5 Top Budget-Friendly Learning Management Systems in 2024

Every company seeks to optimize software expenses without compromising quality. As the market floods with diverse learning management systems, it's evident that affordability no longer equates to inferiority. Discover the top five low-cost LMS solutions to improve your corporate learning in 2024. We’ve compared their pricing approaches, flexibility, and specific features.

Let’s see what we have here.

How to choose a LMS for small business

Small businesses usually work in a specific niche, where they strive to become the best. Usually, their personalized and customized approach, along with creativity to solve problems and high optimization enable them to survive and compete with larger corporations. But like all other businesses, they require corporate education to improve their work productivity. As we’ll see, selecting a low-cost learning management system is a good option for them.

As they have a specific, personalized approach, they need a similar personalized LMS that solves specifically their problems, without additional features that probably won’t be used. In addition, such LMSs usually have more dedicated support and can provide a fully personalized experience, enabling small businesses to build their own educational environment. Actually, CleverLMS is an especially good pick here, as it has a fully customizable app option, flexible feature choice with a pricing calculator, and a dedicated support team with individual LMS usage onboarding.
So, when choosing a learning management system for small companies, it’s important to understand your workflows and at which points you need to apply educational activities. Each of your employees applies their skills, be they hard or soft ones, to some point, where they drive the company’s value-producing machine. Having the map of these points, you can conclude which learning activities you need and how to integrate them into workflows.
So, we’ll see what an LMS for small businesses should do and focus on several examples. Each of them is the best for a certain case and provides features for a decent price, despite most of these platforms having different pricing models, as they want large companies to use them, too. One of them doesn’t have a pricing plan at all, preferring to communicate with customers directly and offer customized plans. But the most important element is to choose the right one, that meets your expectations and solves your specific problems.
Remember, the best LMS for your small business is the one that follows your objectives. We’ll examine these six platforms, including our own, and conclude what each of them is best for.

Let’s see a quick intro before we’ll delve into each platform separately.

Compare learning management systems

Our today’s learning management systems comparison evaluates various software’s prices and features to conclude what each LMS is best for.

No one solution can fit everyone. It’s totally fine that some systems will be better for some organizations and worse for others. All of them work in different environments and have different preferences. For example, those who earn money due to communications have different objectives than manufacturers. Content creation studios, software companies, and retail chains teach their employees different skills and competencies. Each of them needs a learning environment corresponding to their business. And we see several examples today.

See the learning management system cost comparison below to evaluate them.
So, let’s start!

#1. CleverLMS

Our platform has three primary advantages: full customization, strong organization features, and an extensive motivation system. Its mobile app is available for all platforms and can be customized according to your brand, so you’ll obtain your own app rather than use ours. The platform is very flexible, the pricing depends on the feature options you choose, starting from $1 per person/month.

What is CleverLMS?

As you see, the platform is very universal, being the best choice for companies that need to integrate their education with work processes directly.
As mentioned, CleverLMS has three primary advantages. Full customization enables you to create the app you want, with your own features, interface, and branding. A motivation system with allocable badges and a gift store gives users the motivation to learn better and obtain benefits for that. Lastly, a task and event planning system adds project management elements and enables uniting education with workflows seamlessly.

CleverLMS pricing

CleverLMS cost can be calculated easily, based only on your company’s size and the features you’ll use. Use a calculator to see all options: it can cost as low as $1/user/month if having the smallest set of features. The max price is $5/user/month for the full feature set, and $3.5/user/month for large companies with more than 1000 users, with additional managing and integration options.

An on-premise customized solution is available for those wanting to host their own learning management system based on CleverLMS, and its pricing is negotiable.

#2. TalentLMS

While positioning itself as a universal LMS tool, it’s the best for companies working with content. According to the plan you choose here, the TalentLMS app provides you with a platform or creates the whole domain for you, which you can customize. Various pricing options enable choosing the best option, although you pay for the plan, not for the actual number of users.

What is TalentLMS?

TalentLMS reviews are mostly positive, and this tool can certainly be applied to solve many educational challenges. Let’s see how it realizes the primary LMS features.
Therefore, the platform’s strongest sides are its powerful content creation and delivery features. TalentLMS training can be conducted live, with customized, easily created content and a robust infographic showing how learners proceed with it. Therefore, it’s the best choice for companies working with content, marketing, advertising, and educational services.

It’s also possible to ask for a personalized app on a TalentLMS basis, but for that, you need to contact them on their website and the specific pricing is undisclosed. To be more familiar with their costs, let’s see its pricing models.

TalentLMS pricing

The platform has several pricing options, based on your company’s size and features required. TalentLMS cost, therefore, varies from quite affordable to expensive, and a yearly subscription enables cost-saving.

Pricing options are tailored to different needs, ranging from Starter at $89/month for up to 40 users with unlimited courses, to Premium at $569/month for up to 1000 users. The enterprise plan has undisclosed pricing and provides unlimited portals and phone support. Also, a very limited free version is available, with up to 5 users and 10 courses.

TalentLMS mobile app is also available, and as mentioned, you can contact them to obtain a personalized one.

#3. iSpring

This education management company iSpring has several tools for online education. It offers quite an affordable pricing and many features for course creation and management.

What is iSpring LMS?

iSpring Learn is a platform to apply these courses, manage education processes, and track learners’ progress. In our table below, we examine it closely. Also, please note that it has iSpring Suite as a supplemental program, with course building and organization infrastructure, being a good choice for those who create courses constantly.
Therefore, iSpring Learn solutions are specifically focused on creating robust statistics and tracking all performance, and its supplementary tool iSpring Suite also enables quick interactive presentation creation. It’s a good solution for companies where education takes a solid part of time, as it enables them to create a lot of educational content and track learning performance.

iSpring pricing

If checking iSpring reviews around the Web, one can see that it has mostly good ratings, close to 4.5/5. As you’ll see, it has a very wide range of pricing models, with quite a fancy scheme.

If you want to use iSpring for learning only, you need to check iSpring Learn pricing, which is very affordable. It has two primary plans: Start and Business, with the latter having more features available, such as speech recognition and more extensive reporting.
Its plans range between 50 and 1,000 users, and for some options the total price of iSpring app is undisclosed. In general, prices vary between $3.14 and $2.29 per user per month, being lower for larger numbers of users.

Therefore, iSpring Learn features make it a good platform if you want to focus on education and learning content creation.

#4. Axonify

This platform’s features are focused on interactive and dynamic learning and microlearning, where content is organized in small and easily digestible forms. It can be proceeded quickly due to quick two-side feedback and applied in practice. The Axonify app is for teams that should integrate their educational activities right into the work process, and it’s especially good for frontline workers, those who work directly with people.

Being quite similar to CleverLMS, it’s still more specialized and expensive.

If you want to search for other best Axonify alternatives, look for platforms that use quick and interactive learning approaches, oriented on communication and microlearning.

What is Axonify LMS?

According to Axonify reviews that are easy to find on the Web, it works very well. Let’s see a quick summary of its features.
Therefore, Axonify-based tutorials can help in many industries, but it’s the most useful in those where interactive activity is a must-have: sales teams, hospitality, and similar industries focused on working with people.

Axonify pricing

Alas, Axonify pricing plans don’t exist at all. They’ve decided to organize a fully customized approach in choosing the price, so we cannot know how much it costs until contacting them, and they don’t disclose their costs.

If looking at some close Axonify alternatives pricing, such as 360Learning, you can see that it costs about $8/user/month, so it enables you to evaluate how much Axonify will cost. However, no one except for its support team cannot say for sure.

Based on the Axonify features, we can conclude that it’s a perfect choice for teams where interactions with people can make a big deal. Overall, it’s a very specialized tool for educating frontline workers.

#5. Innform

It’s quite a simple product, oriented on learning path automation, and positioning itself as a tool for inns, hotels, and hospitality industry in general. The Innform app is available for all mobile platforms. It also has very affordable prices, starting from $1.40/user/month.

What is Innform?

You can use all these features in the Innform mobile app and web versions. As you see, it focuses on learning much more than management, and its interactive tasks and live education features make it a good choice for the hospitality industry.
The Innform learning platform is very simple, but in many cases it’s advantageous. Just like Axonify, it’s the best choice for frontline workers, but due to its simple, learning-oriented interface, it’s quite universal. Still, it’s the best choice for companies that need to organize and apply learning materials quickly

Innform pricing

To install the Innform online portal in your company, you have several pricing options, based on which features you want. It also has something like a pricing calculator, but it works only to calculate the desired user number, so the price per user decreases slowly as their number grows.

It has four plans. All of them costs 10% less for an annual subscription. Note that only Pro plan, starting from $5.60/month/user, provides all Innform training features available. Other plans start at $1.40/month/user and enable from 10 to 100 training items. The Enterprise plan has rich personalization features, but its price is undisclosed.

Innform reviews are very high across the Web, close to 4.6/5, so it’s an excellent choice if you need a small, scalable LMS with a simple interface and without exceptional customization.
Each of these platforms is specified for some specific areas and industries. While CleverLMS is the most universal among them, others may still work well if you want a specialized learning platform and are ready to pay more for it. However, make sure to check the CleverLMS pricing calculator to see whether it can fulfill your needs.

Good luck with your educational journey!

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