What Happened to Northpass? Status and Options

If you have been trying to work out what is going on with Northpass, you are not alone, and the confusion is reasonable. The short version:

Gainsight acquired Northpass in July 2023 and rebranded it Gainsight Customer Education, usually written as Gainsight CE. In April 2025 Gainsight acquired Skilljar, a larger competitor in the same category. Today, Gainsight’s own customer education product page sells Skilljar. Northpass appears there only as a login link. The Northpass support site now redirects to Gainsight’s, the two product communities have been merged into one, and several review sites have quietly repointed their Northpass pages at Skilljar.

No sunset has been announced. Gainsight has told CE customers that nothing is changing for their current experience in the short or mid term. That is a genuine commitment and it should be taken at face value.

What has not been offered is a roadmap. So the accurate way to describe Northpass in 2026 is not discontinued but rather a legacy product whose vendor is selling something else to new buyers. That is not a fire drill. It is a reason to understand your options and your exit routes calmly, well before you need them.

This guide covers where things stand, how to get your data out, what Northpass can and cannot do for instructor-led training, and how to think about the choice between replacing it and running something alongside it.

Where things actually stand

Here is the evidence, so you can judge for yourself rather than take our word for it.

The acquisitions. Gainsight acquired Northpass in July 2023 and folded it in as Gainsight CE. It acquired Skilljar on 2 April 2025, which came with a substantially larger customer base and is now marketed as Skilljar by Gainsight.

Where the product marketing points. Gainsight’s customer education page leads with Skilljar. CE is not presented as a product a new customer would buy. When a vendor owns two products in one category, the one on the marketing page is the one getting invested in.

The infrastructure has been consolidated. Northpass support documentation now redirects to Gainsight’s support site, where CE documentation lives under a Gainsight path. The CE and Skilljar user communities have been combined into a single section. Some review platforms now resolve their Northpass listings to Skilljar by Gainsight.

What Gainsight has said. Community communications reassure CE customers that nothing changes in the short or mid term, and point them to Skilljar resources. There is no announced migration deadline, no forced move and no end-of-life date.

What has not been said. There is no published CE roadmap, no stated long-term commitment, and no clarity on what happens after “mid term.”

The reasonable conclusion: you have time, you are not being pushed, and you should use the time to know your position rather than wait to be told.

What this means practically

Three things follow from the situation above.

Know your export route before you need it. Not because anything is imminent, but because the worst time to discover an export limitation is when you are under a deadline set by someone else. The next section covers this in detail, and there is one specific gap worth knowing about now.

Ask Gainsight directly for a roadmap commitment. Put it in writing, ask for a written answer, and ask at renewal when you have leverage.

Separate the platform question from the capability question. If Northpass genuinely serves your needs, the acquisition is a reason to plan, not to panic. But if you have been struggling to run instructor-led training on it, that is a separate problem, and it existed before Gainsight arrived.

The instructor-led training gap

This is where most Northpass frustration actually lives, and it has nothing to do with the acquisition.

Northpass was built for self-paced customer education: academies, product training and certification programmes for customers and partners, largely asynchronous. It does that well, and if that is your requirement our guide to building a customer education program covers the wider picture.

It does have instructor-led objects. The platform models Training Events containing Training Sessions, with per-session capacity limits and a waitlist feature, plus a Zoom integration for virtual delivery. So the answer to whether Northpass supports ILT is technically yes.

The question is whether it supports the operations of instructor-led training, and there the documented picture is thin.

Documented limits on what exists, from Gainsight’s own ILT waitlist documentation:

• Waitlists cannot be used with Zoom events, which rules them out for a large share of virtual delivery
• Waitlist close windows are fixed to preset options of 24, 48 or 72 hours rather than being configurable
• Waitlist functionality requires a minimum theme version

Not documented anywhere, because it is not there:

• Instructor allocation, instructor availability, or conflict checking when the same trainer is scheduled twice
• Rooms, venues, equipment or any bookable resource
• Trainer cost, pay rates, or margin per session
• Multi-day session structures where one programme spans several non-consecutive dates
• Invoicing, purchase orders, or e-commerce for paid instructor-led courses
• Certificates issued on the basis of attendance at a live session, with expiry and recertification cycles

If you deliver a handful of webinars alongside a self-paced academy, none of this matters. If you are scheduling trainers across rooms and locations, tracking utilisation, invoicing corporate clients and managing waitlists at volume, you are doing that work somewhere else already, probably in spreadsheets. That is the real gap, and it is the difference between an LMS and a training management system.

Replace or coexist? A decision framework

Most guides in this position push you towards replacement. That is usually the wrong advice, and it is worth being straightforward about why.

Coexist if your self-paced customer academy works, learners know where to find it, your content library is substantial, and your problem is specifically the operational side of live training. Keeping Northpass or Skilljar for on-demand content while running instructor-led operations in a training management system is a smaller, faster and lower-risk project than replacing everything. It also avoids asking your customers to learn a new academy.

Replace if instructor-led delivery is the majority of what you do, your self-paced content is modest enough to rebuild, you want one system of record for all learning, or you have concluded the platform’s long-term future does not justify further investment.

Do nothing yet if the current setup works, the acquisition has not affected you, and you have no live ILT pain. Get a written roadmap answer at renewal and revisit.

There is no universally right answer here. The point is to make it deliberately.

What coexistence looks like

If you keep Northpass for self-paced content and add a training management system for live delivery, the division of responsibility is usually as follows.

The connection between them is normally learner identity and completion records. Northpass’s API exposes People, Courses, Groups, Learning Paths, Training Events, Training Sessions, Products and Categories, following the JSON:API specification. That is enough to keep learner records aligned and to push or pull completions, though it needs building rather than switching on.

Be realistic about the integration effort. There is no off-the-shelf connector for this. Scope it properly, and confirm with any vendor you are evaluating exactly what they will build and support rather than accepting a general assurance that integration is possible.

Suggested Reading – SimpliTrain vs Northpass: 2026 Comparison

Getting your data out of Northpass

Worth understanding whichever direction you go.

The API is documented and usable. It follows the JSON:API specification, with published documentation covering authentication, resource filtering and rate limiting. It exposes People, referred to as Learners in the interface, along with Courses, Groups, Learning Paths, Training Events, Training Sessions, Products and Categories.

But there is no documented bulk export or reporting endpoint. The API is designed for integration, not for extraction at volume. You can page through resources, but there is no single call that hands you everything.

Formal export is request-based rather than self-serve. Gainsight’s data export documentation describes export running through the Salesforce integration, with a zipped CSV delivered by email. That is a process with a turnaround time attached, not a button. Plan accordingly, and test the process before you depend on it.

The gap that should concern you most: course content and media export is not documented.

Your learner records, enrolments and progress data have documented routes out. Your actual courses, meaning the lessons, videos, images and assessments you have built over years, do not have a published export path. Neither does SCORM packaging of that content.

That is the thing to establish now rather than later. Raise a support ticket and ask, in writing, what the documented process is for exporting your course content and media in a reusable format. Keep the answer. If the answer is unsatisfactory, at minimum start keeping source files for new content outside the platform, so that your library is not accumulating further lock-in.

Also worth noting: reporting is the single most consistent complaint about Northpass in public reviews, with reviewers describing it as basic and inconsistent between reports. Do not assume you can rely on the reporting module to produce a clean extract.

What else people complain about

For completeness, and because these tend to be the reasons people were already looking:

• Reporting and analytics, comfortably the loudest complaint
• Pricing, described as opaque, with an entry point reported around 15,000 US dollars a year and confusing invoicing
• Slow release cadence, with reviewers noting feature updates arriving every few months at best
• Customisation requiring code, which puts changes in the hands of developers rather than the learning team
• Limited native integrations, with CRM syncs described as lagging
• Support responsiveness

None of these are new, and none of them are consequences of the acquisition.

Questions to ask Gainsight at your next renewal

Ask in writing. Ask for written answers. Keep them.

• What is the published roadmap for Gainsight CE over the next 24 months?
• What notice would we receive of any change to CE’s support or availability status?
• If CE were consolidated into Skilljar, what migration assistance, tooling and cost treatment would apply?
• What is the documented process for exporting our full data set, including course content and media, in a reusable format?
• Are there contractual commitments available regarding product continuity for the term we are signing?

Whatever you decide about the platform, having those answers on record puts you in a materially better position than not having them.

Frequently asked questions

Where to start

Raise one support ticket this week. Ask, in writing, for the documented process to export your course content and media in a reusable format. That single answer tells you more about your real position than any amount of speculation about roadmaps, and you will want it on file whether you stay for five more years or move next quarter.

Book a demo to see how SimpliTrain handles instructor-led operations, whether as a replacement or alongside an existing customer education platform. If coexistence is the better answer for your situation, we will tell you that.