Cornerstone’s PiiQ is an SMB offering formerly known as Sonar6. PiiQ is aimed at small-to-medium sized businesses and includes core learning management and performance management systems, including content creation, mobile accessibility, and in-product reporting.
$8
per user per month
TalentLMS
Score 6.7 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
TalentLMS is an LMS built for training success, presented as fully customizable and easy to manage, so that teams embrace training while feeling right at home. It is used to provide the right training to any team and every use, while giving expert guidance and support every step of the way.
$89
per month 1-20 users
Pricing
PiiQ by Cornerstone
TalentLMS
Editions & Modules
PiiQ Performance
$8.00
per user per month
PiiQ Learning + Content
$8.00
per user per month
PiiQ Learning + Content & Performance
$15.00
per user per month
Core
$69
per month (billed yearly)
Grow
$109
per month (billed yearly)
Pro
$139
per month (billed yearly)
Enterprise (Custom plan)
Custom
annual plan Starts at 1000 users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PiiQ by Cornerstone
TalentLMS
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
$1,000 per installation
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Users can stay on the Forever Free plan and upgrade, or downgrade or cancel at any time. Monthly pricing also available.
TalentLMS is excellent for quick microlearning since it offers a comprehensive library of courses on various topics. For own classes, their editor is straightforward to use and efficient + it provides a good mix of interactive elements, like the option to use screenshots with interactive annotations. It is not the best solution if you want highly granular data on how your users are doing (on the "new UI"). However, from what I've been told, they are looking into that. Their out-of-the-box courses are not intended to be stand-alone learning material, so don't expect that.
Enables employees to draft work goals and collaborate with their supervisors on a final version - improves mutual understanding right up front.
Combines performance goal ratings with competency ratings and provides a blended score. Simplifies the goal weighting so you don't have to do any calculations.
9-box matrix provides useful definitions and descriptions so managers can prepare development notes or plans for individual employees.
Would be good to have have a virtual "top level" (eg board) user built in to allow senior execs without a direct manager to be able to be set up with KPIs instead of having to create a dummy user
Reports have difficulty downloading if pop ups disabled or in some browser environments
When competencies are updated while a cycle is open, any changes don't effect that open cycle but only future ones. Would be nice to be able to have the option to apply changes to existing "open" cycles
We have courses that are required for each employee based on their job title, and then, many courses we consider to be elective for that job title. We have not found a method to distinguish between those in order to view an employee's performance on required courses only.
Reports are only available by user ID or user name. We have some facilities or managers who need the user ID (based on payroll entry) and some that need names (employees they interact with each day).
It's not that CSB isn't a decent performance management system, but we have decided to go with just one vendor (Workday) for an HRIS/performance management/payroll system so we can directly relate pay to performance. We are more interested in having just one system that "talks" to the other pieces instead of having to work with several vendors. It reduces the hassle of having to communicate with different support teams, having different contracts, and so on.
There are specific things within the goals and competencies that are user-friendly. For example, the rating slider isn't great in my opinion. You can slide in between ratings which can create some odd scoring (if you use scoring). It seems a better solution would be a drop down where you select your rating. There are also some glitches in the system and have been told Cornerstone is aware of them but are focused on delivering new features. There are workarounds, but that doesn't seem to be a great answer.
The saving process slows it down. It doesn’t auto save. If you leave a page, it will sometimes warn you, but not always. When you hit the save button, a window pops up that says creating/saving packets. It feels very archaic.
My assistant could better address this issue. My perception is that there is not immediate assistance, and that there can be a wait for help. That is not a negative, just a perception. I have not used support in two years.
The support team is fantastic, whether through live chat, ticket logging, or discussions with our customer relationship manager. Their knowledge of the product is great, and they are always more than willing to walk you through a process and provide links to self-study as an Admin. The knowledge base is also fantastic and detailed.
I think we could have done a better job of rolling out the tool to our managers. We were under a tight timeline. In the training, we showed them everything and said go do it by this date. Looking back, I would have done it in pieces: for example, 2 weeks to write goals, 2 weeks to get sign-off from direct reports. I just let them go at it. Since then we’ve moved to agile development environment and are applying the technique to everything. In future would only do through change sprint. It is a big change I didn’t take it seriously enough.
I had a team of 3 project managing. You need a champion from every department to make sure you’re getting it right and to make sure what’s happening is communicated. It’s not something you can do without input from department heads
We had no problems at all with the implementation. That being said, we did not have too much to properly implement content-wise since we had no prior LMS. After we activated, we mostly started creating or porting content manually. The overall account setup is straightforward and out of the box, making the implementation very quick. SSO works flawlessly as well.
Lesson.ly has been great to work with but it is a very clear and simple, user-friendly system that anyone can pick up with very little training as it is self-explanatory. It also has a great mobile interface and lots of different features that are easy to add for the admin but really impactful for the user.
Both are good, but the pricing and general value proposition of Talent LMS are better than Trainual in my opinion. Trainual is a bit more modern and cleaner looking from a user interface perspective, but it comes at a higher cost. Both platforms provide very similar features in the way of general functionality and user experience, but Talent LMS wins because of its better pricing model.
It's tool and it's only as good as the person wielding it. The investment in PiiQ was accompanied by a quarterly cadence and manager feedback training. We feel like our employees are given regular feedback and bonuses are tied to objective accomplishment.
Dramatically more cost-effective than alternatives, with greater feature sets. Made our eCommerce training deployment a breeze. Hard to attribute an ROI to just the LMS specifically but it would be a high multiple in a period of just a few months.
