In short
- Three questions narrow the list fast. Where are the learner records kept, does it work properly in French, and can it produce the reports your regulator asks for.
- Answer those three before you compare a single price. They remove most of the market on their own.
- Budget more for building the courses than for the licence. The platform is the cheap half of this decision.
Teaching online pushed a lot of organisations that were perfectly happy teaching in a room into shopping for a learning platform. Most of them do it without anybody on staff who has done it before.
This guide is for training companies, private career colleges, corporate learning teams, and the professional associations that run continuing education.
It goes through the four Canadian requirements that decide your shortlist, what your kind of organisation actually needs, five platforms with real costs, what the content will cost to build, and the process worth running when the decision is a large one. The public side of a course business, the site people enrol through, is a separate job and is covered on the websites page.
Four Canadian requirements that decide the shortlist
Provincial college rules. Ontario’s Private Career Colleges Act and BC’s Private Training Act set the rules, and other provinces have their own. They say how courses must be delivered, what records you keep, and how you track your graduates. Your platform has to keep records that satisfy that.
French. Federal government and Crown corporation clients may require delivery in French. If you want that work, both the platform and your content have to work properly in French. Several American-built platforms translate the buttons and stop there.
Where the data lives. Learner records are personal information. Many Canadian corporate clients require that training records about their staff stay in Canada. Ask whether the vendor has Canadian data centres, and get the answer in writing.
The reports your regulator wants. Law societies, CPA Canada, nursing colleges and engineering associations each want the hours reported in their own format. Confirm the platform can produce it before you buy, not after.
What your kind of organisation needs
Private colleges and bootcamps
You need student records, attendance, grades, certificates and reports the provincial regulator will accept. Look for:
- Student records that keep a history of every change
- The ability to play standard course packages bought from someone else
- Attendance tracking that stands up to an inspection
- Several class groups running at the same time
- Marking tools that grade against a set scale
Commonly used: Moodle, Canvas, and Brightspace from D2L. D2L is a Kitchener, Ontario company with Canadian data centres, which matters here.
Corporate training providers
You need to publish content quickly, keep each corporate client separate, brand the learner’s view, and hand analytics to a client’s HR department.
Look for:
- A separate space for each client
- Detailed tracking of what each learner actually did
- The ability to put your own name and colours on it
- Links to the HR systems your clients use, such as Workday, ADP and BambooHR
- A shopping cart, if you sell courses directly
Commonly used: TalentLMS, LearnDash, Docebo, Absorb (a Calgary company, Canadian data centres), Cornerstone.
Professional associations
The platform has to know who is a member. It has to count the hours they earn toward keeping their designation, issue the certificate, and produce something they can file with their college or society.
Look for:
- A link to your membership database
- Hour tracking that issues the certificate at the end
- Separate member and non-member pricing
- Live event handling
- Screens that work on a phone at a conference
Commonly used: Personify Learning, Crowd Wisdom, LearnDash with the right plugins, Moodle joined to your membership system.
Five platforms, with real numbers
Moodle
Free to licence, and somebody has to host it and look after it.
Suits organisations with technical capacity, tight budgets, deep customisation needs, or content already built for it.
Good: no licence cost, complete flexibility, an enormous library of add-ons, and you can keep it on Canadian soil yourself.
Less good: it needs somebody’s ongoing attention, the screens show their age, help comes from volunteers instead of a support desk, and free stops being free once you count hosting and administration.
Around $8,000 to $25,000 a year for 500 students, all in.
Canvas
Cloud platform, widely used across North American higher education.
Suits organisations working alongside universities and colleges, and anyone who wants a polished learner experience.
Good: excellent interface, strong phone app, broad integrations, a large Canadian academic community.
Less good: Canadian data storage takes a specific contract conversation, and it gets expensive for smaller organisations.
Around $15,000 to $40,000 a year for 500 learners.
Brightspace
Cloud platform from D2L in Kitchener, Ontario.
Suits organisations where Canadian data storage is non-negotiable, or who serve government and regulated clients.
Good: Canadian company, Canadian data centres, strong compliance features, genuine bilingual support, very good analytics.
Less good: priced above the middle of the market, more capability than a simple programme needs, and a longer setup.
Around $20,000 to $50,000 a year for 500 learners.
TalentLMS
Cloud platform aimed at smaller corporate training teams.
Suits corporate providers who need to be live quickly, and anyone selling courses online.
Good: running in days rather than months, clean interface, built-in payments, separate client environments, sensible price.
Less good: hosted in the United States by default, thinner reporting, and a weaker fit for heavily regulated content.
Around $6,000 to $15,000 a year for 500 learners.
Absorb
Cloud platform from Absorb Software in Calgary.
Suits corporate training aimed at enterprise clients, and Canadian organisations who want Canadian support hours.
Good: strong reporting, good learner experience, Canadian company, Canadian data storage available.
Less good: priced above the middle of the market, more than a simple programme needs, and contract terms are firm.
Around $15,000 to $35,000 a year for 500 learners.
The part most organisations underestimate
Your platform is only as good as what you put on it, and the content usually costs more than the licence.
- Interactive courses that ask questions and mark the answers: $5,000 to $30,000 per finished hour, depending on how elaborate. This is the usual format for compliance training.
- Recorded instructor video: $500 to $3,000 per finished hour depending on production quality. The most common format for most training companies.
- PDFs and documents: cheap, trackable, and the least engaging thing you can publish.
- Live online sessions recorded and posted: very cost-effective, and the engagement is high when the session is well run.
A workable rule for year one: budget at least twice as much for content as for the platform. Good content on an adequate platform works. The best platform in the world with thin content fails.
Check these connections before you sign
- Zoom or Teams, for any hybrid delivery. Most platforms have this built in; confirm which version.
- Payments, if you sell to learners directly. Stripe handles Canadian dollars well; some older processors do not.
- Your CRM, if training sales run through one, so enrolments flow back into the client records.
- Client HR systems such as ADP, Ceridian Dayforce and Workday, which saves an enormous amount of ongoing admin for corporate providers.
If it is a big decision, run a proper process
For 1,000 learners or more, or above $50,000 a year:
- Write the requirements down: what it must do, what it must connect to, what it must comply with.
- Shortlist three or four. Drop anything that fails a non-negotiable.
- Give each vendor the same scenario to demonstrate, rather than watching their own demo.
- Speak to two Canadian organisations of similar size and purpose.
- Have counsel read the data agreement and someone technical read the service commitments.
- Run a 90-day pilot with 50 to 100 learners if the budget allows.
How we help with selection, integration and the ongoing support is on the education page, and the day-to-day support behind it is on the managed IT page. Enrolment, reminders and the certificate that has to go out afterwards are the kind of repeated steps described on the automation page. Providers chasing federal and Crown corporation work usually run it out of Ottawa.
Ask us to call you back
Leave your name and number on the contact page and a real person calls you back the same business day, usually within an hour. We will go through what you already have before recommending anything. The free infrastructure audit covers the systems around the platform too.
itopsi provides technology services to Canadian education and training organisations from a Toronto base.
