy.
    • Leadership Development: Develop mentoring, management and leadership skills.
    • Productivity: Improve day-to-day efficiencies and overall strategies.
    • Customer Support: Deliver exceptional customer support with materials designed for meaningful and personal interactions.
  • Analytical Reporting: View real-time learner progress with powerful analytics tools, including native reporting dashboards, data visualization and custom reports.
    • Configure the system to deliver up-to-the-minute learning data via email or FTP, tracking overdue training, event registrations and approaching expiration dates.
    • Provide role-specific access to relevant learning data for administrators, instructors, managers and custom roles.
    • Empower leaders at all levels to view critical learning information tailored to their needs and organizational structure.
    • Use the Smart Report to get an in-depth view of individual or group progress, as well as a summary of all learning activities in the LMS to date.
    • Use the Custom Report Builder to create reports that meet specific business needs. With over 1,000 standard report options and customizations, it generates insightful data on users, groups, and learning objects.
    • Configure these reports to auto-generate and deliver on a regular schedule.
  • Social Learning: Enable learners to like, comment and share content within the system.
    • Allow learners to engage in discussions, share knowledge and build communities of practice via forums.
    • Use the learner directory to connect learners to peers and mentors
    • Use real-time chat, group chat and native video chat with screen share to enhance collaboration and interaction.
  • Compliance Management: Simplify access to compliance training with single sign-on (SSO) or an efficient access page. Employees can quickly navigate to their required courses via a customized dashboard, reducing confusion and enhancing the user experience.
    • Training At-Scale: Set up recurring assignments for annual compliance, re-certifications and safety courses. Custom expiration dates and automated reminders help prevent overdue training and reduce administrative tasks.
    • Learner Analytics: The Analytics Dashboard gives you real-time oversight of learning progress. Segment groups and access detailed data on specific learners or teams. Built-in reporting tools monitor compliance training status from a macro or micro perspective.
    • Common Compliance Content: Access extensive off-the-shelf compliance course libraries relevant to 99% of industries. These courses cover essential topics like harassment prevention and workplace safety, meeting state mandates and reducing the need for additional sourcing.
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Product Ranking

#17

among all
LMS Software

#65

among all
LMS Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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79
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29
82
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83
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Reporting and Dashboard
Platform Capabilities
Mobile Capabilities
Learning Delivery
Content and Course Management
Content and Course Management
Mobile Capabilities
Reporting and Dashboard
eCommerce
Platform Capabilities

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Schoology
Brainier
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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 0 82 83 83 85 0 87 91 92 100 55 29 77 83 50 100 100 92 100 93 100 91 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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29%
64%
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36%

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 972 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 167 reviews
86%
of users recommend this product

Schoology has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 972 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

91%
of users recommend this product

Brainier has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 167 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

4.9 (11)
n/a
4.4 (380)
4.6 (130)
4.4 (436)
4.5 (35)
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3.4 (2)
3.7 (145)
n/a

Awards

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SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Brainier and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Content and Course Management and Mobile Capabilities. Brainier stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award
Content and Course Management Award
Mobile Capabilities Award

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Intuitive Interface: Schoology's interface is generally considered user-friendly and easy to navigate, even for those with limited technical expertise. This ease of use can lead to a smoother transition for institutions adopting the platform.
Mobile App: The availability of a mobile app enhances accessibility for both educators and learners, allowing them to engage with course materials and activities on the go.
Assessment and Feedback Tools: Schoology provides tools for creating and administering assessments, including quizzes and assignments. It also facilitates the provision of timely and effective feedback to students, which is crucial for their learning progress.
Communication and Collaboration: Features such as discussion forums, messaging, and group projects foster communication and collaboration among students and between students and instructors. This can contribute to a more engaging and interactive learning environment.
Customization Options: Schoology offers a degree of customization, allowing instructors to tailor the platform to their specific teaching styles and course requirements. This flexibility can enhance the overall learning experience.
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Ease of Use: Users find the platform easy to navigate, with a straightforward and intuitive interface. The student portal is highly praised for its simplicity and ease of use.
Responsive Support: Users appreciate the friendly and helpful support staff, who are available via multiple channels (email, chat, phone).
Integrations and Custom Security: Many users like that it integrates with other HR software products, including payroll, benefits and performance management solutions, and allows them to set custom securities to manage user accessibility and security levels.
Comprehensive Content Library: Users praise Brainier’s content library, which includes a wide range of learning materials covering common business issues like skills development and leadership training.
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Limited Customization: Teachers may find it challenging to personalize their courses due to the platform's rigid structure and limited theme options.
Gradebook Challenges: The gradebook functionality can be cumbersome, especially when dealing with complex grading schemes or needing to make bulk edits.
Mobile App Issues: The mobile app's interface and functionality may not be as user-friendly or comprehensive as the web version, potentially hindering on-the-go access for students and teachers.
Integrations and External Tools: Schoology's compatibility and integration with external tools and platforms can vary, potentially limiting options for incorporating diverse educational resources.
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High Costs: The pricing structure may be a deterrent for smaller organizations with limited budgets.
Busy Interface: Some users find the design to be too cluttered, which can make it less intuitive to use.
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Schoology is like the Swiss Army knife of classroom tools, helping teachers juggle everything from lesson planning to grading. But is it all sunshine and rainbows? Not quite. While some users sing its praises for being user-friendly and feature-packed, others find it a bit rigid and pricey. So, let's break it down. Schoology's strengths lie in its comprehensive suite of features. Think attendance tracking, online gradebooks, and even a social media-esque interface for collaboration. It's like having a virtual classroom at your fingertips. Plus, it plays nicely with other tools like Google Drive, making file sharing a breeze. However, this robust functionality comes at a cost – both literally and figuratively. Some users find the pricing structure a bit steep, especially for smaller institutions or individual educators. Additionally, the platform's customization options can feel limited, making it less adaptable to unique workflows or teaching styles. So, who's Schoology's ideal student? It's a great fit for schools or districts seeking a one-stop shop for their learning management needs. Its ease of use and extensive features make it perfect for those who want a comprehensive solution without a steep learning curve. However, if you're looking for a more flexible and budget-friendly option, you might want to explore alternatives like Moodle or Canvas. Remember, the best LMS is the one that fits your specific needs and preferences, so do your homework before committing!

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Brainier is an award-winning LMS with a 93% customer satisfaction rating, a user-focused design and a comprehensive feature set. It offers exceptional tools to personalize learning. Administrators can create custom learning paths and dashboards, and set up tailored content pages that cater to specific job roles and departments. The LMS integrates smoothly with popular apps like Salesforce, UKG Pro and Ceridian Dayforce, and lets you manage complex team structures through custom group setups and multi-tenancy. Brainier also emphasizes AI-driven functionalities, such as AI-powered video coaching and content recommendations. It uses AI to provide real-time feedback and personalized content suggestions, ensuring that learners focus on the most relevant materials. The solution’s video coaching capabilities support skill development through self-paced practice and personalized feedback. Its course library offers an extensive range of content, covering everything from compliance training to leadership development. Reporting tools, including a smart report builder, offer detailed insights into learner progress, helping organizations track skill mastery and make data-driven decisions. Accessibility features and automated learning objectives further enhance the platform’s appeal by ensuring that training is inclusive and efficient. User reviews highlight Brainier’s ease of use, scalability and excellent customer support. Many users appreciate its flexibility and integration capabilities, though some find the interface a bit cluttered. While Brainier’s pricing is competitive, it may not be the best fit for smaller businesses or those with limited budgets, as its features could come at a higher price point. Brainier is ideal for mid-sized to large enterprises, especially in industries like healthcare, manufacturing and financial services, offering customizable learning, compliance tracking and integration with HR systems like ADP and UKG. With personalized learning paths, detailed analytics and scalability, Brainier supports both growing businesses and established enterprises, ensuring effective employee engagement and training outcomes. However, companies primarily needing basic course delivery or those with highly specific training requirements may find Brainier’s extensive capabilities overwhelming and might require customizations.

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