Skilljar Alternatives: 9 Options for Teams Who Have to Build the Content Too

Skilljar helps businesses deliver customer education through branded academies, courses, certifications, and learner tracking. However, its annual subscription, active-learner fees, and additional costs for certain capabilities can make pricing a significant consideration as training programs grow.

But cost is only one part of the decision. Running a customer academy also means creating training content, keeping it up to date, and making sure learners get the right information as products and customer needs evolve. The right platform depends on how well it supports these needs without adding unnecessary complexity or manual work.

In this guide, we compare nine Skilljar alternatives across pricing, training delivery, AI capabilities, content creation and maintenance, reporting, and integrations. We'll examine each platform's strengths, limitations, and ideal use cases to help you find the right fit for your customer education needs.

TL;DR

• Skilljar is a customer education LMS (learning management system). It publishes add-on prices but not plan pricing. Public figures put plans between $25,000 and $90,000 a year, billed on an annual subscription plus an active-user fee, with no free trial.
• The nine alternatives split by the job they do: creation plus delivery (Trainn); enterprise customer education (Thought Industries, Intellum); one system for employees and customers (Docebo, Absorb LMS); multi-audience mid-market (LearnUpon, Confirm Academy); budget and speed (TalentLMS); and course commerce (Thinkific Plus).
• The criterion most comparison lists skip: what it costs to keep your courses current after a product release.
• Before you sign: Skilljar's documentation describes no way to export a course or lesson you authored inside it. Analytics and enrollment data export to CSV; course content does not.
• Use the at-a-glance table to scan pricing and ratings, then the "which is right" section to map your team to a platform.

What Went Into This Guide

To make this an objective, useful guide to Skilljar alternatives, the Trainn team researched every platform in depth, tested workflows hands-on where we could, and leaned on real user experience rather than vendor claims. Here is the approach we took:

• We examined each platform's features and how it positions itself, cross-referencing G2, Capterra, and other review platforms instead of trusting any single source.
• We tested the core workflows ourselves where we had access, from building a course through enrolling learners and pulling completion data, noting where each platform fits a first academy versus one you publish and maintain for years. Skilljar, Thought Industries, and Intellum are demo-gated, so our read on those comes from documentation and verified reviews.
• We read verified reviews and community discussion closely, both what users praise and what they struggle with, and kept every reviewer's role and company size intact.
• We drew on conversations with customer education, customer success, and support leaders at B2B SaaS companies about how they choose platforms like these, and what they wish they had known before signing.
• We checked every price, rating, and company fact against primary sources, and cross-checked public case studies and customer outcomes.

Skilljar Alternatives at a Glance – How They Compare

The nine split cleanly on one question: does the platform make your training content, or only host it?

Two things stand out. Only TalentLMS and Thinkific publish a rate card you can act on, so comparing real cost across the rest means talking to sales at seven different vendors. And every platform here can author a course, but only one generates the narrated video, the written guide, and the interactive walkthrough that go inside it.

Why Teams Look Past Skilljar

Skilljar delivers courses well, and its customers say so. What sends teams looking is less about delivery and more about what surrounds it: the bill, the admin work, and how much of the platform needs a developer.

What changed after the Gainsight acquisition

The timeline explains what you are buying today:

• July 2023: Gainsight acquired Northpass, a customer education platform.
• April 2025: Gainsight acquired Skilljar. The announcement said the deal would "combine the best of both platforms."
• Since then: the product sells as Skilljar by Gainsight, and Gainsight lists it as its education platform.
• More recently: an MCP server that connects the academy to assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT.

Customer reaction runs both ways. One long-time user, reviewing in July 2026, wrote that they were "absolutely thrilled to now have it run by Gainsight." Another, in September 2026, called the platform "feature-light and not very intuitive."

None of that makes Skilljar a worse delivery platform. It does mean you are buying into a bigger product line than you were two years ago, and that is the backdrop to the frictions below.

Three frictions that keep coming up

Read enough Skilljar reviews and the same three complaints surface, from solo admins to enterprise teams. None of them is about whether the courses play.

1. Analytics you cannot export, and admin work that stays manual. Reporting is the most consistent complaint across review sites. Teams describe pulling course data one course at a time, with no way to see the whole picture.

2. Native features that are missing or shallow. Jonathan R., reviewing in July 2026, listed two: "there are no nested learning paths and the audit log is not fully available." Cindy L., an LMS admin at a software company, flagged a duplication problem.

3. Customization still runs through code. This one is old and persistent. Daniel W., a Manager of Technical Training, wrote: "The look and feel is highly customizable but you must understand CSS to accomplish this task." Stephen A., reviewing in August 2026 from MasterControl, described the same constraint at enterprise scale: Skilljar catalog pages are "built on 'invisible' dynamic code or custom hard code," and "technical limitations of the combined approach have prevented us from maximizing the potential of our pages."

If you have a developer, none of this is disqualifying. If you do not, all three compound.

What Skilljar Actually Costs

Skilljar publishes add-on prices but not plan pricing. Its pricing page describes the model as two things: "An annual subscription plan" and "An active user fee based on the number of active users taking lessons in your Academy in one year." The per-user rate falls as the user count rises. Four public data points put the plans themselves between $25,000 and $90,000 a year.

Two caveats before you use these. The AWS Marketplace listing does not define what one unit covers, and it is a separate number from the data connector add-on described below, which also starts at $25,000. Three of the four figures are self-reported by buyers, not a published rate card.

The add-ons Skilljar does publish

Several capabilities are priced on top of the subscription rather than included in it:

• Content syndication: $10,000. Embeds your courses inside other learning platforms.
• Language packs: from $10,000 for five languages.
• Data connector: from $25,000. Gives you Skilljar data in a real-time PostgreSQL database.
• LearnExperts: listed as an add-on with no published price.

Budget for these separately. A localized academy with a live data feed is a different number from the base platform, and none of it is included by default.

The pattern underneath all of it matters more than any single figure. Skilljar bills by monthly active user, so the invoice rises as more customers complete your training.

A second practitioner put the structural problem in one line: "Per seat pricing punishes success."

There is a second cost question that pricing pages never answer. Skilljar has no free trial, so you cannot build a real academy and watch real learners move through it before you commit. Across this entire category, only Trainn, Docebo, Absorb LMS, TalentLMS, and Thinkific Plus let you try the product before a contract, and only Trainn and TalentLMS let you start without talking to anyone.

How to Evaluate a Skilljar Alternative

We judged every platform on the same five factors, weighted toward the job most teams are really hiring a Skilljar alternative to do.

Criterion 3 is the one buyers underweight and regret. A practitioner advising another B2B SaaS team on exactly this decision ranked it first:

How to weight these by team:

• Training customers and partners from one platform: weight criterion 1, then 5.
• A small team with no instructional designer and no video editor: weight 2 and 3 first.
• A growing customer base and a fixed budget: weight 4, and ask every vendor for pricing at double your current learner count.
• An enterprise program that already has content and engineering support: weight 5, and treat 2 as optional.

The 9 Best Skilljar Alternatives

The platforms below are grouped by the job they do best, not ranked one to nine. Start from the job you have.

1. Trainn

Trainn is an AI-powered product video and guide creation platform with a customer academy built on top. Its AI video agent reads a screen recording as a workflow rather than a sequence of frames, then generates a narrated video, a step-by-step guide with annotated screenshots, and an interactive walkthrough from that single recording.

Where Skilljar's workflow begins once your content exists, Trainn's begins at the screen recording. The same platform then delivers that content through Academy courses, a branded Knowledge Hub, or in-app tutorials, and reports on who completed what.

Best for: B2B SaaS customer education and customer success teams building their first academy without an instructional designer or a video team.

Key features

• One recording, three formats: A single screen recording becomes a narrated video, a step-by-step guide with annotated screenshots, and an interactive walkthrough. You record once and publish to three different points in the customer journey instead of producing the same lesson three times.
• Trainn MCP: Connect Claude, ChatGPT or Notion and the assistant does the production, not just the plan. Ask for an onboarding course and it drafts the chapters, lessons and quizzes from your existing library. Paste release notes and it flags stale lessons and revises them in bulk. You review everything before it goes live, and it is included on every plan.
• Clip-by-clip editor: Every click becomes its own clip with its own voiceover. When the interface changes you swap the one clip that changed rather than re-recording the lesson, which is what keeps a large library maintainable by a small team.
• No-code Academy: A branded academy live in about 7 days, with courses, chapters, role-based learning paths, quizzes and shareable certifications. 25+ language auto-translate, SSO/SAML, GDPR, ISO and SOC 2 Type 2.
• Delivery beyond the academy: The same content populates a branded Knowledge Hub and in-app tutorials, so a customer who is stuck gets the answer inside the product rather than being sent to a course catalogue.
• Reporting that reaches the account record: Learner-level progress, course drop-off points and completion, with Salesforce and HubSpot integration so training activity sits beside the account your CSM is already looking at.

Strengths

• One platform from recording to report. Content is created, delivered and measured in the same place, so there is no separate authoring tool to buy and no export-and-upload step between systems.
• A product release does not mean re-recording the library. Each video is assembled from individual clips, so you replace only the clip that changed. POSIST updates a video in about ten minutes after a product change, and AVEVA's technical training lead reports 80% less time spent creating and maintaining video.
• Each customer sees the academy meant for them. Role-based paths give a CSM and a sales ops admin at the same account different courses, set up once rather than maintained as separate catalogues.
• Training data lands where the account is managed. Learner-level progress and completion flow into Salesforce and HubSpot, so a CSM can see who finished onboarding without pulling a separate report.

Limitations

• Built for customer education, not internal compliance. No automatic recertification and no audit trails, so regulated internal training belongs on a corporate LMS such as Docebo.
• Content comes in but does not go out. Trainn imports SCORM; there is no SCORM or xAPI export and no LRS support. Settle this early if portability is a hard requirement.
• Fewer integrations than the enterprise platforms. Skilljar, Docebo and Intellum carry deeper connector catalogues, particularly for revenue tooling.

Pricing

Trainn's pricing starts at $19/month on the Creator plan, and the LMS starts on Scale.

• Creator, $19/month: video and guide creation.
• Launch, $2,400/year: creation and sharing, with multilingual voiceovers, embeds and collections.
• Scale, on quote: this is where the academy lives, together with the Knowledge Hub and in-app tutorials. You pay a flat fee against a monthly active user tier rather than per seat, so registered accounts that never log in do not cost you.
• Enterprise, on quote: higher learner limits, advanced security and webhooks.

Trainn MCP is included on every plan. Launch, Scale and Enterprise come with a 14-day free trial, no credit card, and you can run a real academy with real learners during it rather than a demo sandbox.

Ratings: 4.6/5 on G2

Neutrinos replaced a video agency and a separate LMS with one platform, training 423 learners and issuing more than 1,000 certificates in nine months:

Verdict: Choose Trainn when you have to produce the training content as well as deliver it, and you do not have an instructional designer or a video editor to hand the job to.

2. Thought Industries

Thought Industries is an enterprise customer education platform built for companies that sell training or serve many business clients at once. Its multi-tenant architecture lets each B2B client manage their own learners from your catalog, which is the capability it is genuinely known for.

Best for: Enterprise education teams selling training, or running a separate branded academy for each client.

Key features:

• Multi-tenant client portals from a single catalog
• Commerce and monetization for paid courses and certifications
• Enterprise reporting and analytics
• Integration support for CRM and association management systems

Strengths

• The strongest multi-tenant model in this comparison, built in rather than bolted on
• Mature monetization for teams whose training is a revenue line
• Suits complex products in technology, manufacturing, and healthcare

Limitations

• Enterprise pricing that one buyer evaluating it for a small nonprofit called a "gut-check"
• Setup is heavy. One higher-education user reported hiring consultants to deploy it
• Courses cannot be exported, per the same user

Pricing

Thought Industries publishes no prices. Vendr, which aggregates what companies actually paid on signed contracts, puts the median at $54,960 a year as of February 2026, across a range of $24,750 to $115,333.

By deployment size, from the same data:

• Under 1,000 active learners: $25,000 to $50,000 a year
• 1,000 to 5,000: $50,000 to $100,000 a year
• 5,000 and above: $100,000 to $200,000 and up

"Active learner" here means someone who actually took a course that year, not everyone holding an account. Ask which definition your contract uses, because the two numbers diverge fast on a public academy.

No free trial.

Ratings: 4.1/5 on G2

Verdict: Choose Thought Industries if you sell training or run per-client academies at enterprise scale. Trade-off: the price and the implementation effort both assume a program large enough to justify them.

3. Intellum Platform

Intellum is a customer education platform aimed at large organizations running education for customers, partners, and employees from one system. It is one of the few platforms here with an authoring product, Evolve, though that is course authoring rather than video generation.

Best for: Enterprise customer education teams who need more flexibility than a standard LMS gives them.

Key features:

• Education for customer, partner, and employee audiences in one platform
• Evolve Authoring for building interactive course content
• Enterprise reporting and data integrations
• Configurable learner experiences across audiences

Strengths

• More flexible than most platforms in this category, which is the reason it comes up in enterprise evaluations
• Covers three audiences without a second system
• Authoring is available in-house through Evolve, unlike most delivery-only platforms

Limitations

• Service and support draw consistent criticism, even from people who rate the product highly
• Enterprise-sized, so a small customer education team will find it heavy
• Evolve is a separate product with its own learning curve

Pricing

Intellum publishes no prices either. Vendr's February 2026 data puts the median at $40,997 a year, across a range of $6,792 to $215,029. That spread is wide because implementation is quoted on top of the platform fee, and it is not a rounding error:

• Up to 5,000 active learners: $30,000 to $60,000 platform, plus $10,000 to $25,000 implementation
• 5,000 to 25,000 learners: $60,000 to $150,000 platform, plus $20,000 to $50,000 implementation and services
• 25,000 and above: $150,000 to $400,000 a year and up

Read the second half of each line carefully. On a smaller deployment, implementation can add a third again to your first-year spend, and because it is a one-time charge it will not appear in the per-year comparison you build in a spreadsheet.

No free trial.

Ratings: 4.4/5 on G2

Verdict: Choose Intellum if you are running education across three audiences and need configurability a standard LMS cannot give you. Trade-off: you are buying the product, not the service around it.

4. Docebo

Docebo is an enterprise learning platform built first for internal learning and development, then extended outward to customers and partners. It is the most common cross-shop against Skilljar, and the only comparison in this set with meaningful search demand behind it.

Best for: Enterprise learning and development teams who need internal training and customer training on one platform.

Key features:

• Internal L&D and extended enterprise audiences in one platform
• AI-driven content recommendation and personalization
• Broad integration catalog, including HRIS systems
• Compliance and certification tracking for regulated programs

Strengths

• The clear choice when the same team owns employee training and customer training
• Compliance depth that none of the customer-education-first platforms match
• Large install base, so hiring admins who know it is straightforward

Limitations

• Cost scales steeply. One customer reported $65,000 a year, and a practitioner advising a 150,000-learner program warned it "will get crazy expensive at that scale"
• Content management draws criticism from people who have run both it and Skilljar
• Migration into it and customization within it are both reported as difficult

Pricing

Docebo publishes no prices. What is on the record:

• $65,000 a year, reported by a customer who moved off Skilljar to Docebo, weighed against a $90,000 Skilljar quote
• Priced by active user count, which is the same model Skilljar uses. Moving from one to the other changes your vendor, not the shape of your bill
• Docebo Shape (AI content creation) and Docebo Flow (in-app delivery) are sold separately from the core platform, so a quote for "Docebo" may not include the parts you saw in the demo

A free trial is available, which is rare at this end of the category. Use it.

Ratings: 4.3/5 on G2

Verdict: Choose Docebo when internal learning and customer learning have to live in the same system, especially with compliance requirements. Trade-off: you are buying an internal L&D platform and pointing it outward, and the cost curve is steep.

5. Absorb LMS

Absorb LMS is a general-purpose learning platform that covers employee, customer, and partner training from one system. It reaches Skilljar shortlists through the budget holder rather than the customer education team, because it is usually internal L&D that already owns it. The company is mid-move to a new domain, absorbai.com, with the product still named Absorb LMS.

Best for: Organizations training employees and customers together, where internal L&D owns the contract.

Key features:

• One platform for employee, customer, and partner audiences
• Separate branded portals per audience
• Absorb Create for authoring and Absorb Aura for AI assistance
• Compliance, certification, and recertification tracking
• Reporting across every audience in one place

Strengths

• Covers internal and external learning without a second system
• Compliance and recertification features that customer-education-first tools do not have
• Scales from under 50 learners to 25,000 and beyond
• Free trial available, which most of this category does not offer

Limitations

• Administration is heavy. Kyle P., a National Director of Talent Development, writes that "common tasks take more clicks than they should and the menus take a while to learn"
• Capabilities are unbundled. A training manager of three to five years flagged "some features that I wish were included with the Core LMS experience instead of being add-ons for an additional charge"
• Support speed is the most common complaint in its Capterra reviews
• Delivery only. No video, guide, or walkthrough generation
• Built L&D-first, so a customer academy is a configuration rather than the default shape

Pricing

Absorb publishes nothing. Its pricing page is a lead form that asks for your learner count before it will route you to a salesperson, so there is no figure to work from until you are already in a sales cycle.

Three things to pin down on that first call:

• Which capabilities are in the core platform and which are add-ons. Absorb Create (authoring) and Absorb Aura (AI) are named as separate products, and reviewers report paying extra for features they assumed were included
• Whether you are priced on registered users or active users. For a customer academy, where most accounts sit dormant between releases, the gap between those two numbers is the whole negotiation
• The renewal price at double your current learner count, in writing

A free trial is available, and it is the only way to see the product without booking a call first.

Ratings: 4.6/5 on Capterra from 364 reviews

Verdict: Choose Absorb when one platform has to serve employees and customers and compliance matters to both. Trade-off: the admin experience is heavier than a customer-education-first tool, and several capabilities are priced as add-ons.

6. LearnUpon

LearnUpon is a mid-market learning platform known for handling several distinct audiences through separate portals, which makes it a common pick for teams training channel partners alongside customers.

Best for: Mid-market teams training channel partners and resellers alongside their customers.

Key features:

• Multiple portals for separate audiences from one instance
• Partner and reseller training workflows
• Course and certification management
• Standard CRM integrations

Strengths

• Handles customer, partner, and internal audiences without a second platform
• Stable at scale. One organization reports running portals with more than 25,000 active users and "very rarely" hitting issues
• Mid-market positioning, so it is lighter to administer than the enterprise options

Limitations

• The learning journey feature draws specific criticism as clunky
• Delivery only. Content creation happens somewhere else
• Less customization depth than the enterprise platforms in this list

Pricing

LearnUpon publishes no prices and offers no self-serve entry point.

• Quoted by active user count, in bands rather than per seat, so cost steps up rather than climbing smoothly
• Portals are a priced dimension, not an unlimited one. A portal is a separate branded environment with its own learners, courses and settings. Running customers in one, partners in another and staff in a third means three portals, and the quote moves with that count as well as with your users
• No free trial, so evaluation happens in a demo on their schedule rather than in your own tenant

Ask for the quote at your projected user count 12 and 24 months out. With band pricing, crossing a boundary is the kind of surprise you want to find before signing, not at renewal.

Ratings: 4.5/5 on G2

Verdict: Choose LearnUpon when partner and channel training matters as much as customer training. Trade-off: you still need a separate tool to produce the content.

7. Confirm Academy (formerly WorkRamp)

Confirm Academy is the customer-facing half of what used to be WorkRamp. In August 2026 the parent company, formerly Learning Pool, renamed itself Confirm. The WorkRamp Customer Learning Cloud became Academy, and the employee product became Learn:Up. Visiting workramp.com now redirects to Confirm.

Best for: Sales and customer success enablement teams who want customer training running next to their internal programs.

Key features:

• Customer academy paired with an internal enablement platform
• Course building, certification, and learner tracking
• Sales enablement heritage, including practice and coaching workflows
• Shared administration across internal and external audiences

Strengths

• Strong fit when the same team owns sales enablement and customer education
• Internal and external programs share one administrative layer
• Well established, with a large review base under the WorkRamp name

Limitations

• The rebrand is recent and still settling, which matters for documentation and support continuity
• One team consolidating two systems chose Skilljar over it, citing "more customizable page and course options"
• Delivery only. Content creation happens elsewhere

Pricing

Confirm publishes starting rates, which almost nothing else here does. The catch is that it publishes them for everything except the product a customer education team would buy. From their pricing page, billed annually and benchmarked on a 200-person company:

• Learn:Up (employee learning, formerly WorkRamp): from $9 per user per month
• Perform (formerly Confirm): from $8 per user per month
• Practice (AI role-play, formerly AI Sims): from $4 per user per month
• Academy (the customer-facing product, also formerly WorkRamp): no published price

The model matters more than the numbers. Those rates are per user per month, which is how internal software is priced, because a company with 200 staff has roughly 200 users. A customer academy does not work that way: you might register 8,000 customers and see 600 of them in a given month. Before you compare Academy with anything else on this list, establish whether it is quoted on registered users or active ones, because the same rate card produces wildly different bills depending on the answer.

No free trial.

Ratings: 4.4/5 on G2

Verdict: Choose Confirm Academy if customer training sits next to sales enablement under one owner. Trade-off: you are buying into a platform mid-rebrand, so ask directly how the customer-facing product is resourced going forward.

8. TalentLMS

TalentLMS is the budget answer on most LMS shortlists. It publishes its prices, which almost nothing else in this comparison does, and its free plan has no time limit. It is built employee-first. Customer training is a supported use case rather than the design center, and their own navigation lists it fifth.

Best for: Small teams who need an academy live quickly on a published, predictable price.

Key features:

• Published pricing across four tiers
• Branches, which are separate training portals per audience
• TalentCraft AI authoring, metered in credits
• Courses, learning paths, quizzes, and certificates
• Custom domain, SSO, and API from the entry tier

Strengths

• The only platform in this comparison with fully published pricing
• A free plan with no time limit, covering 5 users and 10 courses
• Faster to stand up than any enterprise LMS here
• TalentLMS branding can be removed on every paid tier

Limitations

• Branches are capped by tier: 1 on Core, 3 on Grow, 15 on Pro. If you run a separate portal per customer, this binds early
• AI authoring is metered, and Core gets 5,000 credits once rather than monthly
• The course editor draws complaints. Andy C., a Customer Education Manager, writes that "pasting from other applications produces really messy html"
• Quizzing is thin. Vivek E. notes the question bank "feel[s] limited, especially around question paper creation and randomization of questions"
• Delivery only. No video, guide, or walkthrough generation

Pricing

TalentLMS is the only platform in this comparison with a complete published rate card. These are the annual billing rates; paying monthly costs about 20% more.

• Core: $119/month
• Grow: $229/month
• Pro: $449/month, plus $6 a month for each user above your tier
• Enterprise: quoted, starting at 1,000 users

What you are actually paying for. TalentLMS counts unique users who log in during a month, not everyone who has ever registered. For a customer academy with a large but mostly dormant base, that is meaningfully cheaper than a per-seat model.

The limit that decides it. TalentLMS calls a separate, independently branded training environment a "branch." A distinct academy for customers, a second for partners and a third for internal staff is three branches. Core includes one. Grow includes three. Pro includes fifteen. Teams that want a portal per enterprise customer hit that ceiling long before they come near the user limits, and it is the single most common reason TalentLMS gets ruled out for customer education.

AI authoring is metered. Core gets 5,000 credits once, not monthly. Grow gets 10,000 a month, Pro 15,000.

A free plan covers 5 users and 10 courses, with no time limit and no card.

Ratings: 4.7/5 on Capterra from 600 reviews

Verdict: Choose TalentLMS when budget is the binding constraint and you need something live this month. Trade-off: it is an employee training platform that also does customer training, and the branch caps bite if you need many separate portals.

9. Thinkific Plus

Thinkific Plus is the enterprise tier of a course platform built originally for selling courses. That commerce heritage is the reason it appears on Skilljar shortlists, particularly for teams whose training is a revenue line rather than a cost center.

Best for: Teams who sell their training, or want a paid academy without an enterprise contract.

Key features:

• Course builder with quizzes and completion certificates
• Payments, bundles, and subscription pricing for courses
• Branded site builder
• Learner management and basic reporting

Strengths

• Commerce is native, not an add-on module
• Noticeably cheaper than the enterprise customer education platforms. One buyer who compared it against a $90,000 Skilljar quote noted Thinkific "still did everything the bigger guys do for a fraction of the cost"
• Simpler to administer than any enterprise LMS in this list

Limitations

• Built for selling courses, so B2B features like partner segmentation are thinner
• Delivery and course building only. No video or guide generation
• Plus pricing is quote-based, even though the lower tiers are published

Pricing

Thinkific publishes its self-serve tiers in full, which makes it the easiest platform here to cost before you speak to anyone. Annual rates, with monthly billing costing more:

• Start: $82/month, 2 administrators, 200GB of video bandwidth
• Grow: $164/month, 6 administrators, 400GB
• Expand: $374/month, 15 administrators, 1,000GB
• Plus: no published price, quoted on request

All three self-serve tiers cover up to 10,000 "current students," which Thinkific defines as learners holding unexpired access to at least one course.

The catch that decides this for B2B teams. SCORM upload, single sign-on, learning paths, exams and CRM integrations are all Plus-only. A customer academy needs most of that list, so in practice you land on the quoted tier and the published prices above are not the ones you pay. The branded mobile app is a further $199/month on top.

A 30-day free trial runs on every self-serve tier.

Ratings: 4.5/5 on G2

Verdict: Choose Thinkific Plus when you are charging for training or want a working academy without an enterprise contract. Trade-off: the further you get from selling courses, the less the product is shaped for you.

Why Trainn Is the Best Skilljar Alternative for Customer Education Teams

Four reasons. The honest limits are in the entry above.

1. The content does not have to arrive from somewhere else

Skilljar authors courses. It does not make the video. Neither does LearnExperts, the AI add-on Skilljar resells, which turns documents into modules, exams and video scripts. Scripts, not video.

Trainn's AI video agent starts at the screen recording and produces a narrated video, a step-by-step guide with annotated screenshots, and an interactive walkthrough from that one take. All three land in Academy, the Knowledge Hub or in-app tutorials with no export step.

2. Nobody on your team needs to know CSS

The most persistent Skilljar complaint in this guide is that customization runs through code. Catalog pages sit on custom hard code, and reviewers say you need CSS to change the look of your own academy.

Trainn's academy is configured, not coded. That is the difference between a design change taking an afternoon and taking a sprint.

3. A release does not mean re-recording the library

Each video is a set of clips. When the interface changes, you swap the clip that changed. POSIST does it in about ten minutes.

Then paste your release notes into Trainn MCP and it finds the other lessons that have gone stale and revises them in bulk. Rob B., Technical Training Strategy Manager at AVEVA, reports 80% less time creating and maintaining video.

4. One purchase instead of two

Neutrinos was paying a video agency to make the content and a separate platform to deliver it. Both became Trainn. First course live in two weeks, then 423 learners and more than 1,000 certificates over nine months.

That is the real question for most teams reading this. Not which LMS is better, but whether the production line and the delivery layer need to be two bills.

Moving Off Skilljar Doesn't Have to Mean Starting Over

Switching is lighter than it sounds, and one thing decides how light: how much of your library you built inside Skilljar.

Your data leaves with you

Analytics and enrollment data export to CSV from the Analytics tab, covering courses, students, enrollments, quizzes and learning paths, and you can filter before you pull it. One catch: their documentation says this is not available on the Starter package.

Your courses mostly do not

Skilljar's documentation describes no way to export a course or a lesson. Not as SCORM, not as HTML, not in bulk. SCORM goes in to create a lesson, and it does not come back out.

You can download files you uploaded yourself: videos, images, SCORM packages. Their documentation adds one limit, that content embedded in Skilljar cannot be downloaded, without saying what counts as embedded.

So the rule is simple. What you uploaded, you keep. What you typed into Skilljar's editor, you rebuild.

How to keep the move small

Pull the enrollment CSV and rank your courses by completions. The top five usually carry most of the traffic. If those five are uploaded video and SCORM, this is a light migration. If they were written inside Skilljar, budget to rebuild them and start there.

Keep Skilljar live until the contract ends and point new learners at the new academy. You get completion data from both before you commit, and you are never migrating against a deadline.

If Trainn is where you land, the customer stories are worth reading for how other teams ran the changeover and how long it took them.

One honest note on the category: most platforms here are easier to get into than out of, and that includes Trainn.

Which Skilljar Alternative Is Right for Your Team?

Match the platform to the job you actually have, not the one with the longest feature list.

• Choose Trainn if you have to create the training content as well as deliver it, and nobody on your team is an instructional designer or a video editor. Trade-off: not built for regulated internal training.
• Choose Thought Industries if you sell training or run a separate academy for each client. Trade-off: enterprise pricing and a heavy implementation.
• Choose Intellum if you run education for customers, partners, and employees and need real configurability. Trade-off: the service around the product draws criticism.
• Choose Docebo if internal learning and customer learning share one system, especially under compliance requirements. Trade-off: cost climbs steeply with scale.
• Choose LearnUpon if partner and channel training matters as much as customer training. Trade-off: content creation still happens elsewhere.
• Choose Confirm Academy if customer training sits beside sales enablement. Trade-off: the product is mid-rebrand.
• Choose Thinkific Plus if you charge for your training. Trade-off: thinner B2B features the further you get from commerce.
• Choose Absorb LMS if one platform has to serve employees and customers and compliance matters. Trade-off: heavier administration, and add-on pricing for several capabilities.
• Choose TalentLMS if budget is the constraint and you need an academy live this month. Trade-off: employee-first by design, with branch caps on the lower tiers.
• Choose staying on Skilljar if your academy is live, your content is built, and you have developer time. The migration may cost more than it returns.

Get started with Trainn for free.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the best Skilljar alternative?

It depends on the job. Trainn fits teams who need to create the training content, not just host it. Thought Industries and Intellum suit enterprise education programs. Docebo and Absorb LMS cover internal and external learning together. TalentLMS fits a tight budget. Thinkific Plus fits teams selling courses.

How much does Skilljar cost?

Skilljar publishes add-on prices but not plan pricing. Public data points range from $25,000 a year on its AWS Marketplace listing to a quoted entry point "starting at $50k," and one customer reported $90,000 with customizations. The model is an annual subscription plus a fee per active learner, so costs rise as your learner base grows. Published add-ons include content syndication at $10,000, five language packs at $10,000, and a data connector from $25,000.

Who owns Skilljar?

Gainsight acquired Skilljar in April 2025, and the product is now sold as Skilljar by Gainsight. Gainsight had acquired Northpass, another customer education platform, in July 2023, and said the Skilljar deal would combine the best of both platforms.

Is there a free Skilljar alternative?

Not a real one. TalentLMS has a free plan for up to 5 users and 10 courses with no time limit, but it is built for internal training first. Most customer education platforms, Skilljar and Trainn's academy tiers included, quote on request. Trainn, Docebo, Absorb LMS, TalentLMS, and Thinkific Plus all let you try before a contract.

Can a platform with built-in content creation replace a delivery-only LMS?

Yes, if it does both jobs properly. Trainn creates narrated videos, step-by-step guides, and interactive walkthroughs from one screen recording, then delivers them through Academy courses, a Knowledge Hub, or in-app tutorials, with learner-level completion data.

How hard is it to migrate off Skilljar?

It depends on how your library was built. Skilljar exports analytics and enrollment data to CSV, and lets you download SCORM packages and assets you uploaded. Its documentation describes no way to export a course or lesson authored inside Skilljar, so that content has to be rebuilt. Pull the enrollment CSV, rank your courses by completions, rebuild the top ones first, and keep Skilljar live until renewal.