Best partner training software: 6 tools for SaaS teams

You want partners to be able to understand your product and show it to customers. Instead, you might have an outdated onboarding guide, product videos you're reluctant to share and a partner demo environment that takes days just to provision access.

Partner training software should give your partners a clear way to learn your product, with resources they can return to and use with customers.

What do you need from channel partner training software?

There are 3 main pillars required for effective channel partner training:

1. Learning materials: The actual materials that teach them how to do something.
2. Hands-on practice: Access to environments that let partners practice and test out their knowledge safely outside of production.
3. Structured training hubs: An easy point of access so they can go back and find the resources they need when they need them.

1. Learning materials

Partners need clear explanations of the product and the tasks they need to carry out. For a reseller, that might be a walkthrough of a feature they'll demonstrate; an implementation partner may need a setup guide.

You can use screenshots, videos, or interactive guides to show the product alongside the written explanation.

2. Hands-on practice

Give partners somewhere to rehearse a workflow, through a guided exercise or a sandbox environment they can explore themselves. It should reflect the product version they'll use, including their branding where relevant.

3. Structured training hubs

Put the materials and exercises in single place where partners can find them. Present them in an order and within modules that make it clear where to start and what to do next. Adapt that sequence to the partner's role, and keep it available after onboarding so they can return to it as the product changes. Some programs also need assigned courses, learner records, or certification; those requirements affect how you deliver the program.

Choose partner training software by the problem you need to solve

If your main gap is missing or outdated learning materials, look for tools that help you create product guides, videos, and interactive walkthroughs. In this case you should also ensure the platform lets you arrange and share those assets together either as a structured training hub or as part of any pre-existing content repositories you might have (a documentation hub, LMS courses, etc).

When account provisioning is holding up hands-on practice, look for demo sandbox software that gives partners access to captured product workflows through an instantly shared, personalized link. That lets them rehearse without waiting for an account in your live application.

For your structured training hub, consider how partners will work through the program. An ordered sequence of guides and practice can take them from onboarding to more advanced product workflows. If the program is organized around course enrollments, assessments, and certification, look at a partner training LMS (learning management system). Its lessons can use text, screenshots, and video, with interactive instruction and sandbox practice added where useful.

Partner training platforms at a glance

Six tools for building your partner training program

All six options can provide a structured home for partner training. What differs is how deep they go into the other core elements of partner training.

For example, HowdyGo covers the complete interactive training workflow: creating product learning materials, giving partners hands-on practice sandbox environments, and delivering the program through branded Collections (Learning Hubs). It can effectively by run as a standalone partner training platform or easily integrated into pre-existing LMS courses.

TalentLMS, LearnUpon, Skilljar, and Docebo are more education-focussed LMS solutions. They primarily offer ways to organize pre-existing content around courses and learning paths, with differences between them in how you share courses, administer partner programs, and connect training data to other systems.

These mostly make the assumption that you already have the support content you need or that you’ll generate it elsewhere.

PartnerPortal.io is different again as it is primarily a partner relationship management (PRM) platform, where courses sit alongside deal registration and commissions. They do offer ways of creating partner portals, but as a primary focus, they're aimed at being a CRM for partner sales.

1. HowdyGo

Best for: Running a complete interactive training program for your SaaS partners.

HowdyGo brings all three core parts of partner training into one platform, so your team can:

• create the learning materials,
• provide sanbox environments for hands-on practice, and
• manage branded training hubs.

HowdyGo lets you capture a product workflow as an interactive guide, customize the recorded screens to match your partner's branding, and tweak the messaging for them.

You can then take a guide and convert it into a fully interactive sandbox environment that looks and feels like your product so that partners can instantly get access to it and train on new features in a zero-risk environment.

Figure uses HowdyGo to onboard loan officers and create demonstrations in its partners' branding. Partners also use those demos to walk borrowers through the application process without showing real financial data.

Partners can then rehearse in a captured sandbox without waiting for an account in your application. The sandbox covers the screens and paths you've captured; tasks that need a running backend still need a live environment.

Finally, use Collections to create separate branded training hubs for partner companies or roles. Arrange the guides, videos, and practice in an ordered Playlist, then organize reference material with lists and tags. You manage the content and training sequence in HowdyGo, while partners work through the program from one shared link and return to the material as they need it.

HowdyGo also pairs with an LMS: include its guides and practice in courses that use the LMS's enrollment, assessment, and certification workflows.

Pricing

Starter is $159/month billed annually, with unlimited editors, learners and demos, plus one Collection. Pro is $399/month billed annually, with unlimited Collections and sandboxes available as an add-on. Enterprise is priced by quote.

2. TalentLMS

Best for: Course-based partner training with administration delegated to partner companies.

TalentLMS organizes partner training into courses with lessons and assessments. Its branches feature let each partner company manage training for its own team, with a branded course catalog and administrators, while you oversee the program. This can allow large learning programs to scale well.

TalentLMS also helps create learning materials through built-in screen/video recording. So you can record a product video and combine it with written explanations or assessments in a course.

A customer praised how quickly her team launched training, but wanted more control over lesson layouts and question formats:

Pricing

With annual billing, TalentLMS's starting user tiers are:

• Core: $119/month for up to 40 users and one branch.
• Grow: $229/month for up to 70 users and three branches.
• Pro: $449/month for up to 100 users and 15 branches.

Higher user allowances cost more, and these can grow quickly since a user is counted as anyone who has access to the software: admins, managers, creators and even learners.

Enterprise uses custom pricing for 1,000+ users and includes unlimited branches. The free plan covers five users and ten courses.

3. LearnUpon

Best for: Managing course-based partner academies.

LearnUpon organizes partner academies around courses and learning paths. When several partner companies need the same product training, you can share centrally maintained courses across their branded portals. Update a shared product lesson once, then keep partner-specific material separate.

You can also copy a course into another portal and adapt it independently. Mandana B., who described making her portal look like an extension of the company website, valued that reuse:

That said, reporting across those portals may still need manual work. Steven D. described adding custom user data manually to a report covering three portals:

You'll still create product recordings and practice environments separately as no built in functionality to do so is offered.

Pricing

Custom quote; no published starting price. LearnUpon says it isn't a fit for fewer than 100 users, and its Customer Education package starts at 300. It doesn't publish separate pricing or portal limits for partner training.

4. Skilljar by Gainsight

Best for: Course-based partner education connected to your CRM.

Skilljar is an external training LMS for running a course-based partner academy. Partners follow a branded course catalog and learning paths, while integrations with Salesforce or Gainsight bring training activity into the systems your account teams use.

You can add product videos or embedded guides to lessons and use connected tools for practice environments. Skilljar's page builder and themes handle the academy branding.

Yotpo's Angelo C. described launching an agency-partner academy with a small team. The courses taught agencies about Yotpo's products and when to recommend them as part of their services.

Coralogix's Tanya D. praised Skilljar's Salesforce integration, but had expected data to flow both ways. She reported needing middleware to send Salesforce data back into Skilljar:

Pricing

Custom annual pricing, made up of a platform subscription and an active-learner allowance. Essentials includes one academy site, Professional two, and Enterprise three.

Learners count toward the allowance in each month they use lessons. One head’s up: A partner who uses training every month counts 12 times against the annual allowance.

5. Docebo

Best for: Course-based training across partners, customers, and employees.

Docebo's extended enterprise LMS brings partner, customer, and employee courses into one learning system. You can reuse product training across those audiences while giving each its own catalog, branding, and administration permissions.

Lila H. describes using Extended Enterprise to cater to different learner audiences.

For programs where hands-on practice needs live systems, the separate Labs by Skillable module launches exercises from courses or learning paths and returns results to Docebo. Custom labs need their own setup, and you'll still create product recordings in another tool.

That breadth needs time from your own administrators. Allana B. praised Docebo's implementation staff, but found the setup demanding for her small internal team:

I'd budget for someone to manage course updates and reporting after launch, as well as the initial setup.

Pricing

Custom quote for Elevate or Enterprise, based on the plan and contracted learner model. Docebo offers monthly active, yearly active, and registered active-user pricing; the agreed model changes which learners count.

6. PartnerPortal.io

Best for: Combining partner training with deal and commission management.

PartnerPortal.io is a partner relationship management (PRM) platform with built-in training. It suits teams that want partners to take courses in the same portal they use to register deals and track commissions.

Partners work through ordered lessons with videos, attachments, and quizzes. You can control access through partner groups, track completion, and connect courses to certifications.

Lisa O. described using HubSpot for deal data and PartnerPortal.io as a central resource hub with materials tailored to partner groups:

You'll create product walkthroughs elsewhere and add them to the lessons; hands-on practice needs a separate environment.

Portal reviews include complaints about customization and access to resources.

Pricing

Professional costs $249/month, with up to 100 partners and 1,000 leads, plus unlimited resources and team members. Enterprise costs $399/month and removes those partner and lead limits.

The free plan includes five partners, ten leads, ten resources, and one team member. Courses, quizzes, and certifications are available on all plans; the paid tiers increase usage allowances.

How to build your partner training program

In order to build a successful partner training program, you need to start by choosing software that supports the pillars you're missing:

• creating learning materials,
• providing practice environments where needed,
• and organizing everything in a training hub.

One platform like HowdyGo may let you cover all three, or you may need to consider a combination of tools depending on your needs.

Either way, here’s a mental process to help you map out how you can go from 0 to 1 with your program and hopefully understand where your biggest gaps are.

Before you start, pick one module you already have in mind. Write down what a partner should be able to explain or do after completing it. For my example which I’ll be covering below, the goal was to teach partners how to make payments via Mercury bank’s app.

1. Create and collate the learning materials

Never start from scratch if you don’t need to.

Gather the materials you already have for a module. Look for videos, screenshots, PDFs, slide decks, and written instructions, including useful explanations in your help center.

Go through them against the task you've chosen. Which parts do they cover clearly? What is missing, out of date, or likely to leave a partner confused?

Make a short list of what to reuse, update, and create, and think about how you want partners to experience the lesson.

Short videos can introduce a workflow or explain its purpose, and PDFs can provide reference detail. But for teaching the product, I'd favor an interactive guide that lets partners carry out each action as it's explained.

Not only is it more engaging, but a virtual training lab is also the simplest format to create and keep up to date. Here’s an example lab I created in 5 mins with HowdyGo’s AI demo creator showing how to make a payment in Mercury bank's app.

2. Add hands-on practice where partners need it

Give partners somewhere to rehearse the tasks they'll perform or demonstrate. The Mercury sandbox below for example lets someone try the same payment workflow from above after following the guide, but this time in a free roam sandbox without instructions pointing out every click.

Unlike the guided demo from earlier, sandboxes are free roam environments. They aim to simply recreate your product as faithfully as possible. In the example above, you'll see that you can click into any tab in the sidebar to explore other parts of the product. But the real in-depth flow occurs in the payments section by following the animated buttons.

In HowdyGo, you can automatically convert the captured guide into a sandbox (that’s what I actually did between the 2 examples above). So you’re not actually having to create and maintain multiple assets.

The real benefit of these sandbox environments is the fact you don’t need to provision test accounts. Sandboxes are shared via a single link and get automatically personalized to each of your prospects. They can be used for practice, but you can also deploy them for assessment, testing a partner’s ability to complete a specific flow.

3. Bring everything together in a structured training hub

Now that you’ve got a bunch of materials together, great! It’s time to make them easily accessible for partners.

You ideally want them all to live in a single Hub/course so partners know exactly where to go for onboarding, training or simply for reference. You’ll also need to think about how to group and sequence them so that they are coherent when someone visits them for the first time.

For my Mercury module (with the asset examples I’ve shown you above), I'd start with a short introduction to the payment task then follow it with the guided tutorial. I’d then add a bit more in depth info afterwards (for example I might have a PDF explaining every type of payment protocol that partners can refer to) and as a final step then let the partner try the feature in the sandbox.

This type of sequence, in terms of explaining a feature, is a really effective way to help establish the basics, provide in-depth info for future reference, and then simply let your partners access the flow for practice.

In HowdyGo you can do this via Collections, adding those assets to one so partners can move through them in order and refer back to them as needed. You can add further modules as separate lists, and keep reference material and product updates easy to find with search and tags.

Collections can then be easily personalized, rebranded and tweaked for different partner companies or roles. Make sure that to keep things simple, you use assets like HowdyGo's HTML interactive demos, which allow you to set dynamic variables and branding both in the captured UIs and in the guides and descriptions.

Course-based partner academies

For a course-based program where you have more complex needs against accreditation, an LMS can help you manage enrollments, individual learning records, and certification. Add your HowdyGo guides and sandboxes to the relevant lessons, alongside written explanations or videos in order to get the best from both worlds.

An external training LMS serves learners outside your company. Extended enterprise LMS products often emphasize running courses for several audiences, such as partners, customers, and employees, from one system. The terms overlap, so check how each platform shares courses and separates learners and administrators.

Test out your first module with a partner team

Before you go live at scale, make sure everything works as expected (you can sometimes even get away with doing this from within a platform’s free tier limits).

Share your first module through your chosen partner onboarding software and ask a partner to work through it. Can they find where to start, follow the guide, and open the practice environment? Ask what they found confusing and which explanations they still need.

Watch them retrieve a particular guide afterward, too. Partners should be able to find the relevant material when a customer asks a question, without repeating the whole module. Check the experience on the devices and in the languages they use, including captions and keyboard access where needed.

Before adding more modules, have the person responsible for the program update a lesson and check the published version. In an LMS, also check what happens to existing progress and any reports you need when the shared course changes.

Start a HowdyGo trial to build the guide, add sandbox practice, and bring your first module together in a Collection.