Totara Learn Reviews - Pros & Cons, Ratings & more

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Totara Learn is an industry-leading and flexible learning management system that gives organizations the freedom to learn. Deliver training and development anywhere, anytime. Improve engagement, ensure compliance, and achieve breakthrough results across your organization and extended enterprise.

Totara Learn

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I really like the type of the course with the videos and helpful teachers. This course help me a lot to learn the basics of  totara.

Overall, I'm satisfied with the product and we definitely recommend it to all our prospective and existing clients that fit the need.

Consultant

It is still a great tool, that can though still be adjusted to whatever someone likes it to be.

Intuitive and affordable, with a great team behind it.

Competence Center Lead e-learning Technologies 

The easy way to create and maintain the content, the wide variety of learning activities, the forums etc. made Totata  the perfect solution.

The support and users community is very good and always active with new suggestions and improvements.

Excellent LMS, cost effective and full of features.

Training Manager

Some notifications are hard coded , which prevent us from customizing them.

LMS Specialist

This is a very cost effective solution to organizations' Learning Management needs.

Digital Content Manager

We are using it as a custom learning platform for our digital leadership development content. We have enjoyed using it to address the various business requirements of our end users and departments.

eLearning Specialist and LMS consultant

We have been using Totara Learn for past 2 years (almost). We love it even more because of the exceptional customer support by our vendor Kineo.

Solution Architect

Lack of detailed release notes, how functionality should work, examples of using / implementing functioanlity.

Product Specialist

Configuration of the features, unstable roadmap and release of new versions / features is taking a long tome.

eLearning project manager

The product is easy to implement - it is fairly intuitive for the learner and easy to brand and upkeep as an administrator.

Senior Consultant

There is no central notification center. But it is currently under development.

Lead

Good product, but it get more difficult to setup. Functionality of this product is awesome.

Moodle

Have an application focused on business learning, with tools focused on the corporate area to prepare quality professionals who know the business and its function in the company is optimal.

Perfect application for corporate training and learning.

We have been using Totara Learn for past 2 years (almost). We love it even more because of the exceptional customer support by our vendor Kineo.
Since we moved from Learnforce LMS, which had a completely different interface, some ulearners find it difficult but LMS admins love the flexibility now they have to configure even things like custom fields etc. 

From Learnforce to Totara and beyond

Hi Sahar, thanks for the lovely review! Our partner Kineo will be delighted to hear that. I'll pass on your feedback about the user reports. Glad to hear your LMS admins enjoy the flexibility of the platform.

Our company implemented Totara through a third party reseller.  We migrated from Moodle.

Really happy with the supplier support and the way the software keeps evolving

Totara works for us

Hi Steve, thank you for the amazing review! Glad to hear that it was easy to implement and that you're happy with the support from your Totara Partner. We have lots of stuff coming up on our roadmap so stay tuned :)

We love it. Our clients hate it. They find it difficult to navigate and over complex. 

Great but lacking some aspects.

Rob, thank you for your review of Totara Learn. We're happy to hear that you're enjoying the many adaptable features, functionality and value for money. We're always actively working on improving Totara Learn with every release (and gathering the required research and customer feedback in order to do so), so we really do appreciate your feedback. Speaking of which, we'd kindly suggest ensuring that you're using the latest version of Totara Learn, Totara Learn 13. It features multiple improvements to user experience for your learners and admins. This includes improvements to site accessibility, more streamlined navigation (particularly when viewing learning plans or creating user accounts) and much more. 

We are using it as a custom learning platform for our digital leadership development content. We have enjoyed using it to address the various business requirements of our end users and departments. We will continue to use it to address the evolving needs of the organization, because it is such a flexible system. 

Good LMS choice for heavily customized use cases

Thank you! We are happy to hear that Totara Learn is proving to be a versatile and adaptable platform that meets your complex needs. 

Benefits of Totara Learn

We're elated to hearing your 10 out of 10 recommendation! Thank you so much, Louise. We are also very big fans of the way Deloitte adapts our LMS to deliver a uniquely bespoke training platform for Deloitte learners. It serves as an inspirational example of adaptive training and adaptability in general! 

We want to make Totara Learn as good as it possibly can be, so please feel free to add any feature requests in the Totara Community.

Very positive - it was a first LMS for our company and the set up and implementation were smooth.  Users did not have much difficulty using this (construction workers) and it has been easy to maintain.

Totara LMS for small organizations

For large companies I have recommended it since they allow to create individual development plans, so each person in charge of the team will be able to see the progress of their employees in charge and adjust the learning objectives needed within the platform.

The open LMS with better support

Thank you for your kind words Daniel. We really appreciate it! 

Excellent tool for education and online training

Meets our needs

Great customisable Learning Management System 

10 out of 10, wow! Thank you so much, Stephanie! Glad you were able to fully customize your LMS. We want to make Totara Learn as good as it possibly can be, so please feel free to add any feature requests in the Totara Community.

As a consultant for Totara LMS I would totally recommend Totara to other customers. 
In short...

The Downside:
- Very complex to learn for people who do not have any technical understanding
- Usability very low because of too complex site-structure and permission management
- Design very simple and overloaded with blocks, nobody knows what they are for in the first place
- Documentation partially very poor, especially when it comes down to programming and adding advanced features
- Many useful features are still lacking some important settings for establishing real logical learning workflows

The Upside:
+ Very rich of standard features that make it easy to establish simple learning workflows
+ Open Source let the system be flexible by adding your own plugins and adjusting the system core to your needs
+ Great support in fixing bugs and advancing the system with new features (Evergreen)
+ Continuous Development

All in all I would say it still needs some improvement, although I know that some requests are not as easy to programm as it might seem in the beginning.
It is still a great tool, that can though still be adjusted to whatever someone likes it to be. If you have on the one side people who see the potential of TotaraLMS and have a great idea of how it can be used and on the other side people who can develop within that system, you can accomplish great things and have tremendous success by offering that tool to customers.

Feature rich and open source vs Complex handling

Totara Learn review

Hi Frantisek! Thanks so much for the 5 star review! We love working with you guys at e-learnmedia. The central notification center is on the way and should be with you in a matter of days in Totara Learn V14 :) We love suggestions to improve Totara products so please feel free to keep them coming. 

Totara allows for custom tailored experiences for employees / extended enterprise. 
The system is highly configurable, and working with a Totara partner opened the door to creating a multi-layer learning ecosystem. 

Custom Tailored User Experience

Through the last 5 years,  Totara leads us won  opportunities that we might lost in case of not having an enterprise LMS like Totara.  It has helped us as companie to incorporate our full e-learning solutions (consulting, content authoring tool and LMS) at important companies.  It represents between the 5 or 10% of our incomes and it gives also to Totara trough the last 4 years more than $40,000 USD anual revenues.
Eventhough we feel the growing of the tool (Totara) or their features expansion  has been limited during the last 4 years. 
Example: It doesn't integrate x.Api compliance (with a LRS Module), and we do not see intelligence guideness trhough the training experiencie taked from the training sessions of the user. 
We do not have so much reference about how to explote gamification through it (and what kind of tools are they innovating related with this model)
Why do not integrate an authoring tool with the LMS like Shift, so you  just not focus on the user that take courses, and let the creators, build content.
Doesn't offer options for the smaller companies because the ntermediate price between 500K and 3K has a huge difference, that always is letting us a big issue on how to deal wiht those price diffeerences.

Aura Gold Partner

I mostly work with the Totara LMS from a server admin and web developer point of view and so far my experience has been ok. Not the easiest / most simple system I work with or have worked with, but manageable. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but I find the support material  and documentation from Totara to be pretty lackluster for server admins. If I find answers to my questions, 99% of the time I find it on Moodle documentation or forums. Bad thing because for the price of Totara I would expect much better, good thing that I am able to utilize a very large community.

I do spend quite a bit of time developing themes and plugins for Totara for our clients, and I do have to say that I like and support your decision use the native Bootstrap class names as well as using Grunt as the task runner since use Bootstrap and Grunt quite often with other projects. I look forward to migrating to Totara 9 towards the end of this year / beginning of next year.

Totara Review

Our main use if for LMS, e-learning and training compliance. It does everything we need.

Overall please with product

Ideal für den Unternehmenseinsatz

Ideal for corporate use

Thanks for the brilliant review! We're so happy you're loving the platform and the adaptability is something we're really proud of. Thank you!

Totara for Securitas Aviation 

Thank you for your feedback, Wim! Happy to hear that the LMS was perfect for one of your clients due to its adaptability and customizable features. If you have feature requests, please mention them in the Totara Community. We weigh our customer feedback very carefully and pay special attention to feature requests. 

I have been using Totara since it started more than 6 years ago.
It has developed tremendously and has truly become a modern, powerful, flexible and reliable learning and performance system.
The Totara team are very responsive and keen to make the product move forward and the way they listen to and take to hear the needs of the user community is a great demonstration of the symbiosis of users, customers, developers and service providers.
Looking forward for fast future developments of the platform.

Powerful and Flexible Enterprise Open Source LMS

Totara LMS was used at a government agency I contracted for.

Long journey of learning, with a lot of useful features which interact with our employees in a friendly way. The dashboards cover wide numbers of tables resources which allow us to make a lot of reports.

Friendly software 

Nermine, thank you for the kind words and 10 out of 10 recommendation ratings. We're always delighted to hear that Totara Learn is meeting the unique needs of our customers and are happy that Alshaya has been able to customize the platform to meet its unique enterprise training needs!

Finally a commercially focused LMS that puts the user in control of the Learning experience and LMS functionality.  Our organization has found Totara LMS to be feature rich and yet cost effective, while the open source aspect provides flexibility to mold the system where necessary to our specific needs.  The UI is pretty basic, but again you have the flexibility to control even that and make it what you will.  

Totara Learn Reviews (2025)

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Pros and cons

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