There is one line in an independent review of Litmos that explains almost everything about running instructor-led training on it. Describing how an administrator sets up a session, the reviewer notes that a location and an instructor must be entered manually, because there is no built-in directory of locations, facilities or instructors.
That is not a criticism of the product. It is a description of what Litmos is. Also, it is a learning management system, built to deliver content to learners at scale, and it is good at that. Litmos was never designed to be the system that knows which of your forty trainers is qualified to teach a course, which are free on the eleventh of March, and which room in Manchester seats twenty-four with a projector.
If you are running classroom or virtual classroom training out of Litmos and finding it heavy going, this guide explains why, what specifically is missing, and the two realistic ways forward. For most organisations the answer is not to replace Litmos. It is to stop asking it to do a job it was not built for.
One note on the name. SAP sold Litmos to Francisco Partners in a deal that completed in December 2022, so the product is now simply Litmos. Most people still search for it as SAP Litmos, which is why it appears that way in the title. The brand history runs Learning Heroes, then Litmos Heroes under CallidusCloud, then SAP Litmos from 2018, then Litmos again from the end of 2022.
Why instructor-led training is awkward in Litmos: the structural reason
Understanding one design decision explains most of the friction.
In Litmos, the container is a Course, and a course is made up of Modules. A module can be a video, a document, a quiz, a SCORM package, or an instructor-led session. Instructor-led training is a module type inside a course.
That is a reasonable way to build a blended learning experience, where a live workshop is one component alongside pre-reading and a follow-up assessment. It is a poor way to model a training operation, where the live event is the primary object and everything else hangs off it. The distinction is the same one we cover in LMS versus TMS.
Once live training is a component of a course rather than an event in its own right, several things follow automatically:
- Sessions are created one at a time, per instance, rather than scheduled from a reusable event definition
- There is nowhere natural to attach a room, because rooms belong to events, not to modules
- An instructor is not a first-class object either. Instructors in Litmos are ordinary users who have been promoted to that role, which means there is no record of what they are qualified to teach, when they are available, what they cost, or how heavily they are booked
- Reporting struggles, because the data model has no concept of a session as a business event with a cost, a margin and a utilisation figure
The rest of the limitations are downstream of that one design choice.
What is actually missing
These are documented behaviours and consistently reported user experiences.
No directory of locations, facilities or instructors. As above. Each session gets a manually typed location and instructor. There is no room inventory, no capacity data, no equipment, and nothing to prevent the same room or trainer being booked twice.
Per-instance scheduling. Sessions are created individually with seat limits and what reviewers describe as a simple waitlist. Complex events, multi-day programmes running across non-consecutive dates, multi-track conferences, anything with resource dependencies, are not modelled.
Click-heavy administration. Reviewers on TrustRadius describe components of the instructor-led platform as cumbersome and requiring multiple clicks, and specifically ask for more processes to be available as bulk actions rather than one at a time. For a team scheduling a handful of sessions a month this is a minor irritation. For one scheduling dozens, it is a job.
No manager or team booking. Reviewers have asked directly for functionality allowing managers to book their teams onto in-person sessions. In most enterprise training operations, that is how a substantial share of bookings originate.
ILT reporting is the loudest complaint of all. One Capterra reviewer describes needing “excel magic” to report on instructor-led sessions. Another states plainly that they export Litmos data and use a different platform for reporting. An eLearning Industry review notes that calendars for instructor-led training need improvement. When customers are routinely exporting your data to report on it elsewhere, the reporting is not adequate.
Commerce is lightweight. Litmos Commerce supports payment through PayPal and Payment Express across a limited set of currencies. There is no invoicing, no purchase order handling, no business-to-business quoting, and no seat-block or bundle sales. If you sell training to corporate customers who expect an invoice with payment terms, this is a hard stop, and our note on the best TMS for selling courses covers what to look for instead.
No cost or margin tracking. No trainer pay rates, no cost per session, no profit and loss by course or by client.
Also No certification renewal cycles. Litmos issues achievements and badges. It does not manage credential expiry, recertification schedules, or continuing education unit tracking the way regulated industries need, which is what dedicated certification management exists for.
Post-acquisition service issues. Since the change of ownership, reviewers have reported slower support, in some cases waiting several days for a response and considerably longer for fixes, along with renewal price increases. Worth factoring into your own renewal planning.
A note on Litmos Training Ops
Litmos previously offered a training operations product, sometimes referred to as Training Ops, aimed at exactly the back-office gap described above. It is still listed on at least one third-party vendor directory, but it does not appear on Litmos’s current platform page, which lists Litmos LMS, Content Libraries, Content Authoring, Litmos AI, Data Services, Litmos Integrations, Litmos Commerce and Expert Services.
We could not confirm its current availability, so treat this as a question to ask rather than a conclusion. If you are being sold Training Ops, ask directly about its roadmap and support commitment. If you already own it, ask the same question at renewal.
A practical annoyance: the documentation is now behind a login
Worth flagging because it affects how you research your own platform.
Litmos support documentation now sits behind authentication. That has two consequences. Your team cannot easily search for how to do something without logging in, and, more oddly, neither can anyone else. Litmos how-to content is largely invisible to search engines, which is why answers to questions about Litmos ILT are hard to find publicly.
For migration or integration planning, this means the useful public technical material is mostly third-party. Integration platform documentation lists the API resources, and there are community-maintained open source SDKs on GitHub in Python and JavaScript that give a clear picture of what the API covers.
Replace or coexist?
Coexist if your e-learning library is substantial, compliance training runs through Litmos and works, learners know the platform, and your problem is specifically the operational side of live training. This is the common case.
Replace if instructor-led delivery is the majority of what you do, your self-paced content is modest, you are selling training commercially and need real invoicing, or you are at a renewal where the total cost no longer stacks up.
Stay as you are if you run a small number of live sessions a year and the manual overhead is genuinely tolerable. Not every gap needs closing.
What coexistence looks like
The division of responsibility, in practice.
| Owned by the training management system | Owned by Litmos |
|---|---|
| Instructor-led catalogue and event scheduling | Self-paced content library |
| Instructor directory, qualifications and availability | SCORM and xAPI courses |
| Rooms, venues and equipment | Compliance e-learning |
| Registrations, waitlists and manager bookings | Learning paths |
| Joining instructions, reminders and attendance | Achievements, badges and points |
| Invoicing, purchase orders and session margin | Learner-facing experience, where you want one front door |
| Certification expiry and recertification | Content authoring |
The connection runs through the Litmos REST API, which covers Users, Teams including sub-teams and team leaders and admins, Courses, Modules, Learning Paths, ILT sessions and modules, Results, Achievements, custom fields and date-range queries. Litmos also supports SCORM, xAPI and SAML single sign-on.
The pattern is: identity and structure sync from your HR system or from Litmos, operational scheduling happens in the training management system, and attendance and completion records post back into Litmos through the ILT and Results endpoints so the learner record stays complete. Check what your candidate platform supports through its integration options before you scope the work.
What to establish before you commit
Do not accept a general statement that integration is possible. Confirm these specifically:
- Completion write-back on ILT modules. Post a result to a real ILT module in a test environment and confirm it appears correctly on the learner record.
- Single sign-on behaviour, so learners are not managing two sets of credentials. Our note on single sign-on benefits and security covers what to check.
- User provisioning direction. Decide which system is authoritative for people, and make sure everyone building the integration knows.
- Custom field mapping, since these carry information your team depends on and no template covers yours.
- API access and documentation. Given that official documentation is behind a login, make sure whoever is building the integration has credentials and access before the project starts, not in week three.
If you are replacing Litmos entirely
The export position is reasonable, with one significant caveat.
The API covers your structured data. Users, teams, courses, modules, learning paths, ILT sessions, results, achievements and custom fields are all accessible, with date-range filtering. Community SDKs in Python and JavaScript will save your developers time.
Your content is the harder question. SCORM packages you uploaded can generally be retrieved. Content built inside Litmos’s own authoring tool, and content licensed from Litmos content libraries, are different matters. Licensed library content does not transfer, because you licensed it rather than owned it. Content authored in the platform needs its export path confirmed explicitly before you plan anything around it.
Establish this early. Raise a ticket and ask, in writing, what the documented export process is for content authored in the platform, and what happens to licensed library content on termination. The answer shapes the whole project.
What generally does not transfer: platform configuration, team and sub-team structures with their permission logic, notification settings, brand and portal configurations, report definitions, email templates and audit history.
Timeline: eight to sixteen weeks for a mid-sized organisation, depending almost entirely on content volume and how much of your library needs rebuilding rather than moving. Our migration checklist guide covers the sequencing.
Validating the result
Whichever route you take:
- Learner records complete, with self-paced and instructor-led history reconciled for a test population
- Compliance reporting reconciled before and after, line by line
- Certification and expiry dates verified individually where regulatory requirements apply
- Single sign-on working for a real user on a real device
- Future sessions present with correct dates, times, timezones, instructor and location
- A full end-to-end test: schedule a session, register a learner, deliver it, mark attendance, confirm the record posts back, confirm the certificate issues, confirm the report picks it up
Have someone who did not build the configuration run that final test.
Suggested Reading : SimpliTrain vs SAP Litmos: 2026 Comparison & Pricing
Where SimpliTrain fits, and where it does not
This guide opened with a single line about Litmos having no built-in directory of locations, facilities or instructors, so it is reasonable to ask what a system built the other way round actually looks like.
Against the gaps named earlier, SimpliTrain covers: a stored instructor directory with qualifications, availability and conflict checking, rather than a name typed manually into each session; a room, venue and equipment inventory with capacities; events scheduled from a reusable definition rather than created one instance at a time, including multi-day and multi-track programmes with resource dependencies; manager and team bookings; waitlists with automatic promotion; invoicing, purchase orders and business-to-business quoting alongside card payment; trainer pay rates, cost per session and margin by course or client; and certification with expiry dates and recertification cycles. Because live training is modelled as an event with a cost rather than as a module inside a course, reporting on it does not require exporting to a spreadsheet first.
This is worth looking at if your team schedules live sessions in a spreadsheet that sits outside Litmos entirely, if you sell training to corporate customers who expect an invoice with payment terms, if you operate across multiple locations, or if you work in a regulated industry where credentials expire and recertification has to be tracked and evidenced.
It is not worth looking at if you run a small number of live sessions a year, all virtual, with one or two internal trainers and no rooms to book. Litmos handles that, and the manual overhead is genuinely tolerable at that volume. Not every gap is worth closing.
For teams deciding to replace rather than coexist, SimpliTrain also covers the self-paced side, including SCORM and xAPI, authoring, assessments and learning paths, so consolidation onto one platform is an option rather than a compromise. Pricing is flat-rate on administrators and instructors with unlimited learners, which is a different shape from per-user LMS pricing and usually the first thing worth modelling if learner numbers are what is driving your current cost.
Frequently asked questions
Is Litmos still owned by SAP?
What happened to SAP Litmos?
Does Litmos support instructor-led training?
How do I create an ILT session in Litmos?
Can you schedule recurring sessions in Litmos?
Why is instructor-led reporting difficult in Litmos?
Does Litmos have an API?
How do I export data from Litmos?
Does Litmos have e-commerce and invoicing?
Should I replace Litmos or add a system alongside it?
Where to start
Open the spreadsheet your team actually uses to schedule live sessions. The one with trainer names, room bookings and dates that lives outside Litmos entirely. That spreadsheet is the specification for what you need, and it is a more accurate requirements document than anything a vendor will hand you.
Book a demo to see how SimpliTrain handles the instructor directory, resource booking and ILT operations that spreadsheet is standing in for, either alongside Litmos or in place of it.
