How to choose the ideal LMS for Confluence for different teams?

Khawla Issaoui

May 8, 2025

As more teams rely on Confluence for daily collaboration, it’s only natural that learning and training move into the same space. Whether it’s onboarding new hires, running compliance training, or upskilling employees, having a Learning Management System, LMS for Confluence simplifies everything.

Among the options available on the Atlassian Marketplace, two apps, IZI LMS and Smart Courses, offer different learning approaches within Confluence. This guide will help you compare both tools side by side, understand how different teams can benefit from each, and choose the solution that fits your needs today and as your organization grows.

6 steps to help you choose the right LMS for Confluence

Before diving into the use cases, it’s important to take a step back and evaluate what your team truly needs from a learning management system within Confluence. With few apps available on the Atlassian Marketplace, the right choice comes down to understanding your goals, your learners, and how you manage content and reporting.

Here’s a simple process to guide your selection:

1. Define your learning goals: Are you focused on onboarding, compliance, upskilling, or a combination of all three? Your training objectives will shape the structure and functionality you need.
2. Assess your team size and structure: Smaller teams may lean toward simplicity, while larger or growing organizations often require features like user segmentation, automation, and course versioning.
3. Decide on how to deliver training: Will learners self-enroll, or should course creators assign it to them? Do you need one-off courses or recurring programs? These decisions impact how flexible your LMS needs to be.
4. Evaluate your content types: Consider whether your training will rely on Confluence pages, videos, PDFs, SCORM, or interactive quizzes. The more diverse your content, the more robust your LMS should be.
5. Check your reporting and compliance needs: Do stakeholders require detailed progress tracking, pass/fail rules, and exportable training logs? Audit readiness is key for many teams, especially in regulated industries.
6. Map out contributor roles: Will course creation be centralized or shared across departments? If multiple people are involved, look for apps that support granular permissions or contributor roles.

Ultimately, the right LMS should meet today’s needs and scale as your training programs evolve. With these criteria in mind, let’s take a closer look at how IZI LMS and Smart Courses serve different teams and use cases within Confluence.

HR for Onboarding

IZI LMS is a solid starting point for small HR teams looking to provide onboarding courses inside Confluence. It supports course assignments, completions, and even provides certificates, which can help standardize the onboarding process. For example, for teams with a local workforce or simple training content, this may be enough. However, as training needs grow or become more diverse, additional features may be required.

Though, as companies grow and start onboarding international teams, Smart Courses becomes essential. It offers AI-powered multilingual translation, allowing HR to deliver courses in multiple languages without duplicating pages or content. New hires can switch course languages with a click, and everything is managed within a single centralized course, eliminating confusion and maintenance headaches.

Smart Courses supports continuous assignments, allowing HR teams to automatically assign onboarding training to contractors, seasonal workers, or employees moving into new roles, with no manual steps needed.

Also, Certificates are generated automatically upon course completion, helping maintain consistent documentation and compliance across all training programs.

Courses and training insights in Smart Courses LMS for Confluence

Progress tracking and reporting work on both Cloud and Data Center. HR teams can monitor completion rates, export training reports on demand, and easily follow up on learners, perfect for distributed, remote, or rapidly growing organizations.

In addition to course-level stats, Smart Courses offers multiple levels of insights:

• A global insights view to compare performance across all courses.

• Space-level insights to monitor courses created in a specific Confluence space.

• Course-level views to assess how learners perform within a single course.

• A user-level insights dashboard that gives a cross-course overview of individual progress.

These insights make it easier to evaluate training effectiveness, identify gaps, and take action with no external tools required.

What sets Smart Courses even further apart is its catalog, which brings the full LMS experience into Confluence. Courses are not just embedded in pages; they are organized in a dedicated catalog with customizable filters. HR can add categories, difficulty levels, and labels, so learners can easily find relevant content. The course catalog can be branded with your company’s logo and announcement, delivering a polished experience that feels like your own internal academy, without sending users outside Confluence.

Compliance & audit

Compliance teams using IZI LMS can benefit from some foundational features like SCORM integration, user enrollment, and progress tracking. The app allows teams to embed SCORM modules and assign them to users, which may be sufficient for smaller organizations or those relying on limited third-party compliance material.

However, IZI LMS lacks a dedicated exam mode at the course level. While it allows setting pass/fail criteria for individual quizzes, it doesn’t offer unified control over an entire course that may combine various content types. Since courses in IZI are typically built as Confluence pages or standalone quizzes, there’s no way to enforce pass/fail rules, attempt limits, or completion criteria for the course as a whole.

Smart Courses, on the other hand, delivers a complete compliance training ecosystem. You can create structured exams with configurable rules, including passing scores, time limits, limited attempts, and forced sequential navigation, so learners can’t skip ahead.

The app also supports recurrent training, allowing learners to automatically renew training certificates or refresh their knowledge at regular intervals, which is critical for maintaining compliance over time. Assignment reminders can be enabled to prompt users before deadlines, and certificates are generated upon successful completion.

Exam mode is what you need!

Smart Courses goes further by offering 7+ question types, including single/multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, drag and drop, and open-ended responses, which makes assessments richer and better suited to various regulatory needs. The exam mode ensures a focused test experience, and teams can even invite contributors to help manage and update training content without giving full admin access.

Can you customize insights viewing permissions with Smart Courses LMS for Confluence?

Admins can control who accesses insights, making it easier to delegate responsibility across departments. All user activities, such as course assignments, completions, and quiz results, are tracked and stored centrally. Course contributors can also navigate feedback given about the course or capsules and filter it by type, making it easier to improve training content based on real learner input.

If your organization requires repeatable, reportable, and auditable compliance processes, Smart Courses provides the features and flexibility to make it happen, without relying on workarounds or additional plugins.

Learning and development teams

IZI LMS gives learning teams a simple way to build and assign training content, especially if you’re focused on delivering lightweight, quiz-based courses. Its quiz builder supports single or multiple choice and true/false formats and even essay mode questions, which are effective for quick knowledge checks or validating basic understanding. IZI is primarily based on user-driven enrollment, meaning admins or course creators enroll users manually, which ensures control over who accesses each course and when.

However, Smart Courses was designed for more flexible, scalable learning experiences. L&D teams can create immersive courses by combining various content formats, Confluence pages, videos, audio, images, PDFs, and quizzes all within a structured and interactive flow. The advanced quiz builder supports over seven question types, including drag-and-drop, fill-in-the-blank, ordering, and essay questions that require manual validation by course contributors.

Smart Courses also supports multiple enrollment methods: admins can assign users directly or allow self-enrollment through a browsable course catalog. This distinction is valuable for learning and development teams managing a wide range of training, whether mandatory or elective. The ability to support both assigned and voluntary learning enables better personalization and employee-driven development.

This or that: So, which LMS for Confluence should you choose?

Every team’s learning journey is unique, and the right LMS depends on your goals, scale, and how you use Confluence.
IZI LMS is a dependable solution for teams seeking straightforward training delivery within Confluence, especially on Data Center. It offers a range of core features, course enrollment, progress tracking, quizzes, SCORM embedding, and the ability to build structured learning paths directly within Confluence pages. For organizations with local training needs or those prioritizing simplicity, IZI provides an efficient and focused experience.

But when training requirements become more complex, or when there’s a need for centralized access, multilingual support, interactive learning, or regulatory compliance, Smart Courses takes it further. Designed for scale and available on both Cloud and Data Center, it helps teams handle everything from onboarding to recurring training and global L&D initiatives. With a modern course player, easy content discovery, multilingual AI, SCORM compatibility, exam mode, and rich analytics, Smart Courses turns your Confluence into a robust, enterprise-ready LMS.

And it doesn’t stop there: Smart Courses will soon introduce learning paths, and the product team remains actively engaged with customers, rolling out new features and improvements year-round based on real user feedback.

To help you quickly compare the two and decide which best fits your team’s goals, here’s a side-by-side overview of the core features: