Cornerstone LMS

The Mercedes among LMS systems

Comments: We were able to deliver a huge online-learning-catalogue from scratch with a modern interface and a mobile option.
Now we are able to bring together the different learning-activities from the different departments

Pros:

For the user: Modern and intuitve For admins: Lot´s of configuration items and options The huge community (in their own Cornerstone-Instance!) and the very good product-documentation, including training-materials, etc.

Cons:

Oldschool-Interface in the backend Sometimes too complex

A good product that needs some attention to make it great

Comments: Support can be a bit hit and miss. Turnover of account managers has been high the past few years, so we feel like we have been having a lot of repeat conversations.

Pros:

The functionality is comprehensive, with a lot of features you can customize including custom pages which are great for improving the user experience.

Cons:

It is a very slow system - each time you update a field, the whole page refreshes. There are still a lot of functionalities that one would think would be a given with an LMS that despite feedback, they choose to focus on their bigger scale feature releases.

Cornerstone is an alright product, but it's expensive

Comments: Cornerstone has been an alright experience, but it doesn't meet the needs of our users always and is sometimes difficult for them to navigate.

Pros:

Cornerstone can be customized, which is really nice.

Cons:

Cornerstone is very expensive compared to similar platforms. It also isn't that much better.

You get what you pay for

Comments: It's been slowly improving. I would say that our experience is limited as so many functions are outside of the Learning Module. We purchased a smaller version and I think it shows as we are continuously struggling to make it suit our needs the way we want.

Pros:

I think that the recent changes have made the system more user friendly, but it is still not the most clear system. It manages transcripts fairly well.

Cons:

I assume (as I was hired after implementation) that you need to request it, but our permissions are more limited than I would like. We can't run reports like utilization metrics, or who is in what security role which really limits our abilities. We also don't have backend design privileges and as a web developer that is infuriating. I would say usability is less than desirable as there are HTML issues, and Transcript functionality confuses people. There isn't a natural or logical way to set up accommodation requests even when using custom forms, which in my opinion is a very bad issue. We of course have text in the email, but it's insufficient and has caused issues.

Robust learning management system

Comments: We have been pleased with the ability to consolidate our learning offerings/tracking and the ability to automate our assignments and emails. This has streamlined our efforts and saved staff time doing manual processes.

Pros:

I like that we can have all of our required trainings in one system and can automatically assign them to our learners along with sending automated emails. It is great to be able to run reports out of one system to track learning. I am also excited to see where we will be using the tool in the area of Skills.

Cons:

The evaluation tool is not that easy to use and the reporting is basic level. It needs to be an area of focus.

Industry Leader in LMS Software - Top Shelf Product with Excellent Customer Service

Comments: My overall experience with Cornerstone OnDemand has been excellent. I appreciate the training team, support team, client success, and the product team who go above and beyond to respond quickly to client needs. I have undergone several certifications through Cornerstone - the process of training for certifications and working with certification specialists has been an incredible opportunity to upskill my proficiency with the product and apply that knowledge toward optimizing the user experience at my org. I strongly recommend this LMS product to any org seeking to adopt the best LMS on the market.

Pros:

Among the LMS products that I have worked with, Cornerstone OnDemand provides the most customizable solution for unique business needs. Cornerstone provides an abundance of training for clients, including hundreds of on demand videos, online courses, online help articles, and virtual instructor led training classes for administrators to upskill their familiarity with the features. Each client is unique, and we have a tremendous ability to tailor the learning experience for end users. At my organization, which is a retail company with 80% un-desked workers, employees love the possibilities for learning in the flow of work, such as with Express Class, and the easy to use AI-supported carousels on Learner Home. Edge Import provides an easy experience for loading historical data and courses into the system in batch. We are able to support 100k+ employees with a core admin team of 4 with smart security configurations and the ability to use custom pages to embed self-service tools for end users and instructors directly within the portal.

Cons:

Cornerstone is constantly growing and adapting its product during quarterly releases and they are very inclusive with customer suggestions for future enhancements. There is a lot of thought that goes into release planning and UAT through a stage environment and release ready webinars. Often these enhancements are the direct result of client suggestions that have been upvoted by other clients. It is a huge product with a top talent product management team, and I am always impressed with how the product is updated to adapt to new technologies and industry trends, as well as business needs. I would love to see even more emphasis in the future on release updates to include even more customer suggestions, even though the releases are already very robust.

CSOD - Access your learning anywhere/anytime!

Comments: Overall, we are very pleased with our selection and have no plans of leaving this application any time soon. We just resigned for another 5 years, so that speaks volumes to our confidence level with this product.

Pros:

We have found that our users required no training to be able to use the Cornerstone software successfully. Given that we have 10,000 employees, this was a key deciding factor when we signed on.

Cons:

There’s always going to be small issues that may be frustrating. The one thing that we found is that their customer service/support central is more than adequately prepared to handle anything that comes up.

CSOD Getting Better Every Year!

Comments: We are very happy with the applicatoin. We have been with Cornerstone for over 3 years now and signed a new contract for another 5 years. The support we get from them is excellent and would not look elsewhere.

Pros:

Constant improvement (quaterly) is something I really like about this application. Users do not complain about it, which is a huge plus for us supporting the app in our organization. The application is big and there is always something new to learn or better way of doing things.

Cons:

There is not much that I can say negative about the application. One thing that I would like to change is character count when creating groups. It might seem small for some organization admins, but for us its a important as our groups can be very large. It is frustrating when creating a group and you are unable to save it because you succeeded the character limit. Not a deal breaker but for sure an annoyance that can perhaps be fixed in the next releases.

Cornerstone LMS not great for complicated builds

Comments: My experience is both good and bad. Good in that I have gotten used to the way the product works and can maneuver well. Bad in that its tedious work and there are areas where streamlining is needed.

Pros:

Cornerstone was an improvement over the LMS platforms we were using 5 years ago. It handles large amounts of learning objects and dynamic assignments well if its simple. It doesn't like complicated assignments. The system works well with a simple set of learning objects assigned to a simple group with a due date. If you need to build a complicated group (one with many parameters), it may not work as well. Also the removal of items is a challenge when you are removing from a large number of transcripts.

Cons:

the administration of cornerstone is not straight forward. There are a lot of nuances that come up when you are completing various activities. There is also the inconsistencies with various screens throughout. In some areas you can click check all or uncheck all to select multiple objects. In other areas you cannot and have to click individually, which is time consuming.

Solid HRIS system with a strong LMS

Comments: Overall, Cornerstone is a solid and robust system. We run into very few issues with it. It has helped us reach our global workforce and manage learning within our organization.

Pros:

Cornerstone offers one of the better LMSs that I've managed in my career. They continue to update the system with new features and evolve it with emerging technology like machine learning and mobile compatibility. It supports all of the content we use and user management is relatively painless. Each area of the system integrates with the others. This allows for a very cohesive performance management suite.

Cons:

The weak spot of Cornerstone is their customer service. It has been a pain point for several years. They say they are working on improving it and sometimes they do, but it still has a long ways to go. I also wish the system had more robust mobile compatibility. This is something they have been working on, but they are behind some competitors. They also need further support for multimedia, specifically video.

A learning experience

Pros:

Range of functionality and ease of implementation. Does more than most LMSs out there. Initial setup and integration was outsourced and great whilst support lasted.

Cons:

Expensive and some features hidden behind paywall. Customer support varied dependant on who your CSM was.

A system full of interesting functions, but difficult to 'cooperate' from the admin's perspective

Comments: From the Admin's perspective - it is very hard to work with the system, creating anything takes a lot of time and you can never be sure that all functions will work as you want (some you set up at the stage of uploading materials, some later - sometimes they are mutually exclusive). From the perspective of a person who uses Cornerstone for learning - quite intuitive navigation through the system, visually approx.

Pros:

Many nice features, like Playlists - you can create a playlist with any links you want and share with employees (e.g. leadership Inspirational videos/articles). Easy to assign training for a big group of employees (very easy to create a specific group based on employees' features like a place where they work). The end result, e.g. assigned training, looks good from the user's perspective. Easy to re-assign which is very useful for mandatory training.

Cons:

The biggest problem for me is a very unfriendly administration panel - to create anything, you need a lot of "clicks", and in every part of the system, it looks different (e.g. you have to sometimes click 'done' to add something, and in another place just click on '+'). Sometimes it seems to have no logic (even Cornerstone employees have sometimes problems answering how the given feature will work...). It is also difficult to edit anything in many places, which means that you have to start work from scratch (e.g. when creating a test, you can set that user will receive partial points for multiple-choice questions, but if you did not choose it when creating the question, you have to create the question from scratch) And the last annoying thing for me - practically nothing can be deleted from the system if it has been used at least once, which creates a long list of unnecessary materials / tests / training / etc and makes it very difficult to find what you need.

CSOD - Great Enterprise LMS

Comments: - user friendly/stable LMS that hits all the major offerings of comparable LMS's on the market
- committed to improving the product and the customer experience
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Pros:

- easy to use/intuitive end user experience - highly customizable - stable/quick response when issues arise - quarterly upgrades offer frequent improvement - robust help functionality (knowledge articles, training, etc)

Cons:

- administration can be complex (by-product of high customization) - functionality can be hidden/unavailable to even the overall system admin until vendor enables, making it easy to miss helpful updates - mix of old/new functionality can be confusing: as updates are rolled out piece by piece it can feel a bit disjointed

Cornerstone across the years

Comments: Very positive. In the last 20 years I have worked with Saba, Sum Total, and Cornerstone. This has been exclusively Cornerstone for the past 12 years. I'm sure that says something!

Pros:

It is functionally rich with a clear and visible roadmap of future product development and in recent years clients have had some level of influence and input into this.

Cons:

It is a hugely configurable platform which is both a strength and also a weakness, particularly when first implementing. Rapid innovation in emerging areas such a skills and learning in the flow of work whilst critical, does carry the cost of leaving some parts of the platform looking a little tired and in need of overhaul (e.g. managing events and sessions).

Cornerstone OnDemand

Comments: Our business use for this was tracking regulatory training for roughly 12 trainers in the health care field. This is also where people could sign up for in-person training whether that was a leadership class, CPR, etc. We were starting to use it for succession planning - although I feel we could have just used PowerPoint. We didn't use it for performance although we looked into it.

Pros:

This is a flashy LMS. It looks great to the user. For a large organization, this was helpful with tracking regulatory trainings and more. It has all the bells and whistles.

Cons:

The reason I would never recommend this to a colleague is because of the price and admin functions. First, the price. We were shown from the beginning, everything the system could offer, which we obviously loved, but shame on us for not asking additional questions. What we saw and what we got were different. For additional pricing, we could add on. Even customer service hours were charged. In the end this costed triple what we originally thought. Furthermore, my second issue was the admin functionality. It was extremely complicated. We had 12 trainers working on the back end to get it implemented, on top of that we eventually hired 3 full time employees to work on the admin part for upgrades, running reports, etc. That is obviously another cost. As much as the system was user friendly... It wasn't worth the cost when there are plenty of learning management systems that are user and admin friendly, for less.

A complete solution for providing educational content

Pros:

There were no missing elements or workaround to be done to achieve the desired results

Cons:

Progress can be lost on a few rare occasions

Cornerstone as a Learning Management Tool

Comments: Overall, the LMS is great. We have seen increased user engagement with the content and completion of training items. In addition, the Playlists are a big hit and I love how we can customize the Learner Home Banners and Welcome Page.

Pros:

Working to integrate Cornerstone with our business had some challenges with setting up the system with our vendors, both current and previous. While we still have trouble with our integration from ADP to Cornerstone, our transition to the system has been pretty smooth. The system offers SSO Access which cuts down on the need to reset passwords and has a very sleek and intuitive design. I think that is the best part of the software - end users find the tool easy to access.

Cons:

As a Learning Administrator, I am responsible for updating content and learning assignments throughout the organization. Versioning content and their associated assignments in Cornerstone is very confusing, and I often make mistakes that cannot be reversed. I think that is what is challenging about Cornerstone - once you submit a change, it is difficult to undo without a back-end service.

CSOD LMS - product review 2021

Comments: CSOD is offering us the solution for an LMS tool that is deployed almost worldwide within our organization and due to the customization level we have reached we can offer it to the branches with different license types: for Regulatory basis only, for Digital activity or full package containing also ILTs.

Pros:

The entire documentation (OnlineHelp, release notes) , community and forum is well structured and easy to find an information or use case. Also, the Product academy is offering us support to get the recognized CSOD certifications.

Cons:

some of the improvements we suggested were not prioritized; Some actions we raise to GPS support are marked as billable working orders even if sometimes it is related to a tool issue.

Cornerstone Recruitment Module

Comments: Overall the experience has been good and we are happy with the recruitment solution we have in place. It is helping us to report on sources and cost which is brilliant for making data driven decisions rather than trying to guess what sources are working and what are not as often is the case when using other ATS systems without this functionality.

Pros:

The software is user friendly and pretty adaptable to fit our business needs. Most of the screens are modern in design (some need updating) and the workflows are able to be flexed so that the process is not clunky and hard to navigate. It works well for our internal recruitment team and for the most part our candidates, although some improvement could be made to restricting views to some of our managers as they for our process we dont need them to see some of the status's or have the ability to change them. Overall it is one of the better recruitment systems out there for flexibility and functionality. The fact that we are able to track candidates source is crucial to our business and supports our budgeting strategy really well.

Cons:

The helpdesk support could be better and more efficient in responding. Having the ability to share screens in real time to highlight issues or discuss improvements that could be made would be better.

Cornerstone Learning Management System

Pros:

lots of features and options to arrange the system in your way, you can implement on your own speed and what you want, great user community, very good product documentation

Cons:

quality and speed of customer support needs to be improved, treatment of improvement suggestions is bad and not transparent at all, sometimes administration is very cumbersome, some areas of the system still are in old-school design

Customizable and User-Centric

Comments: The use of Cornerstone has been instrumental in changing the training culture of our social services agency, which relies on flexible training delivery to staff who's time is limited and most often needed elsewhere.

Pros:

Cornerstone has created and outlet for users across varied companies to collaborate and advocate for new and/or improved features. I have seen requested features come to fruition in their regularly scheduled feature updates that are rolled out several times a year.

Cons:

In regards to training and support, Cornerstone definitely prioritizes some functionality over others. When working in the Certification Management area, I have rarely communicated with anyone who I would call an expert. I have often gotten the odd look and the blow off when I expressed my need for assistance in this area.

Great LMS

Pros:

Excellent UI and End User experience. Great product and customer teams, quarterly updates that always add meaningful, high quality new features.

Cons:

Lots of configuration, you really have to know what you want to achieve, rather than just take it off the shelf.

Cornerstone is getting more exciting and heading to the right direction!

Pros:

Edge, Learning Assignment Tool, Learner Home

Cons:

Reporting (does not have a robust Dashboard creation for managers to have a holistic view of their team performance), ILT creation is still very complicated and not user friendly

So glad my organization made the switch!

Pros:

We use the Learning, Performance and Succession Modules. I really like the fact that each module "talks" to each other. It makes for a more robust platform and reporting is so easy!

Cons:

The Succession Module works but there are times that it can be a bit clunky. Overall I do like how they all work together.

Cornerstone OnDemand

Comments: Cornerstone has proven to be an excellent partner for our organization and has helped us achieve many of our corporate strategy goals.

Pros:

There are an infinite number of ways to build and customize learning programs.

Cons:

There are some areas of the portal that are outdated in regards to the UI.