Firmwater LMS

Avantages

In my six years using Firmwater software, I have had not one complaint by our more than 6,000 graduates or me. Everything we requested, they either complied or showed us a better solution. After six years, I shopped to see what I might be missing. Within a few days, I knew I would be missing Firmwater. There is something magnetic about providing services beyond expectations that generates a loyal customer base, and Firmwater can count me as one of those.

Inconvénients

When you are using a product and working with Firmwater support teams, there is nothing to like least because we are an e-commerce business, and every report and response translates to increased revenue on some level. If you are in the e-commerce business, you need to take a close look at Firmwater LMS.

Avantages

The integration with a financial processing system was the main reason we selected Firmwater. Firmwater also provides client managers with an excellent self-service feature. Clients can subscribe, enroll/change employees access, and track employee course progress. The customer support provided by Firmwater LMS is exceptional!

Inconvénients

The reporting features are not fully customizable, but that isn't a feature that is important to us. I don't use reporting hardly at all.

Avantages

Once I figured out what I needed to get done in it, it is relatively easy to use.

Inconvénients

user interface appears outdated and reporting feature is lacking.

Avantages

The Firmwater LMS product is incredibly intuitive and user friendly. We are able to easily keep track of our clients and specific users, and there was hardly a learning curve. We did multiple conference calls with [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN], our Firmwater representative, who gave priceless instruction and suggestions again and again to get us set up. And that's what really impresses me; the customer support.
The longest it has ever taken to receive a response from their support team is still less than one business day. They are quick to respond, knowledgeable about their product and the authoring tools (I primarily use Articulate Storyline).
It would have been infinitely more difficult to set up our site without their instruction, advice, and hard work. Their help has been invaluable

Inconvénients

I don't have any outright complaints. If a user is experiencing issues with the trainings we put out it's sometimes because they're using outdated software. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] has been able to tell me if the user is on a mobile device and what browser and version they're running. It would be helpful if we could have that information.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Firmwater LMS

Avantages

Firmwater is one of very few LMSs made specifically for training providers. If you want the ability to host an LMS on behalf of other clients, this is the ideal solution.

Inconvénients

Like any LMS, there's a bit of a learning curve, but it's not bad, and the support is very good.

Avantages

At first site the LMS seems plain in comparison to 'fancier' platforms. But its simplicity is one of the best features, once you see how well it works with importing great looking courses and excellent reporting functions. It is simple and does the job you want it to do.

Inconvénients

Terminology is not the clearest - needed some explaining about exactly what was what.

Avantages

I found the customer service with Firmwater to be exceptional. Nothing was too much trouble, [sensitive content hidden] (our contact) was always available to support and help grow and understand our needs.

Inconvénients

The pricing is the only thing which is a con about Firmwater and this is purely due to the volume of users we have, for the first few years the pricing was excellent.

Avantages

The ease of the system to set up and learn. The support is with a Live person which is incredible when you really need to speak to someone. Response from support through email is quick and very helpful.

Inconvénients

The support is on a 3 hour time difference so they close earlier than us but then they open 3 hours earlier too so I get the answer early in the morning. But, if it’s really important they will often respond and/or take a call after hours.

Avantages

The software is user friendly for a non-skilled individual like myself to not only deliver educational content, but also on the backend for controlling content, managing users, and providing reports.

Inconvénients

Not a durn thing so far :), super easy and I am learning new things all the time.

Avantages

We can offer custom portals to our corporate clients. Students can print their Certificate of Completion from their Training Plan.

Inconvénients

The per-head registration fee is the same, regardless of the size of the price of the course, but I think this is more our problem than theirs!

Avantages

Overall the user experience was great ! It took very little time to understand and utilize the program. Made our first experience as an entry level program for us to be very easy to use.

Inconvénients

I cannot think of things to discuss regarding what we didn't like about the product.

Avantages

Our Firmwater LMS is so easy to use! With the ability to create child accounts, the scalability is endless. We can brand our clients LMS portals by simply uploading their logo.

Inconvénients

An storefront feature native to Firmwater would be nice, but it is very easy to connect to Shopify for ecommerce sales.

Avantages

The ease of use and ease of navigation, amazing personalized customer service experience, reliability, and very easy to learn how to navigate. It has been very helpful to create countless client sites (which can be individually branded as necessary), and grant content from our host site to the various client sites depending on the training that has been purchased. The ability to customize the setup of complex programs has been invaluable.

Inconvénients

I genuinely don't have anything bad to say about the Firmwater LMS due to the fact that in my experience when there was a "missing" feature or improvement desired, the Firmwater team is responsive and solutions-focused. They want to see you succeed in your business goals.

Avantages

First and foremost this product was easy for a non-technical administrator like myself to take on, and understand. This was our first time using an LMS system and it seamlessly integrated with what we were already doing and has the features that we need.

Inconvénients

There is nothing so far that that I don't like about this software.

Avantages

The integration with Shopify is fantastic and means that our users have a seamless purchasing experience. It's great that we're able to have different certificates for different modules, ensuring that our users in Wales are able to access bilingual certificates. The support team are always happy to help, and as a non-specialist team that has made a huge difference to us. Once you know what you're doing, it's quick and easy to build the courses on Firmwater.

Inconvénients

We make regular use of the reporting features, but it would be great to see these further developed so that we're able to build our own custom reports. That being said, the support team are always happy to look into reports or features that aren't available.

It would be great for our development team to be able to have more control over the general look of the platform (ie font type, colours, icons etc). However, when we requested changes to the appearance the Firmwater team were more than happy to help.

Avantages

The ease of use and reliability. Very little overhead with a learning curve that is palatable.

Inconvénients

Our business model requires we maintain very detailed records of user results. Most rapid e-Learning publication tools do not offer the level of data we need to export. Firmwater has worked with us to ensure this critical information is captured from the third party software we are currently using. A quiz building engine that offers detailed reporting is something we eagerly await from Firmwater. We'll be the first on board as soon as this is available.

Avantages

The ability to create custom platforms for our clients and the excellent up time and easy of use.

Inconvénients

Would love to see a bit more real time reporting.

Avantages

It has a lot of great features: Allowing a payee to send an invitation to someone else, easy access to the certificates after account is inactive, ability to send e-mails to participants reminding them of their time limit, automatically deactivating participants after a period of time, easy access to management to change participant's information (e-mail address), being able to resend invitations to start the class, easy access to view participant's information by management, and many other features that I can't think of.

Inconvénients

There are only a few drawbacks or cons that we found: Some reports cannot be printed out using PDF.

Avantages

Very quick and personalized support
Quick uploads
Ability to create private brand labeled sites (known as “clients”)
Grant content from a “master” to “clients”, enabling automatic content update
Supports locations and departments
Many email contact options, including customization of email messages
Various options for user setup
Ideal for certificates and certifications (including customized certificates of achievement)
Logical user interface and process for content management

Inconvénients

Need more backend functions accessible to the user interface (in process)
Would be nice to have a "lite" LCMS that supports version control
Upgraded user interface for reports and help

Avantages

The software is easy to use for clients and staff.

Inconvénients

Firmwater's LMS is my only experience using an LMS, so I don't have anything to compare it to. In other words, I can't come up with any cons.

Avantages

Firmwater's LMS is very easy to setup and use. It is easy for us, as a training company, to add new clients, get them setup with an administrative account, show them the basics, and then let them do what they need to do. I like the customization options that we can provide to each new client (custom domain, company logo, etc.) with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Firmwater is able to effectively run and track the content that we upload (typically Articulate created elearning programs) with excellent accuracy and immediate response time. The multitude of reports on each user and piece of content is a great feature for us.

The cost of Firmwater's LMS is what really set them apart from other LMS providers that we researched. Their pricing structure allows us to maintain low overhead costs and remain ultra-competitive with our own pricing structures.

Inconvénients

One feature that I wish was available within Firmwater was the ability to email users or send users reminders that their training needs to be completed by this date. As it stands currently, we have to generate reports and then export those reports to get a list of email addresses that have not completed a program.

I know that new features are constantly in development and the Firmwater team works hard to put out their best product possible, and I hope that this feature gets implemented somewhere down the road.

Avantages

TPC maintains the largest industrial skills training library with over 640 hours on online content and many more hours of offline training material. We currently have over 200 online clients and are adding 3 to 5 new clients per month to our TPC Online (Firmwater LMS).

The Firmwater LMS makes administering so many clients and managing content between them easy. The LMS was designed from the ground up to support content publishers and handles complex tasks with ease.

From our clients perspective, the Firmwater LMS hides all complexity behind a straightforward interface making it simple to register users, create training assignments, manage users, and run reports.

Inconvénients

It's difficult to think of any Cons regarding the Firmwater LMS.

Avantages

The software was easy to use and easy to set-up but the best part was the client support. It saved us so much time to have quick responses and resolution of issues.

Inconvénients

I would have liked more visuals in terms of course completion and scores.

Avantages

The white-labeled training portal is a market differentiator for selling to our B2B clients.

Inconvénients

Some of the standard features, such as free trial access and monthly subscriptions, are not available with Firmwater LMS. The feature of customizing training certificates is limited which can cause issues with regulatory requirements. Navigating and using the platform is not always user friendly and user mistakes can cause costly errors if you aren't careful. I don't care for having to rely on Firmwater staff to help me implement changes in my portal.

Avantages

Firmwater LMS is very intuitive and easy to use for both our internal team and our clients. It allows us to set up each of our clients with their own secure, personalised site. These client sites can also be integrated with the client's own LMS which is a huge advantage. The content library is set up in a way that allows us to easily manage our training content and share it with our clients as appropriate, saving lots of time compared to our previous LMS.

Inconvénients

Users are unable to create custom reports.