Totara Reviews & Pricing

by Totara | Founded 2010, Wellington, New Zealand

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Overview Benefits Reviews Features

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What is Totara?

Industry Specialties: Serves all industries

Totara's primary product, Totara Learn, is an open-source learning solution built to promote workplace training and development. It’s flexible and offers businesses the freedom to customize formal and informal education requirements, both within the organization and in the extended enterprise. The vendor enables companies to deliver training through individual learning courses for employees at various levels. The customizable, workplace-oriented framework conforms to an organization’s hierarchy and provides personnel training accordingly. Deploy it on-premises or host it on the cloud.

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User Sentiment

Based on 106 reviews:

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Totara Benefits and Insights

Why use Totara?

Key differentiators & advantages of Totara

Organized Assessments: Track the learning progress of individual staff members or a group of employees. Helps organizations manage multiple assessment types with a built-in quiz engine, user polls and assignment submissions. Give administrators control over the elements of assessments, including scores and the number of attempts, to ensure that the review aligns with an organization’s training quality.
Blended Learning: Provide blended learning for an engaging experience. Let learners indulge in a host of offline activities, including classrooms, group activities and online learning. Review and approve online requests for offline activities, which saves time by centralizing the approval process for such requests.
Open Source: Create programs with the flexibility to extend, customize and adapt the code. Thanks to its open-source nature, developers can collaborate with a community and address any challenges or issues within the system, saving time on endless browsing for answers.
Customized Reporting: Build reports from scratch or customize pre-built reports in the builder tool. Choose from a range of geographical reporting tools, including pie charts, horizontal displays, columns and lines once the contents of a report are finalized. Ensure that the data is presented with accessible visuals.
Social Learning: Support social engagement through blogs, chats and forums. The communication tools facilitate discussions on hot topics and help with shared learning.

Industry Expertise

The vendor provides learning solutions for clients in business services, financial institutions, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, education and training, non-profit, government bodies, hospitality and travel, sports and lifestyle, technology and media and more. The company also offers two other products, Perform and Engage; Perform focuses on boosting productivity and performance management, while Engage focuses on increasing employee motivation. It serves small businesses (with one to 500 employees), medium businesses (501 to 5,000 employees) and large businesses (over 5,000 employees).

Totara Reviews

Average customer reviews & user sentiment summary for Totara:

106 reviews

85%

of users would recommend this product

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Based on an aggregate of Totara reviews taken from the sources above, the following pros & cons have been curated by a SelectHub Market Analyst.

Pros

Good Functionality: Over 90% of users felt the system worked well and had a wide range of features.
Excellent Reporting: Reviewers were pleased with the reporting features in more than 90% of comments that mentioned them.
Easy to Navigate: Workers said they could use the system quickly and easily in over 90% of discussions about it.
Affordable: Over 80% of users who discussed the price point felt it was reasonable.
Customer Support: Reviewers were pleased with customer support in over 80% of the comments that mentioned it.
Highly Recommended: More than 80% of users who gave definitive recommendations said it would be good for other businesses.
Customizable: Reviewers felt the system was highly customizable in over 80% of comments that talked about its customization options.

Cons

Steep Learning Curve: Over 80% of commenters who discussed its implementation and early use said it was overwhelming to use and learn at first.
Lacking Multimedia Support: Users were displeased that they could not upload videos, podcasts and other multimedia in over 80% of discussions on the subject.
Poor Integrations: More than 70% of users who talked about integrating the system were unhappy with the results.

Researcher's Summary:

Totara is an e-learning solution that also offers performance management and engagement suites. Reviewers were happy with its robust functionality, affordability, excellent customer service and good reporting functions. Commenters described it as easy to use and navigate, though they initially experienced a steep learning curve. Several said they would recommend it to others. Reviewers loved the range of options provided through customization options and open-source software. However, not all reviews were positive, with a notable amount saying that the varied features were overwhelming. Some advised going in with a clear vision of a learning strategy. Others complained about not being able to upload or deploy multimedia elements like video. Lastly, a few users had difficulties with third-party integrations. Totara may be a good choice for small and medium organizations, especially those with special needs or more complicated workflows.

Key Features

Hierarchies: Mirrors the company’s organizational structure and assigns learning plans using that hierarchy. Use organizational hierarchies to report on specific segments or departments.
Personalized Learning Paths: Prepare personalized learning programs for employees by designation and organizational role. Offers tailored e-learning paths for employees, thereby focusing on individual-level training.
Performance Management: Manage employees better through appraisal tools such as 360 feedback, skills and competency tracking linked to personal goals. Ensure that employees progress in the required fashion. Assign activities to staff members based on their objectives and give feedback in real time.
Competency Frameworks: Use the competency-based performance framework within the overall learning strategy. Create learning plans for specific positions; departments automatically contain the competencies mapped for these positions.
Compliance and Certifications: Provide structured certification and recertification pathways, ensuring that employees get notified of upcoming training. Simplify report generation based on the compliance status of every staff member in an organization.
Badges: Assign badges to encourage learning with the help of healthy competition between teams. Give a reference for visual recognition of a team’s or a group’s knowledge and skills — award learners who complete assignments, courses or learning paths.
Responsive Interface: Personalize and rebrand visual themes to match the target audience’s requirements.
Integrations: Integrate with existing HR systems used by the business to deliver a better, more seamless experience. Input employee data once and then rely on automated processes to keep it updated.
Mobile Responsive: Use the responsive interface on mobile devices and tablets for organizations with a varied workforce. Provides a consistent user experience, regardless of the device, and offers connectivity and flexibility to employees.

Limitations

This product has the following limitations as of the writing of this review:

The site structure and permission management are too complex
Poor usability
Steep learning curve
Requires technical skills and extensive training to make full use of the features
Expensive deployment
Inadequate UI compared to other products

Suite Support

Support is available Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., excluding national and local holidays in the following time zones: Pacific (US), Eastern (US), UK, Australian Eastern and New Zealand. Response times vary depending on the severity of the issue and whether the customer is a Totara Partner or direct subscriber. . The vendor provides a host of self-help resources within the software, accessible via the help icon, or on their website through online-documentation, training, community forums, YouTube videos or more. Additional resources include blogs, brochures, eBooks, feature sheets, guides, infographics, info sheets, newsletters and product sheets.

Email: Email support is not visibly listed.

Phone: Not listed.

Training: For self-help resources, peruse online documentation available on the Totara Help center. Read numerous blogs and resources on the vendor’s website on various topics related to product set-up and other issues.

Tickets: Customers must request access to the vendor’s helpdesk system by emailing support. Then, they can submit tickets through the helpdesk portal.