7 Must-Have LMS Features for 2025

8 min read
11 Nov 2024

Implementing a Learning Management System (LMS) is exactly what can help your business develop a powerful learning culture and, as a result, stay competitive and attract top talent. By utilizing LMS features, you can explore opportunities for flexible organization of the learning process, personalization of employee training, enhancement of progress tracking, reduction of training costs, and hassle-free management of learning processes.

The demand for effective training solutions is confirmed by statistics — the enterprise Learning Management Systems market size is projected to grow by $43.95 billion at a CAGR of 31.87% from 2023 to 2028. Whether you are looking to enhance your e-learning services or take your company’s corporate training to the next level, Brights, as an experienced LMS development company, knows how to boost your educational impact. We develop effective learning spaces for the corporate and educational sectors, providing services like end-to-end custom LMS development, legacy systems upgrade & customization, LMS data migration, and continuous support.

Our team has successfully implemented many LMS projects in various industries. Our EdTech clients include Samsung Smart School, Meat Study, The Earth Prize, DSC, BeProfi, Headway, and others. Thanks to this experience, we know how to deal with challenges organizations face when incorporating Learning Management Systems, including those related to employee engagement, performance tracking, and personalized learning. Keep reading to discover all about the top LMS features to consider for your project.

Learning management systems developed by Brights

Learning management systems developed by Brights

Key takeaways

  • A Learning Management System is an effective way to develop a strong learning culture within your organization.

  • The enterprise Learning Management Systems market size is projected to grow by $43.95 billion at a CAGR of 31.87% in the next 4 years.

  • When choosing LMS features for your learning platform, you should prioritize your organization’s goals and learning needs.

  • The must-have LMS features for an effective learning platform in 2025 are customizable learning paths and personalization, mobile accessibility, advanced reporting and analytics, gamification, SCORM/xAPI compliance, integration with third-party tools, and collaborative learning tools.

  • As an LMS development company, Brights provides services like end-to-end custom LMS development, legacy systems upgrade & customization, LMS data migration, and continuous support after launch.

Let’s talk about the perfect LMS for your business.

Customizable learning paths & personalization

Brights’ experience covers the implementation of such functions as course & content management, user management, assessment tools, tracking and reporting, gamification, collaboration tools, e-commerce functionality, AI-powered personalization, AI chatbots, routine task automation, and more. This extensive expertise allows us to say with certainty which features of LMS work best today.

Customizability and personalization are some of the key points that ensure the learning portal you create will be unique and meet your users’ expectations. But how exactly can you achieve it? Let’s look at specific LMS features list related to customizable learning paths and personalization and analyze how these features benefit educators and corporations.

LMS featureBenefits for learnersBenefits for educators and corporations
Adaptive learningThe system helps educators modify the content of materials and the level of difficulty according to the skills, knowledge, and progress of students.This approach helps track learning progress, ensures content adaptability, and enhances overall learning effectiveness for corporations.
Custom learning pathsLearners get access to a structured yet flexible path that aligns with their goals or job requirements, leading to more targeted learning.Trainers can tailor the curriculum, ensuring each learner receives the most relevant content for their needs.
Personalized content recommendationsStudents receive educational materials and courses that best suit their preferences, interests, and needs.This functionality can increase engagement in the learning process and ensure that students build relevant knowledge and skills.

Mobile accessibility

Today, LMS capabilities are a critical tool for employee training, development, and compliance in many organizations. And as mobile adoption grows, businesses must adapt their LMS systems to ensure seamless mobile accessibility. So, here are our practical tips and best practices for ensuring advanced mobile learning solutions.

Take a mobile-first design approach

Mobile-first design approach principles

Mobile-first design approach principles we recommend following

Your win-win solution in the context of ensuring mobile accessibility is to design LMS systems with mobile users as the key target audience of the future platform. Mobile-first design principles include simplified UI, fast load times, adaptive content layout, offline access, and responsive design concepts. All this allows you to achieve flexibility, easy navigation, an intuitive interface, and overall simplicity of content layout.

Your task is to provide a flexible and consistent user experience across various devices, and responsive design is one of the key answers here. By taking this approach to LMS development, you can be sure that your content will display correctly on any user’s device, regardless of the screen size or format. Responsive design eliminates the need to create different versions of the same content, saving you time and money while streamlining content management and updating processes.

Another important point to consider is providing offline access to educational content. Ensure a seamless learning experience by allowing students to download materials and work on tasks without having to be online all the time. This way, students can gain knowledge without any interruptions or obstacles.

Last but not least, we recommend the mobile-first design approach to LMS development as a long-term strategy that aims to achieve a return on investment, optimize budgets, and reduce costs.

The Earth Prize LMS, developed by Brights

LMS for The Earth Prize competition. Developed by Brights

Ensure compliance with accessibility standards

One of the most important principles of mobile accessibility is meeting the needs of all users, including those with disabilities. Therefore, when developing mobile learning solutions, it is vital to create solutions that will be equally easy to use for people with visual, hearing, cognitive, and motor impairments.

This approach promotes inclusiveness and ensures employees can access educational content regardless of their abilities. You may want to consider implementing screen readers, subtitles, and keyboard navigation, among other things.

Continuously test and get user feedback

To maintain a mobile-friendly LMS, you must continually test it on different devices and browsers, collect user feedback, and implement improvements. On top of that, it involves identifying issues, glitches, and bottlenecks to ensure that the LMS works as intended.

While it might sound like a lot of work, the benefits of sticking to a mobile accessibility approach when implementing LMS system features are worth it. By following these practices, you can increase flexibility, enhance user engagement, achieve inclusivity and equal access to learning, boost user experience, and advance productivity.

Create an LMS that works for every user out there — talk to our professionals in software accessibility.

Advanced reporting & analytics

Tracking learners’ progress is critical to the success of your learning projects, and reporting and analytics can help you ensure everyone involved stays on track. As some of the most important LMS platform features, reporting and analytics tools allow you to evaluate learning performance, visualize data, identify overall learning trends and areas for improvement, and measure the impact of your initiatives. Based on this data, you can then make changes to courses and learning materials as needed.

Here’s a visual overview of key analytics and reporting LMS functions and how they impact the learning process.

MetricDescription
Course completion rateThe proportion of learners who have fully completed the curriculum, based on which you can assess engagement and identify potential weak points in the course
Learner satisfaction scoreThe average rating a course has received from students, which helps evaluate the effectiveness of the educational materials
Time spent on learning modulesThe average time it takes to complete a specific module, which allows you to assess the length of a course, its complexity and efficiency


Learner’s profile on BeProfi, an LMS developed by Brights

Learner’s profile on BeProfi, an LMS developed by Brights

Gamification

Learner engagement is key to learning success. Gamification tools add fun to learning content, improving knowledge retention, promoting memorization, and motivating learners to keep learning. This method is especially effective when teaching complex skills — it makes difficult things simpler and easier to understand. Gamification also recognizes employee achievements, adds healthy competition to the learning process, and provides learners with an additional incentive to improve their performance.

Let’s look at some examples of gamification elements in the context of the features of a Learning Management System.

Gamification featureDescription
BadgesVirtual items on the user profile as a reward for their achievements
PointsRewards for completing learning tasks and activities
LeaderboardsTotal scores and user ratings for different metrics
QuizzesInteractive questions that provide immediate feedback to enhance retention and track progress
StorylinesTools that turn the learning process into an exciting journey with a plot
Rewards marketA place to exchange points for rewards

SCORM/xAPI Compliance

Shareable Content Object Reference Model and API Experience are e-learning standards. SCORM is an international set of technical requirements for e-learning content, and xAPI is the latest e-learning standard that eliminates many of the limitations and shortcomings of SCORM. So, SCORM does not cover all the aspects of e-learning, as learning happens everywhere, not just in traditional SCORM courses in traditional LMS. And API Experience, unlike its predecessor, gives you the ability to see the whole picture.

These standards ensure that Learning Management Systems and e-learning content will work well with each other. So, before developing LMS functionality, you need to determine which standard you need.

  • SCORM is the most versatile standard and quite easy to use, but it tracks limited data. SCORM courses are compatible with most Learning Management Systems, allowing you to move from one learning platform to another without the risk of losing courses. The SCORM standard also allows you to create excellent learning experiences — the course has a clear structure, provides automatic feedback, and stores learners’ progress.

  • xAPI helps track learning activities outside of the Learning Management System and connect them to learning that occurs within the systems. This standard addresses the inability to support seamless mobile learning and the implementation of AR and VR, facilitates social and collaborative learning, and enhances reporting capabilities.

Integration with third-party tools

Third-party LMS integrations are designed to enhance the platform’s functionality and provide a seamless and advanced user experience by connecting to other software and applications. Having such integrations makes your Learning Management System features better and more efficient. It is critical to ensure that your LMS integrates and syncs with your existing solutions or connects to them via API.

So, when it comes to LMS integrations, your Learning Management System should have seamless integration with social media, CRM, payment gateways, video conferencing, and other tools. Here are the key third-party integrations that we use at Brights to enhance your LMS software features.

Third-party toolDescription
CRM integrationSynchronization of customer data and improvement of customer relationship management
HRMS integrationCoordination of training with HR management, including onboarding and performance management
Payment gatewaysProcessing payments for educational content and training courses using secure solutions
Analytics toolsGaining valuable insights and a deep understanding of learning success and outcomes
Collaboration platformsEnsuring efficient communication and enhanced teamwork among users
Communication systemsProviding effective communication and advanced marketing to learners
Social media integrationIncreasing student engagement in the learning process
Video conferencing toolsConducting live training lessons and webinars
Cloud storage servicesFacilitating the storage and sharing of educational content

At Brights, we understand the importance of integrating the Learning Management System with third-party tools to provide the best user experience. In our successfully implemented projects, we pay special attention to integrations — an example of this is one of our recent cases of developing an LMS solution for The Earth Foundation, an environmental sustainability organization. As part of our work on The Earth Prize case, we integrated the LMS with Vimeo to achieve an exceptional video learning experience, high-quality media playback, secure content delivery, and seamless access to video.

Integrations for The Earth Prize platform

Third-party integration for The Earth Prize LMS we developed

At the same time, while many of the features can be implemented through third-party integrations, you should be cautious about this option if you’re building an LMS based on an off-the-shelf solution:

“When we started working with The Earth Foundation, they already had a solution based on different SaaS platforms. So, for it to work, the client team had to integrate a lot of third-party services, which didn’t function properly and were hard to manage as a unified platform. And that’s a drawback of ready-made solutions you have to be aware of: it’s not always possible to cover all your business processes with off-the-shelf services, especially if your needs are complex.”

— Nata Shved, COO at Brights

Ready to build an LMS that does it all? Let’s craft a system powered by smart integrations.

Collaborative learning tools

Collaborative learning stands for an approach to training in which learning occurs through close interaction between students or between students and teachers. According to this concept, learning occurs through collaborative exploration and active discussion, but organizing effective collaboration within an LMS is challenging.

So, how to enhance learning experiences, and what features of an LMS are key to this process? Here is our list of must-have collaborative learning tools that should be included in a Learning Management System.

  • Discussion forums that allow participants to engage in discussions, exchange ideas, share experiences with each other, and gain knowledge from multiple perspectives;

  • Review tools that enable participants of the learning process to give and receive feedback, track assessments, comment on peers’ progress, discuss feedback, and always be in an environment of motivation and healthy competition;

  • Collaborative project spaces that allow students to work together on projects, share access to information, and collaborate in real time. This tool is great for working on group tasks and team projects, all of which build communication and teamwork skills;

  • Live sessions that enable interactive video conferencing activities and engage students in dynamic learning. Such tools can also allow for real-time discussions and the ability to record these meetings for future access.

This list is by no means exhaustive: with custom LMS development, you can add out-of-the-box solutions depending on your unique needs.

“One of Brights’ specialties is business-oriented LMS development, specifically for training sales representatives. For one project, we integrated voice control functionality, allowing salespeople to record themselves presenting a product to clients. The video is then uploaded to the server, where certified professionals analyze it, assessing key elements of the presentation. This feature enhances the LMS by helping to evaluate the effectiveness of the training received by the sales team.”

— Nata Shved, COO at Brights

Last thoughts: Core considerations

Implementing the right Learning Management System depends on the specific LMS features and benefits that organization needs. When choosing LMS functionality, be sure to analyze your internal processes and actively seek user feedback — only this approach will help you make an informed and practicals decisions regarding your future solution.

The LMS features we recommend exploring in 2025 are customizable learning paths, personalization tools, mobile accessibility, advanced reporting and analytics, gamification, SCORM/xAPI compliance, integration with third-party tools, and collaborative learning tools. However, the final set of features directly hinges on your business goals.

Regardless of the desired functionality and type of learning platform you want to build, we are here to consult you and help implement the optimal LMS solution for your business.

Reach out to Brights, and we’ll dive into your ideas and give you a clear path forward with an estimate.

FAQ.

Our LMS platforms integrate with such third-party tools as CRM, HRMS, payment gateways, analytics tools, collaboration platforms, communication systems, social media integration, video conferencing tools, cloud storage services, and others.