Udemy vs Brainier

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Our analysts compared Udemy 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.

Product Basics

Udemy is an online learning platform with over 40 million students. Over 80% of the top Fortune 100 companies use it. Lessons are self-paced and recorded by industry specialists. The subjects include business, design, developing and programming, marketing, music, personal development, photography, IT and more. Other courses are more tailored to specific, in-demand and professional skill sets like cyber security, ethical hacking, financial analysis, graphic design, machine learning, Adobe Photoshop, PMP, SQL and web development.

Once purchased, classes are available to the user indefinitely. Learners can reference them for a refresher. Overall, it has 50,000 instructors and 130,000 courses taught in more than 60 languages from over 190 different countries. To date, it’s seen over 245 million enrollments.
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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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Product Insights

  • Upskilled Workforce: Identifies staff with the right abilities and navigates the continuously changing duties in the modern workplace. Provides an easy, affordable talent upgrade for organizations with competency gaps. Courses are skill-based and taught by experts.
  • Culture of Learning: Teaches and trains employees with a variety of self-paced classes. This allows an organization to promote education affordably. Allows companies to give more time and focus to development opportunities. Creates a culture of continuous improvement.
  • Increased Efficiency: Allows workers to improve skills and become more efficient at their job. Increased automation levels make it a massive time and money saver, especially given the fast rate at which jobs change in the modern era. Lets HR staff focus less on manual information input and more on advanced staff development.
  • Happier Workforce: Lets employees acquire new skills and grow in their job, one of the top requests for employees in any workforce. Through a course library, users can expand their minds, meet career goals and feel better about their place of employment. Showcases the level of dedication with an investment in people.
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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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  • Class Creation and Management: Manages and creates lectures, text, multimedia, slides, videos and additional resources bundled together for lessons. Offers testing and assignment options like quizzes, practice tests and coding exercises. The license for courses never expires and learners can finish at their own pace.
  • Instructor Capabilities: Sells classes and accepts payment through the solution via PayPal or Payoneer when students enroll. Designs lessons to help people advance skills, upgrade careers or explore hobbies. Offers training that details how to build units, curriculum pages, an instructor dashboard and others. Last, allow students to connect with instructors via messaging, Q&As and announcements. Instructors own all the rights to the class material.
  • Devices: Operates on laptops, desktops, tablets and mobile. Works on both iOS and Android. By downloading classes, users can watch them offline and view them with Chromecast or Apple TV.
  • Certifications: Sends a certificate of completion when users complete paid classes for reimbursement. Showcase talent or dole out bragging rights. Certifications aren’t available for free courses or ones that only have practice exams.
  • Affiliates: Promotes an affiliate program for organizations or individuals who want to promote courses on their blog or website. Users make a commission for each sale.
  • Subjects: Offers a variety of courses on different topics such as:
    • IT and Tech: Provides courses in IT AWS certification, ethical hacking, hardware, networking, operating systems, security and others. It also provides information needed for IT certification like Microsoft Azure, Cisco CCNA, CompTIA A+, CompTIA Security+, Windows Server and others.
    • Marketing: Teaches useful marketing competencies in areas such as copywriting, digital marketing, Facebook ads and marketing, Google AdWords, Instagram marketing, SEO, social media marketing and more.
    • Design: Covers subjects such as animation and 3D, architectural design, fashion, game design, graphic design, interior design, user experience and web design.
    • Business: Offers courses that cover communication, entrepreneurial skills, finance, management, Microsoft Power BI, project management, sales, stock trading, strategic thinking and others.
    • Music Education: Provides classes such as music fundamentals, instruments, production, software, techniques, vocals and others.
    • Health and Fitness: Offers art therapy, aromatherapy, CBT dance, dieting, first aid, fitness, general health, herbalism, massage, meditation, mental health, nutrition, safety, self-defense, sports and yoga.
    • Teaching & Academics: Comes with calculus, engineering, English, German, humanities, IELTS, Japanese, math, online ed, science, Spanish, test prep and more.
    • Office Productivity: Teaches learners how to increase efficiency and get trained in key office tech. Offers classes in Data Analysis, Excel, Microsoft Access, Microsoft and others.
    • Finance & Accounting: Comes with accounting, blockchain, bookkeeping, compliance, cryptocurrency, day trading, economics, finance certification, financial modeling, investing, money management, taxes and more.
    • Lifestyle: Offers several classes that apply other areas of life, such as arts and crafts, beverage and food, beauty, gaming, home improvement, makeup, neuro-linguistic programming, pet care, pet training, portraiture, travel and others.
    • Personal Development: Teaches skills focused at soft skills or life skills. Provides health and wellness, increasing learning and memory or financial issues. Some course categories include energy healing, life coaching, memory, mindfulness, neuro-linguistic programming, reiki, speed reading, stock trading and technical analysis.
  • Udemy for Business: For organizations looking for ways to host corporate training, this coexisting platform is an option. It supports company training, creates learning paths for employees and provides over 2,000 courses. For more information, see its separate product page.
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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

#15

among all
LMS Software

#65

among all
LMS Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 675 reviews
Excellent User Sentiment 167 reviews
91%
of users recommend this product

Udemy has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 91% when considering 675 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.

4.5 (559)
4.6 (130)
4.9 (9)
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3.4 (2)
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Awards

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

User Favorite Award

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

Useful Functionality: Over 90% of users who discussed features were pleased with the system’s components, notably self-paced learning capabilities.
Upskills Workforce: Users felt that the classes helped train employees in necessary skills in over 90% of reviews that discussed it.
Great for Training: More than 80% of reviewers who discussed using it as a training tool were pleased.
Excellent Courses: Learners loved the quality of the courses themselves in over 70% of comments that talked about it.
Skilled Instructors: Over 60% of users who discussed the teachers felt they were communicative and well-versed in the topics.
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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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Refund Issues: Just under 80% of users who talked about refunds said they had problems getting their money back and didn’t like the policy.
Price: While over 50% of users felt it was reasonably priced, 46% of users who talked about price felt they were overcharged or didn’t like the pricing structure.
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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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Udemy is an online learning solution that provides instructor-led learning classes. Users can pick from a varied selection of topics and train at their own pace. Most reviewers were especially pleased with the features, especially the ability to control the speed of learning. Reviewers left overwhelmingly positive comments on the quality of the classes. Many learners said they were still able to contact their instructors when needed. Most users felt their teachers were skilled and knew their subjects well. Users praised its skill-building both in personal and corporate environments. Though users did like the classes, they also recommended heavily screening for quality. Some complained that the platform didn’t vet what was on the site well. Udemy has reviews for all of its classes left by users. Most people recommended weeding out the good ones from the bad ones. The most significant criticism by far came from people trying to get refunds. They said they had trouble contacting customer support or didn’t receive their money back. Others disliked the 30-day refund policy and felt cheated by it. Users were split on the price of the courses. Classes often came with discounts and some felt they were reasonably priced. Others felt they were too expensive or got angry when they paid for a class that was later offered for free. Udemy is a helpful resource for self-paced learners who have a specific set of skills they want. Vet the courses carefully, wait for discounts and look for details if the price isn’t satisfactory. It doesn’t have HR functionality as it’s more of a content library than a full LMS. Larger organizations who want to take an analytics-driven approach to learning should look elsewhere.

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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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