The actual courses — harassment, HR compliance, leave and accommodation, investigations. This is the part your people sit through and the only part that changes behaviour.
You need this.
I.
Buying guide
Compliance training software, honestly explained.
Most of what is sold as compliance training software is four separate things bundled into one subscription. Some of it you need. Some of it you are probably already paying for somewhere else. This page separates them so you can work out which problem you actually have before anyone books you a demo.
What's on this page
- The four layers — what a compliance training platform is made of, and which layers are worth paying for.
- Five questions before a demo — the ones vendors answer least comfortably.
- Platform, or just the courses? — a headcount-based rule of thumb.
- Where we fit — what we do and, more usefully, what we don't.
II.
II.What you're actually buying
Four layers, priced as one.
Every platform in this category is some combination of the same four things. Vendors differentiate on the first and the last; the middle two are close to commodity.
Hosting the course, tracking who opened it, marking it complete, storing the certificate. Technically a solved problem; most vendors price it as though it isn't.
You may already own this.
Deciding who gets what and chasing the people who haven't finished. Genuinely useful above roughly 200 employees, and genuinely overkill below about 50.
Depends on headcount.
Proof of who completed what, when, and on which version of the content. The thing you are really buying, and the thing worth checking hardest in a demo.
Check this first.
III.
III.Before you book a demo
Five questions worth asking.
None of these are trick questions. They are simply the ones that tend to get answered with a change of subject.
- Do we already have somewhere to put courses?
- If you run Workday, BambooHR, Rippling, Teams, or Google Workspace, you likely already have somewhere to host and assign content. Buying a second platform to hold four courses is the most common overspend we see in this category.
- What does the completion record actually look like?
- Ask for a sample export before signing. You want the employee, the course, the version, the completion timestamp, and the score. If the vendor can only show you a dashboard and not an export, that is a problem the day someone asks you to evidence it.
- Who updates the content when the law changes?
- The single largest hidden cost. Some vendors update automatically and silently, some charge for the refreshed module, and some leave you on a version that quietly went stale two years ago. Get the refresh cadence in writing.
- What happens to our records when we leave?
- Completion history is a compliance record, not a convenience feature. Confirm you can export the full history in a readable format, and that it survives the contract ending.
- Are we paying per seat for people who take one course a year?
- Per-seat annual pricing assumes continuous use. If your compliance obligation is one or two courses per person per year, per-seat pricing is usually the wrong shape and per-course works out considerably cheaper.
IV.
IV.A rule of thumb
Do you need a platform, or just the courses?
Headcount is a cruder signal than vendors would like, but it predicts the answer better than anything else.
UNDER 50 EMPLOYEES
Courses only.
Assignment and reminder tooling solves a problem you do not have yet. A shared drive, a spreadsheet, and the completion certificates will hold up perfectly well.
50 – 250 EMPLOYEES
Courses, on the system you already own.
This is where most overspend happens. You need real content and a real record, but your existing HRIS or Google Workspace almost certainly handles distribution.
250+ EMPLOYEES
A platform starts to earn its keep.
Chasing completions manually across hundreds of people stops being viable, and role-based assignment becomes a genuine time saving rather than a feature on a slide.
V.
V.Where we fit
We build the first layer, not the other three.
HumanResourcely is a course library, not an enterprise LMS. If what you need is role-based assignment across three thousand people in eleven countries, buy a platform — we will not pretend otherwise.
If what you need is a small number of courses that a manager will actually finish, with a completion record you can produce on request, that is the part we are building — and it is priced per course rather than per seat per year.