ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Learning and Development Suites: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
Learning and Development (L&D) Suites are emerging as the connective tissue
For enterprises, the appeal is straightforward: fewer systems doing more work with clearer lines of sight from learning investment to business capability. CFOs and CIOs want consolidation without losing control; CHROs want a skills strategy that shows up in the tools people actually use; L&D leaders want to spend less time stitching together data and more time designing programs that move the needle. Suites promise a coherent experience where required training, role‑based upskilling, coaching prompts and performance check‑ins live in the same place—and where the system can explain why it is recommending a path, not just that it is.
Historically, organizations assembled learning from separate components: the LMS for structure and compliance, an LXP for discovery and engagement and a performance system for goals, check‑ins and reviews. Data and workflows rarely lined up, leaving teams to reconcile completions, feedback and skill signals after the fact. The first wave of “suites” often meant a bundle rather than a true integration. In the last two years, however, the category has matured toward shared skills graphs and ontologies, a unified user experience and workflows that carry a learner from assignment to practice to feedback to performance conversations without dropping context. The suite is evolving from a convenient license to an operating model.
Enterprises need this coherence to solve practical problems. Think audit‑ready compliance that can coexist with personalized, in‑the‑flow experiences; role‑ and skill‑aware paths that reflect job architecture and proficiency, not one‑size‑fits‑all curricula; and managers to see “who needs what by when” at a glance, with nudges that fit into daily routines. Global organizations also need robust delegation, localization and accessibility, plus the ability to serve external audiences when partner or customer enablement is part of the mandate. Above all, leaders want to connect learning to work—readiness for key roles, time‑to‑productivity in onboarding, adoption of new tools—and to measure progress credibly.
To meet these needs, successful L&D suites combine a compliance backbone, an experience layer and a unified intelligence layer. The compliance backbone ensures rules‑based assignment, versioning and blended delivery (ILT/VILT and asynchronous) with evidence an auditor can trust. The experience layer brings consumer‑grade usability, mobile access and learning that appears inside collaboration hubs and frontline systems so employees do not have to go hunting for it. The intelligence layer ties everything together through a shared skills model and governed AI that can personalize recommendations, summarize content, draft goals or learning plans and orchestrate follow‑ups—always with explainable logic and clear administrative controls. Analytics evolve from static counts to risk and readiness views, correlating learning, skill signals and performance outcomes so leaders can prune what underperforms and amplify what works.
The day‑to‑day realities for L&D teams, managers and administrators define whether a suite succeeds. L&D needs curation and authoring aids that reduce toil—AI‑assisted tagging, translation and item generation—without turning the design process into a black box. Managers need timely prompts inside their existing tools, not new portals to check; they should be able to launch a coaching moment from a performance check‑in and assign a short learning path without losing track of accountability. System administrators need reliable integrations with HCM/HRIS, identity and content providers; robust role‑based access; and sandboxing so they can adopt new capabilities without breaking production. When suites respect these operating realities, adoption follows.
Innovation cycles in this category are practical and accelerating. Skills intelligence is becoming more precise, allowing suites to map job requirements to observable behaviors and relevant learning, not just to keywords. Agentic assistants are emerging to orchestrate workflows—drafting learning plans from goals, scheduling check‑ins and reminding teams ahead of compliance deadlines—while remaining governed by enterprise policies. Simulations and mixed‑reality scenarios are expanding beyond niche pilots to support onboarding and safety‑critical roles. Most importantly, analytics are shifting from descriptive to prescriptive and explanatory, helping leaders understand not only what happened but what to do next and why.
The risks are equally real. Without a clear skills architecture and content governance, personalization can amplify noise instead of value. If AI logic is opaque, trust erodes and adoption stalls. If performance and learning data models aren’t unified, managers get conflicting views and administrators end up back in spreadsheets. Global deployments can stumble on localization, accessibility and regulatory nuances. The antidote is disciplined data stewardship, transparent recommendation logic and a change‑management plan that equips managers and employees to use new capabilities with confidence.
Within the Buyers Guide, the L&D suites are judged on how convincingly they unify these threads—compliance, experience, skills and performance—through a shared architecture and workflow. We look for proof that the suite operates as one system: a common skills model, consistent UX, native ties between learning and performance, trustworthy AI and measurable impact on readiness and outcomes. We do not consider bundles without meaningful integration or performance tools that merely link out to learning.
As you evaluate providers, prioritize suites that can explain their recommendations, demonstrate a shared data and skills model and show working integrations with your HCM core, identity and collaboration stack. Seek evidence that compliance and experience can coexist without administrative contortions, that analytics illuminate risk and readiness rather than just usage and that managers are empowered to act in the flow of work. In short, choose the platform that keeps you audit‑ready, connects learning to performance decisions and gives your teams an intelligent assistant—not another system to manage.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Learning and Development Suites evaluates software providers and products in key areas: unified platforms that combine core LMS functionality with experience-forward capabilities, skills intelligence and content access—often enhanced by native or embedded AI. Additionally, these suites integrate the functions of performance management and skills development with learning experiences, creating a deep and meaningful connection between learning and development. These suites aim to support the full spectrum of enterprise learning needs, from compliance to skills-based development and continuous learning.
This research evaluates the following 9 software providers offering products to address key elements of learning and development suites as we define it: Acorn, Cegid, Cornerstone, Dayforce, Oracle, PeopleFluent, SAP, Schoox and Workday.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of learning and development suites software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating learning and development suites offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for Learning and Development Suites in 2025 finds Oracle first on the list, followed by Cornerstone and Schoox.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle learning and development suites, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our learning and development suites blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.