Continu Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

The next generation of the workforce is being shaped by e-learning platforms. Companies need to keep pace with this modern way of training in order to keep and enhance their talent. Continu lets your organization do just that by tapping into its customizable platform for educating customers, sales teams, new employees, partners, and more. Continu works with some of the biggest names in the business world—will yours be next?

Continu: The Good and the Bad

Continu is at the forefront of digital business learning, providing a wide array of learner-oriented and administrative features that make training and development more attainable, accessible, and catered to the needs of learners. But this complex software also has a few kinks to still work out.

What Continu Is Good At

This platform is powerful, elegant, and streamlined, while also being packed with essential integrations and automations. With multiple learning options for learners and administrators, you and your colleagues can leverage Continu to enhance onboarding and the development of talent once they’re on board.

Unlock modern learning techniques

Unlike older legacy systems, Continu has a beautiful and intuitive user experience that makes it effortless for employees, customers, or third-party vendors to access the training they need and choose course options that are suited to the ways they learn best.

Right from the user-friendly Explore page, learners can browse content and self-register for courses or workshops that match their interests and needs. Users can filter options down to only the content most relevant to them, with segmentation options available by location, department, level, and more.

This flexibility keeps learners highly engaged and helps to ensure course completion rates of over 90%. Learners can interact with one another and instructors through the native Slack integration and by sharing visual learning plans.

Beyond consuming content, Continu enables learners to be creators themselves through peer-to-peer learning tools. The customizable Collaborator role provides them with permission to author and share their own content with colleagues. Learners can organically augment your official learning materials this way.

When they want to accomplish more formal educational content creation, the dedicated Creator role allows learners to build full courses and learning tracks. Continu lets admins define creation permissions tailored to certain topics, formats, or settings.

This software seamlessly supports both informal and formal learning, with a tailored experience based on each learner’s role.

On the admin side of things, you can set up integrated calendar invites, notifications, and reminders to ensure learners never miss a class for both virtual and in-person sessions. Attendance and participation are simplified. Learners can also be enrolled directly by admins for required training.

Continu fully supports blended learning, and remote sessions are enhanced by the Zoom integration, which enables automated attendance tracking, pre/post work distribution, and session recordings.

Continu offers two flexible workshop modes for in-person training:

• Varied, where individual learners pick their own session dates/times
• Cohort, for group enrollment and team-based development

Training learners outside of your organization is every bit as convenient and adaptable.

For customer training, Continu lets you create customized learning tracks that ensure users fully understand your product or service. Content can be personalized based on learner profiles like department, location, or team.

For partners, you can tap into Continu’s content marketplace to access thousands of courses. Or, import your own materials to provide training customized to your systems and processes. A sandbox environment allows the testing of educational content before it’s live.

Feature-rich dashboards

Continu’s dashboards excel at empowering learners and giving admins options for matching the platform to their organizational needs.

Learners can track assignments, view upcoming training, and monitor their overall progress after logging in via SSO or a custom-branded login page. They’ll see all their active and completed learning activities in chronological order, with clear indicators for due dates and any past due work.

This takes the guesswork out of what the next step is on their learning journey. Progress bars on every course keep learners motivated by showing how far they’ve come and how close they are to completion.

The dashboard also centralizes certificates, badges earned for milestones, and any rewards from social learning. Recognizing achievements drives engagement while serving as a catalog of accomplishments.

An integrated calendar makes it easy for learners to integrate their coursework into their daily workflow. It syncs assignments, content due dates, and registrations for in-person and virtual training events alike.

With robust search and filtering, learners can quickly find content by keywords, tags, content types, and even locate colleagues by skills or location. Continu combines work and learning into one unified experience.

On the organizational side, Continu lets admins customize dashboards to match your brand’s look and feel. This includes background visuals, logos, and color schemes. Content thumbnails and banners are customizable, too.

With Continu, your training program looks like an integrated part of your digital workplace.

The manager dashboard gives admins a single hub to oversee learning programs with ease. Managers can view direct and indirect reports to monitor team progress. Custom groups let you track cohorts, like new hire classes, beyond formal org charts.

Meanwhile, powerful automation eliminates manual tasks. Admins can build sequences to auto-release gated content based on completed prerequisites. Workflows also handle data-driven assignments so new-hire training scales instantly.

Content sequencing is flexible with both locked and unlocked course progressions. Workflows auto-assign the next piece upon completion to create customized learning paths.

Continu’s authoring toolkit enables admins to easily create engaging content, learning tracks, assessments, and more. Guided workflows plus templates allow rapid development with no prior experience needed.

Admins can create customized roles and permissions, from content creators to managers, external users, and beyond. The specific functions of roles like a manager can be configured just the way you want them to be.

The dashboard also allows access to robust analytics through customized reporting and easy CSV data exporting. Monitor program effectiveness in real time and integrate Continu data into any BI tools you use for deeper insights.

The admin interface mirrors the sleek learner portal in terms of easy navigation. Its modern UI keeps things intuitive, even for complex functions. Continu guides admins and learners alike, every step of the way.

Content creation and authoring

Continu’s powerful authoring tools make it a breeze to import existing content or create new, engaging courses directly within the platform. This means spending less time creating materials and more time empowering your learners

You have a powerful drag-and-drop content editor right at your fingertips. Build rich learning experiences like courses, articles, and quizzes in no time, using this intuitive web-based authoring environment.

Creating learning tracks with multimedia content is simple. Add text, video, images, slides, web links, and more. Instructor-led training (ILT) workshops can be configured with automated pre-work, waitlisting, and follow-ups.

For one-off educational content, Continu offers several options. Build detailed wiki-style articles that incorporate files and media embeds which learners can access whenever they’d like. Assessments allow various interactive question types, auto or manual grading, and customizable rubrics. Workshops and other content types have templates to help you standardize their structure.

For modern training programs, Continu makes authoring simple, powerful, and adaptable to diverse needs. With this software at your disposal, you provide better training to employees (and others) while slashing the cost usually associated with this level of organizational education.

Importing existing materials is a breeze. Continu supports SCORM, documents, media files, iframe embeds, and content from platforms like LinkedIn Learning and Udemy. You can also directly link or record videos in Continu for seamless multimedia additions.

Once created, any content can be duplicated and repurposed as needed, whether it needs to be integrated into another course or provided on its own in a different way or at a different time. You can mix and match imported and natively authored content for maximum flexibility.

With these user-friendly tools and integration options, Continu removes the friction from instructional content creation. Your subject matter experts can focus on delivering quality teaching to learners, rather than having to deal with any complexities of the platform.

Feedback from course-takers

Learners can easily rate and review any Continu content on a five-star scale, plus provide detailed comments.

Average ratings are displayed next to every course option listed, so new learners will see what their peers got the most out of. On the other side, admins and content owners receive real-time notifications to stay on top of reviews and respond to learner concerns.

Targeted surveys can be attached to any Continu content types and workshops. These include customized questions, text and graphical analysis, and exportable reports to capture learners’ perspectives. Or, use external surveys—they can be easily integrated into Continu, too.

For in-person and virtual training sessions, timed follow-up notifications prompt attendees for feedback days or weeks after the event ends.

When learners create their own assignments and assessments, admins, managers, and peer reviewers can provide criteria-specific scoring and feedback for each submission.

With this combination of broad ratings, structured surveys, prompt follow-ups, and customizable scoring, Continu provides comprehensive tools to gather actionable learner feedback. This powers a training program that continuously evolves and improves based on those it serves.

Organizing, assigning, and sharing custom content

You’re able to easily organize materials into custom categories and subcategories on Continu’s Explore page. Utilize the software’s smart segmentation to tailor learning to locations, departments, roles, or any data field.

This also allows you to automatically assign materials to the right groups, via workflows based on triggers like new hires, promotions, or skill gaps. Assigned content can include due dates, reminder notifications, and escalation contacts to ensure completion. Managers can also be granted access to directly assign training to their teams.

Workflows make targeted content distribution simple by handling all the complex logic behind the scenes. Admins just set up the rules, triggers, and notifications once. Automated assignments happen instantly for each new user that matches.

On top of these automated methods, you can craft branded emails or in-app messages with your logo, customized sender name and subject lines, and custom fields.

When learners register for a session in Continu, it automatically creates the event in Google Calendar or Outlook and sends invitees an appointment. If registrants decline the invite, Continu is automatically updated to manage the waitlist.

For workshop facilitators, any calendar changes made externally also sync back to Continu in real-time. The platform reflects an up-to-date roster and availability without any manual exports or imports.

Beyond this auto-sync, you can utilize system notifications for assignments, due date reminders, and overdue work. Escalate past-due alerts to managers to encourage course completion.

Or, build custom notifications for different audiences, such as welcoming new hires, sharing learning tips, celebrating achievements, and more. Notifications can be automatically sent based on triggers or manually pushed to individuals or segments.

Reporting data

Continu provides powerful analytics to measure program success and guide your strategy. Access comprehensive reports directly within the platform or export the raw data via CSV file to share with stakeholders and partners.

For individual modules, you can view social engagement metrics like views, likes, shares, ratings, and survey responses to see what’s resonating with learners.

The manager dashboard gives visibility into direct and indirect progress, so you can monitor team activity with ease across all learning modules. Admins can also build custom reports filtered by user, content, time period, and other options to analyze trends.

On top of that, you can leverage the robust API access Continu provides its users to enable integration with BI tools, like Tableau or Power BI. This lets you visualize your Continu data any way you’d like.

Extending capabilities through integrations

Continu is plenty powerful on its own, but it can reach a completely different level by tapping into the integrations on offer.

Native Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Outlook, and Google Calendar integrations lead the way here, highlighted by bi-directional calendar syncing with either of the latter two platforms.

Google Meet and Microsoft Teams integrations work similarly. Run a webinar on either platform with event creation, registrations, invitations, and attendance tracking happening in Continu. Workday integration automatically creates user accounts, syncing key data like role, location, manager, and hire date.

Two-way Slack integration enables notifications for assignments, events, and reminders right within Slack conversations. Learners can also use it to search for content and provide ratings or feedback.

You can also easily embed content from Google Workspace, YouTube, LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, and more, plus sync view data with LinkedIn and Udemy via xAPI. Or, add content from Guru and others via iframes.

On top of all of these convenient native integrations, Continu also lets you access its API to build custom connections. Use it for advanced user management, accessing reporting data programmatically, or integrating with any SAML provider to enable turnkey SSO.

With its powerful yet easy-to-use integrations, Continu brings together learning, collaboration, productivity tools and HR systems. This convergence provides a seamless, engaging experience while unlocking robust reporting and automation.

Continu’s Potential Drawbacks

We weren’t huge fans that you have to book a demo just to have a look at Continu’s software. We would really have loved to see a free trial, so that we could get in there and really test out the platform ourselves. On top of that, users have noted some differences between their expectations of certain features and the reality of how they work in the platform.

Clunky site navigation and other issues

A few learners mentioned that they had some difficulty finding their way through parts of the Continu interface. While there are navigation features and progress indicators visible on learning modules and other areas of the dashboard, they’re not always prominently displayed.

One learner was frustrated that course outlines and downloadable materials were only visible after clicking through each section. Showing the full structure up front would provide searchers and learners with better context.

The search functionality also posed issues for some users. One mentioned unreliable results, while another was overwhelmed by excessive suggestions that lacked obvious relevance. Additionally, a user felt the Explore recommendations were unclear and overwhelming.

Other issues we found in real user reviews included difficulty accessing bookmarked or highlighted materials, a lack of a clearly marked section for getting in-platform help from Continu, and general clunkiness in the content authoring section of the Continu interface.

Criticism like this wasn’t terribly prominent in our research of user reviews, but they were prevalent enough for us to pass on this information to you. Chances are, Continu is simply a complex enough platform to have a few bugs that are tough to iron out.

Our advice is to keep these usability critiques in mind when you enter a Continu demo, so that you can troubleshoot how likely these same issues will affect your own organization.

No social media presence

While this isn’t always something we’d hold against a brand, we were surprised and disappointed by Continu’s lack of presence on channels that could attract more learners and company representatives in charge of organizational training.

Its major social accounts have been dormant for over a year, including its Facebook page and Instagram profile.

That could be acceptable if not for the equally sparse YouTube channel, which only consists of three videos totaling four minutes of content.

A modern learning software provider like Continu could really benefit from utilizing this channel better. Videos could share company updates, feature announcements, customer spotlights, and tips and best practices. A healthy library of walkthroughs would help interested buyers more confidently request demos, as well.

For a software provider whose product is so adept at connecting learners, instructors, company representatives, and other users, it’s just surprising and a bit disappointing that Continu isn’t leveraging social media to make the same connection with its current and potential customers/.

Interested customers are limited to demos

A major frustration of ours while doing research for this review, was the lack of a self-service free trial. The only way to experience the platform is by requesting a guided demo.

This is a common tactic, but it poses challenges for curious prospects. Demos take time to schedule and require a sales rep to be present, rather than allowing freeform, hands-on exploration of the platform.

Compounding this, Continu provides very limited public information on features and pricing. Their website and scarce social presence offer little transparency.

When we contacted the support team for details, they couldn’t elaborate on pricing details over email or phone (outside of a hint at a $15,000 minimum price tag). Information had to be obtained through the demo-sales process.

The inability to test drive Continu through a self-guided trial seems at odds with the product and buyers’ needs, though we understand the company’s perspective on limiting access to demos only.

Continu Plans and Pricing

Continu provides three options for tapping into its modern learning platform. While no pricing is publicly listed, we’ll examine below the use cases, product features, and benefits of each of Continu’ plans.

Growth

The Growth plan is an ideal solution for companies with up to 250 learners that want an all-in-one platform to level up their training and development programs.

This plan includes a set of features to build comprehensive learning journeys. Create learning tracks to group content into structured courses or curricula. Any e-learning modules you already have on hand can be integrated through SCORM.

Continu’s Growth plan also provides custom reporting capabilities to help you track program analytics and measure the impact of your learning initiatives. Plus, single sign-on enables secure and easy login for all your learners through SAML 2.0.

Beyond that, you’re also getting access to:

• Workshops, assessments and learning journeys
• Automated workflows
• Integrations with popular platforms like Slack, Google Meet, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams
• Access to Continu’s implementation and success experts

With its robust core feature set, engaging tools, and included support, the Growth plan provides mid-sized companies with a complete, modern learning system that can elevate workplace learning and development.

Professional

The next step up is the Professional plan from Continu. This tier is tailored for larger companies with 250 to 5,000 learners that are looking to unify learning programs across the entire organization.

This plan includes all of the key features of the Growth plan, but adds several enhancements suited for large organizations.

You can create external user profiles to train partners, customers, and other external stakeholders. Multi-session workshops allow training sessions to span multiple days or weeks, with built-in support for recurring schedules. Multi-language support enables you to easily localize training content for global workforces. And, video coaching tools provide a way to deliver personalized feedback at scale.

Integration options expand to include the ability to sync with content libraries from Udemy for Business and LinkedIn Learning.

You also get premium-level support from Continu. On this plan, you’re assigned a dedicated implementation specialist and a dedicated success manager. Continu will also supply your organization with bespoke onboarding, enablement, and ongoing success consultations.

Enterprise

The Enterprise plan from Continu is designed to meet the needs of massive organizations with over 5,000 learners.

With all the features of the previous plans, Enterprise also unlocks:

• Groups to segment learners across regions, divisions, and business units
• Profiles
• API access and webhooks
• Content module development sandbox
• Custom fields

This full run of Continu’s features lets you tweak almost every aspect of the Enterprise plan to fit your needs. Get granular with permissions, integrate Continu with your HRIS and other employee data sources, test new course changes before publishing, and more, allowing you to wield this software just the way you want to.

The Enterprise plan also provides white-glove support and services. This goes beyond dedicated success and implementation reps. You get attentive care and support for the long haul, helping you maximize your use of the software long after launch.

Final Thoughts

Continu claims to be the number one learning management system in the industry, and we believe it is certainly up there among the best. With a potent combination of custom course-building and learning features, deep automation and analytics, and granular admin controls, your organization can leverage this software to uplevel everyone, from employees and partners to customers and vendors.

While the lack of a free trial and a likely steep price tag may deter some smaller companies, the potency of Continu should make it very attractive to larger businesses of 250 or more. If you want to enhance your capabilities to educate and develop, ask for your demo of the software today.