I was reading through old Litmos blog posts, as I do from time to time, I came across a three year old post written by Nicole, my blogging predecessor.  The post was based on a report by Tagoras released in 2009 about LMS cost and implementation time.  I decided to dig for a current report, and to my pleasant surprise, Tagoras updated this report for 2013.  This time digging deep into 20 different LMS providers including Blackboard, BlueVolt, InReach, Interactyx, Latitude Learning and Neovation. Below are my findings.

Cost

If you commit to a year on a silver or higher plan, you are eligible to receive a free month.  With this discount, a year for 500 users on Litmos will cost only $7689.  In the new report from Tagoras, a year for 500 users will cost anywhere from $22,000 to $102,000!

To clarify, this means that by choosing Litmos over any of the 20 LMSs in this study (and many others that are not), you can save over $14,000.

Implementation Time

Average Implementation times for an LMS ranged from:

• Calendar days for a simple implementation of the stock-standard LMS
  • 2009 – 19.2 days
  • 2013 – 19.2 days
• Days for a ‘typical’ implementation, as in the usual experience of LMS vendors
  • 2009 – 47.6 days
  • 2013 – 48.4 days
• Days for a complex implementation involving integration and custom development
  • 2009 – 85.3 days
  • 2013 – 102.8 days

The Implementation Time in the report is defined as ‘Assume the implementation clock starts when the contract has been signed and stops when end users begin accessing the LMS’.  Because Litmos does not have contracts, this becomes tricky to define.  Let’s assume that the implementation time starts after the evaluation process has ended, the account has been upgraded and the first payment has been made, therefore, sealing the deal.

However, this account will be the same account as when you sign up for your free 14 day trial.  Any courses uploaded, users imported, customizations made and any other changes made during the trial will carry through to the paid account.  This means that implementation time may start before any commitment has been made.

From my experience the times for implementation listed above appear to be accurate for Litmos users as well.  But I have also noticed that many of our users take advantage of the free 14 days.  If you are able to evaluate the system while using live data, your implementation time may be cut to as short as 5.2 days.