Best LMS Platforms in 2023 (+ the Features You Need)

The great differentiator in the business world is changing. 

For customers, it’s not flashy marketing campaigns or low prices. 

For employees, it’s not beer on tap or big paychecks. 

For partners, it’s not about a big night out or great swag.

Instead, it’s about value.

Customers want to know that what they bought is helping them — for example, Shopify customers want to see the software improving their eCommerce business. 

Employees want to know that what they’re doing is helping both the business and their career growth. 

Partners want to build relationships with companies that understand their vision and can help reach their business goals.

The companies that can show the most value will win. 

Full stop. 

For this reason, learning programs are becoming popular as companies invest in online learning to make sure their customers, employees and partners have ready access to the resources they need to see this value, quickly. 

Learning management systems (LMS) are becoming popular as well as these companies develop, create and deliver these programs at scale. 

This begs the question: What’s the best LMS platform in 2023? 

This post breaks down important LMS features and the best LMS platforms available right now.

LMS Features You Need in 2023

A quick Google search for “what’s the best LMS for [insert type of training]?” will return millions of results. 

While that doesn’t mean you have millions of LMSs from which to choose, it does mean the list is long. 

It also means that when you’re looking for an LMS, you’ll have an even longer list of features to sift through.

This brings up another question: Which features are important? 

The features you need to train your customers, employees or partners depend on your goals, program maturity, budget and team size, but there are several features you’ll need no matter what. 

Looking for an LMS? Download our LMS RFP to make sure you pick the right one.

• Fully Customizable

  A great learning experience is more than just content. That’s a big part of it, but the design and appearance of your academy are important, too, which is why the best LMS should give you the flexibility to build an academy that’s on-brand and aligned with other brand touchpoints, including your website. 

• Integrations

  Learning programs shouldn’t operate in a silo. The best LMSs must be able to connect with the tools you use daily or that you can add to your tech stack to make the learning experience even better — think HubSpot, Salesforce and Zapier.

• Mobile Friendly 

  The popularity of mobile technology and the rise of remote working means it’s all but a guarantee that your learners will consume some — if not all — of your content on mobile devices. For this reason, the best LMS should be mobile-friendly and deliver content that fits on any screen size, allowing people to learn on their own time.  

• Analytics

  Your online learning program should always be evolving. How do you know what to change or what to leave alone? Analytics. Your LMS must be able to drill down into learning data that gives you a clear picture of what’s working, what’s not and what you need to do to continue delivering the promised value to your customers, employees or partners. 

• Cloud-based

  With people more on the go than ever, it’s important that they can access content wherever they’re located. A cloud-based LMS or SaaS LMS makes this possible while also ensuring that you don’t run into any issues as you scale your learner base across the country or world.

• Personalized Learning

  No two people have the exact same learning needs. Maybe one needs an onboarding course while another needs help with a technical problem or an advanced feature. Personalization tokens recognize individual learners and deliver content that applies to them. This is especially helpful if you’re using your LMS to train multiple audiences, like customers and employees. 

• Automation

  An impactful learning program can have a lot of moving pieces — pieces that are both timely and costly to keep in line. An LMS with automation capabilities can take many of these tedious tasks off of your plate, freeing you and your team up to spend on more high-impact tasks like success planning with your customers, course building with an instructional designer (ID) or setting SMART goals with your employees.

• Ease of Use

  It’s human nature to use something you value and have no trouble using — like a super-easy-to-use mobile app. The same goes for an LMS. If your admins or learners don’t understand the value of the content you’re delivering via the LMS or they find the experience difficult to navigate, they’re less likely to use it. This is why the best LMSs are intuitive, easy to navigate and make learning fun and engaging for both admins and learners.  

• Blended Learning

  Some people like reading content. Others like watching videos. A handful like listening to the information. To some degree, the type of content your learners prefer will differ across the board. Your LMS must account for this and make it easy for you to deliver content in a variety of mediums, including blogs, video, audio, quizzes and instructor-led training (ILT).

• Learning Paths

Don’t leave anything to chance; make it abundantly clear to your learners what you expect them to get out of the content by pushing them down a predefined “path” to the correct learning outcome. For example, a learning path on how to activate their account and add new admins.

Now that you know what features to look for in an LMS, here are some of the best ones available right now. 

10 of the Best LMS Platforms in 2023

1. Northpass

Northpass is an LMS that gives businesses the freedom to easily create, manage and scale their learning programs to their customers, employees and partners. Northpass’ intuitive platform provides ultra-fast authoring, intelligent administration and perfectly integrated learning experiences — all driven by the best support in the industry.

Northpass is the only 100%-customizable LMS that allows teams to completely tailor their academy and create on-brand experiences. Northpass is also the only LMS in The HubSpot Marketplace, giving Sales, Services and Marketing teams the ability to bring learning data into HubSpot.

2. Docebo

The Docebo Learning Suite provides businesses with a single suite of tools they can use to manage content, deliver training and measure the business impact of their programs. 

Working with Docebo gives businesses access to a variety of tools, including Learn LMS, its flagship and AI-powered product that enables virtual coaching, auto-tagging and content suggestions that improve the learning experience.

3. LearnUpon LMS

Combining user-focused technology and industry-leading expertise, LearnUpon LMS is a solution businesses can use to deliver impactful enterprise-level training to their employees, partners and customers.

LearnUpon LMS offers a variety of impactful features, including LMS portals that allow learning teams to configure training for different audiences. LearnUpon LMS also integrates with popular tools, including Salesforce and Zapier. 

4. Skilljar

Skilljar is an external LMS that helps businesses educate, engage and retain everyone they do business with, including their customers and partners. 

Skilljar offers actionable data and insights to help learning teams measure business impact, track learning progress and evaluate content. It also has enterprise-ready support to help businesses manage security requirements and a global learner base. 

Built-in assessments and certifications also enable learners to showcase their expertise while giving learning teams an effective way to drive engagement. 

5. Lessonly by Seismic

With Seismic, businesses can unify their enablement tech stack by integrating with their CRM, email tools, collaboration software, content authoring and hundreds of other applications.

6. SAP Litmos

SAP Litmos Training comes with an online course builder, tracking and reporting capabilities, task automation and ILT capabilities. The LMS also includes a library of pre-built courses that learning teams can use in their own programs.

7. 360Learning

360Learning uses AI and collaborative features to turn in-house experts into learning and development (L&D) collaborators. With 360Learning, learning teams can create courses easily, while discussion forums, upvotes and reactions enable collaborative learning. 

8. TalentLMS

TalentLMS makes implementation easy with ready-to-go capabilities that makes creating new courses easy. Additionally, TalentLibrary offers a collection of more than 550 unique-ready-made courses — like Sales Training Essentials — that cover the skills teams need to succeed at work.

9. Absorb LMS

Absorb LMS empowers companies to effectively deliver consistent and on-brand training to internal employees, customers, partners and more. 

Absorb Intelligence, an AI-powered set of capabilities simplify tasks and give learners more opportunities to gain new skills and knowledge, while giving learning teams the ability to improve the learning experience, drive engagement and create efficiencies.

AbsorbLMS also makes it possible for learners to train offline by syncing course progress when an internet connection is restored.

10. WorkRamp

WorkRamp is the all-in-one LMS that makes it easy for businesses to create content at scale and deploy training to internal teams, customers and partners. 

With WorkRamp Dashboards and CRM integrations, learning teams can easily surface important metrics like revenue impact, employee engagement and customer health.

Supercharge Learning with the Best LMS Platforms in 2023

Deciding to invest in customer, employee or partner training is a great first step. 

What’s equally — if not more — important, however, is selecting the right LMS and vendor. 

Hopefully, this article helps you do that.