Which training management software fits your kind of training business?

Arlo was built around the scheduled session. You publish a course with dates, venues and instructors; learners book and pay on your website; Arlo sends confirmations and reminders, runs the waitlist and raises the invoice. Professional adds multi-session courses, customer and organization portals and an instructor mobile app. Enterprise adds automated certificates, multi-region tax rates and SSO.

The bill has two parts. Licenses are per admin, from $118 a month on annual Simple. Then every paid registration costs $2.15 and every free one $1.07, about 10% less on annual plans. Run your own numbers: 3 admins on annual Professional and 2,000 paid registrations a year comes to roughly $7,340 in licenses and up to $4,300 in registration fees. For a provider charging $400 a seat, that's about 0.5% of revenue; for $40 workshops, it's over 5%.

What users say: support is a strength, and reviewers rate it well above Administrate, its usual rival. The common complaint is price, especially for small or seasonal businesses. Read the contract: an annual plan lets you add licenses but not remove them until renewal, a monthly plan needs 30 days' written notice, and data is deleted six days after a trial ends.

Cademy gives every plan the same products: course builder, booking on your site, LMS, training CRM and session management with facilitators and certificates. Plans differ by capacity only. That makes it the easiest way to run classroom and on-demand courses side by side without paying for two systems.

The free plan has no time limit and needs no card: 1 admin, 2 facilitators, 1,000 registrations a year and 5 published courses. The catch is the 5% platform fee on paid bookings. On $30,000 of bookings a year, that's $1,500, close to a year of Pro billed yearly ($1,548). Pro removes the fee and adds invoices, private courses for client companies and Zapier.

The weak spot is the step up. Pro still means one admin, so the day a second coordinator joins, you're looking at Teams at $649 a month billed yearly. SCORM, Xero and API access also wait for Teams. Independent reviews are thin, so lean on the free plan to judge it with your real courses: Cademy imports from Arlo, accessplanit, Eventbrite or a spreadsheet.

Bookwhen is a booking system first. Lite at $16 a month gives you a booking page, online payments, discount codes and Zoom links. Standard at $29 adds reminder emails, waiting lists, vouchers, passes and attendance tracking, for up to 800 bookings a month and 5 team members. Yearly billing gives two months free, and charities get 20% off if they ask support first.

For the paperwork, it stops early. Attendance tracking starts on Standard, but the plans list no completion certificates, no instructor portal and no invoicing on account. If a company asks you for a certificate per delegate and an invoice with its purchase order number, you'll be doing it by hand.

The free plan is for free events only, 50 bookings a month; any paid event needs Lite. You can cancel any time with no fee, which makes it a low-risk first system.

Dante is built for business-to-business training. It keeps customers, suppliers and prospects, a training history for each delegate, quotes and refresher reminders, course and trainer scheduling, and invoices with credit notes for cancellations. That's the paperwork a company buyer expects, and the part cheaper booking tools skip.

The pricing is flat: £70 a month on Essentials, £200 on Professional, unlimited courses and delegates, no fee per booking. Agreements roll monthly, user licenses go up or down month to month, and phone and email support are unlimited on both plans. The cost sits up front: implementation runs £500 to £1,100 on Essentials and £1,250 to £2,500 on Professional. Year one on Essentials with the top setup bracket is about £1,940; year two is £840.

Limits: prices in pounds only, so US providers should treat it as a UK option. Online booking with Stripe, the tutor portal and Xero sync appear in its plan comparison; check which plan includes each before you budget. We found few independent reviews.

Corsizio has no plans. Every account gets every feature: registrations, waiting lists, completion certificates, early-bird prices, discounts, refunds and tax collection. Under 30 new registrations in a month, you pay nothing. Above that, every registration that month costs $0.15. Online payments add $1 per transaction on top of Stripe's card fees.

For a solo trainer, it's the only system here that issues completion certificates for free. Do the maths on the $1 fee, though: on a $20 class it's 5% before card fees, on a $350 course it barely shows. Price cheap sessions as bundles.

The limit is service and depth. No demos, no training sessions, no phone support: you learn from the help site. No room or trainer scheduling, no portal for client companies, no invoicing on account. It stops fitting the day a company books ten staff and asks for one invoice.