Today, that problem is even more visible. Teams are becoming leaner, expectations are higher, and new hires are expected to get up to speed faster than ever. There’s less room for delays, missed steps, or inconsistent training.

If you’ve ever managed onboarding, you’ve probably seen how easily things can slip. A task gets delayed, training isn’t assigned on time, or follow-ups depend on manual reminders. Even with a clear plan, execution becomes inconsistent.

That’s where monday.com starts to make a difference. It brings structure to onboarding by turning it into a workflow where every step is tracked, assigned, and visible. Instead of relying on memory, teams can rely on a system.

But even with that structure in place, onboarding still lacks the extra layer that makes it truly effective.

How does monday.com help you manage employee onboarding?

Onboarding tends to get messy faster than expected. Tasks are spread across emails, documents, and various tools, making it easy for things to fall through the cracks.

That’s exactly where it comes in. It gives you a way to organize onboarding into a clear workflow where every step is assigned, tracked, and visible. You can see who is responsible for what, what’s been completed, and what still needs attention, all in one place.

Why does onboarding need more than tasks and items?

Onboarding isn’t just about checking off tasks. It’s about helping new hires understand how things actually work.

They need to learn processes, tools, and expectations, which usually means going through structured learning modules. Without that, even a well-organized onboarding process can leave people confused or dependent on constant support.

The challenge is that while monday.com is great for managing workflows, it doesn’t natively deliver training or show how someone is progressing and performing through it. That’s why many teams end up using separate tools or manual tracking, which brings back the same problems onboarding was supposed to solve.

How does Smart Courses LMS fit into monday.com?

This is where Smart Courses makes a real difference. It adds that learning layer directly inside monday.com, so training becomes part of the same workflow rather than something separate.

What makes this especially powerful is that Smart Courses doesn’t introduce a new interface or external system. Instead, it uses the same board structure, navigation, and visual design that teams already use in monday.com. Everything feels familiar from the start, which means there’s no learning curve and no need to switch between tools.

Because Smart Courses is built on top of the same board logic, you can use monday.com’s native capabilities directly within your training setup. This includes creating workflows, triggering automations, and leveraging AI automations to handle repetitive actions like assigning courses, updating statuses, or sending reminders.

Course creation follows the same intuitive approach as any other board in monday.com. You can build learning modules by combining different types of content, such as videos, documents, and assessments, and organizing them into structured sections that guide learners step by step. Everything lives within the item view, which serves as a dedicated training piece for each course.

As users go through their training, their activity is captured automatically. Instead of relying on manual tracking, teams can use course insights to see progress, completion, and performance directly within monday.com.

The result is a system where onboarding doesn’t just happen alongside your workflows, but inside them.

A simple onboarding flow using monday.com and Smart Courses

Let’s look at what onboarding actually looks like when everything is connected and automated.

It starts the moment a new employee is added. Instead of having someone manually assign training, the system immediately assigns the appropriate onboarding courses. The new hire doesn’t have to wait or ask what to do next, because everything is already in place from day one.

As they go through their training, course insights give visibility into their progress. You can quickly understand whether the onboarding is moving forward or if someone is falling behind, without needing to check in manually.

At the same time, onboarding content doesn’t stay static. When a course is updated and its status changes from draft to published, it is automatically assigned to the right users. This ensures that every new hire always receives the most up-to-date training without additional effort.

And because people get busy, reminders are sent automatically, and users will be notified. Instead of managers chasing employees, the system keeps things moving on its own.

Why are teams moving toward automated onboarding?

The shift toward automated onboarding isn’t only about scaling teams anymore. In many cases, teams are becoming leaner, and expectations from each new hire are higher than ever.

Companies are investing heavily in AI and automation, sometimes reducing headcount, but that makes onboarding even more critical. Every new employee needs to be productive faster and equipped with the right, up-to-date skills from day one.

This is where onboarding can no longer rely on manual processes. When training depends on follow-ups, scattered materials, or inconsistent delivery, it slows down time to productivity and creates gaps that teams can’t afford.

By combining monday.com workflows with Smart Courses and automations, onboarding becomes a system that ensures every hire receives the same structured training without additional effort. Instead of managing onboarding step by step, teams can rely on a process that runs consistently and adapts as content evolves.

In a context where companies are optimizing resources, investing in people remains one of the most important decisions. Automated onboarding ensures that investment is not only made, but fully realized.

If your team already runs projects, onboarding, HR workflows, and daily operations inside monday.com, chances are you’ve already wondered:
“Can we also train our teams here?”

“Can it function as our LMS?”

Short answer: Yes. And it works even better than you think.

This article explains how monday.com’s structure naturally supports learning, how Smart Courses uses that same architecture to enable training, quizzes, and analytics, and why integrated learning often outperforms a standalone LMS.

1. Is monday.com naturally designed for learning?

Even though monday.com is widely known as a work management platform, its fundamental building blocks mirror the elements you would expect to find in a modern LMS. Boards, for example, are essentially structured databases, the perfect place to organize courses, store training categories, or manage compliance requirements. Items, which normally represent tasks or projects, can easily represent training modules, lessons, assessments, or learning paths.

monday.com also gives teams a flexible visual environment.

Views allow you to present information in various formats, which is incredibly useful for displaying training dashboards or course libraries. The platform’s built-in permissions and automation capabilities also behave much like those in a traditional LMS. You can control who can access what, automatically assign training when someone joins a team and more.

All of these components, structured content, configurable views, workflow automation, and strong reporting, are the exact foundations an LMS requires. Smart Courses builds on that familiar architecture to add the missing layer: the training experience itself.

2. How Smart Courses builds a complete LMS for monday.com right inside your workspace?

What makes Smart Courses LMS truly powerful is how effortlessly it blends into monday.com. Instead of introducing a new interface or external dashboards, the app uses the same visual patterns, the same navigation style and the same workspace flow users are already comfortable with.

This creates a learning environment that feels natural rather than foreign.

Course creation follows the same intuitive logic as building anything else on monday.com. You can assemble training programs by combining videos, PDFs, audio files, questions, and interactive elements.

This content can be grouped or sequenced into sections, allowing you to design structured learning experiences without dealing with the complexity of traditional LMS builders. Everything appears inside the item view, which becomes a dedicated training screen customized for each course.

Smart Courses LMS for monday.com also adds full assessment functionality. Exams can include questions such as multiple-choice, ordering, and essays… Since everything runs on monday.com, learners don’t need to open external tools. Their progress, attempts, scores, and completion dates are recorded directly in the workspace, turning your boards into a live learning database.

Because the app is built natively on monday.com, reporting becomes exceptionally easy. Managers can track performance without leaving their monday.com, filtering results by user, reviewing completion rates, or analyzing quiz performance in real time. The data is always available and always up-to-date.

3. Why does an integrated LMS for monday.com outperform a standalone one?

Standalone LMS platforms often struggle with adoption, not because they lack features, but because they exist outside the daily workflow.

Asking employees to log into another system, with another interface, another set of notifications, and another learning curve, inevitably creates friction. Completion rates drop, engagement weakens, and training becomes something people do in addition to their work, rather than as part of it.

By keeping training inside monday.com, Smart Courses eliminates this friction. Employees already spend their day on the platform; their tasks, communication, and goals already live there. When training appears in the same space, it becomes an organic part of their routine. This significantly improves completion and reduces the mental overhead of switching tools.

Integrated learning also means integrated workflows. With Smart Courses, training becomes part of the full lifecycle of work: when an employee joins, they automatically receive their onboarding courses; when a user joins a new team, new training appears; when a compliance cycle resets, reminders fire automatically.

You also avoid the complexity of maintaining multiple systems. Instead of having an LMS for learning, monday.com for projects, and separate reporting tools, Smart Courses consolidates everything in one place. The result is a simpler, more coherent, and more cost-efficient environment that scales with your team.

In essence, Smart Courses makes not just a platform for managing training, but a platform for growing people, and it does so with the same clarity, structure, and simplicity that users already love.

Confluence as a Learning Management System

Smart Courses for Confluence is a comprehensive learning management system (LMS) app that enhances Confluence as a platform for employee training. This Confluence LMS app enables organizations to create and manage courses, quizzes, and onboarding programs directly within Confluence. No need for a separate LMS – all training content lives in Confluence, which is ideal for use cases like new employee onboarding, compliance training, certifications, and ongoing staff development.

Key features

Intuitive Course Creation: Build structured courses with an easy editor. You can organize a course into sections/pages and embed all kinds of content – including existing Confluence pages, images, videos, and even SCORM e-learning packages. The editor is SCORM-compliant and multilingual, meaning you can import SCORM content and create courses in multiple languages from the same interface. You can also maintain version history and restore older course versions if needed.

• Interactive Quizzes and Exams: Smart Courses lets you create quizzes in Confluence to make learning interactive. The quiz builder supports seven question types. You can set passing scores, time limits, and attempt limits for exams, with results tracked automatically. Upon successful completion, certificates can be issued as proof of training.
  

• Self-Paced learning with Course Catalog: Smart Courses provides a global course catalog a centralized “Learning Center” where all available training courses and exams are listed. Users can browse or search the catalog using categories, filters, and keywords to quickly find relevant courses. Learners can enroll and take courses at their own pace through an intuitive course player interface.

• Progress tracking and insights: With built-in dashboards and reports, Smart Courses enables tracking of learner progress and training effectiveness. Administrators and instructors can view metrics such as enrollment numbers, course completion rates, quiz scores, and success rates at a glance.

• Assignments, deadlines, and reminders: Beyond self-enrollment, you can also assign courses to specific users or groups. This is useful for onboarding in Confluence. Assignments can include deadlines, automated reminders, and even recurring courses for recertification.

• Collaboration and permissions: Course creation supports co-authoring, allowing multiple contributors to build courses together. Permissions can restrict who can edit courses, who can enroll, and who can view analytics. Guest and anonymous access is also available.
• Multilingual support and AI Integration: Smart Courses includes 24-language support for both UI and course content. AI integration can help translate content, generate quiz questions, or suggest course content, thereby speeding up the course development process.

In short, Smart Courses for Confluence covers the full training cycle – from creation and delivery to reporting and compliance, making it a robust Confluence learning management solution.

Smart Terms for Confluence – A glossary and definition engine

Smart Terms for Confluence is an enterprise glossary app that lets you manage terminology and definitions within Confluence. It provides a powerful definition engine that ensures consistent use of terms across your organization.

Key Features

• Centralized Glossaries (Global and Space-Specific): Create and manage glossaries at two levels: global glossaries that are accessible across all spaces, and space-specific glossaries tailored to project or departmental needs.
• Term Creation, Import/Export: Add terms manually with a rich editor.
• Rich Definitions with Media and relations: Enhance definitions with media like images, PDFs, and videos. Define related vocabulary such as acronyms, synonyms, or abbreviations to create a terminology network.
• Automatic Term Highlighting in Page: Glossary terms are automatically highlighted in Confluence pages. Users can hover or click the highlight to view definitions without leaving the page. The highlight engine is customizable.
• Powerful Search and Discover: Glossary terms are fully searchable and can be browsed via an A–Z index or filtered by labels. Dedicated glossary macros let you display dynamic lists of terms on Confluence pages.
• Multi-Language Support: Maintain definitions in multiple languages, allowing users to toggle between them for localized definitions.
• AI-Powered Definitions and Editing: AI can suggest draft definitions when adding terms, which can then be refined to match organizational context.

• Customization and Integration: Appearance and behavior of highlights can be customized. Smart Terms also integrates with Jira, enabling the same glossary definitions to appear in Jira issues.

Altogether, Smart Terms ensures clarity and consistency by making every page self-explanatory with inline glossary term highlighting and a centralized terminology hub.

Smart Tables for Confluence – Excel-like Tables with Real-Time Collaboration

Smart Tables for Confluence brings Excel-like functionality to Confluence tables. It enables advanced editing, calculations, and collaboration directly within pages, eliminating the need for external spreadsheets.

Key Features

• Hundreds of Excel Functions: Apply 390+ familiar Excel formulas directly in Confluence tables. From SUM and AVERAGE to advanced lookup and date functions, tables become dynamic and self-calculating.
• Inline Editing & Live Updates: Edit table cells inline without page reloads. Multiple users can collaborate on the same table simultaneously, with real-time updates visible to all.
• Advanced Filtering and Sorting: Filter rows by text, numbers, dates, or dropdowns. Multi-criteria filtering enables complex queries, such as “Status = In Progress” and “Priority = High.”

• Data Visualization with Charts and Pivots: Generate dynamic charts (bar, line, pie, etc.) directly from table data. Create pivot tables in Confluence to aggregate and summarize data for deeper analysis.
• Real-Time Collaboration: Built for teamwork, Spreadsheets supports concurrent edits and instant updates. Teams can hold working sessions and update project dashboards collaboratively.
• By combining calculations, filtering, charting, and real-time collaboration, Smart Tables turns static Confluence pages into interactive spreadsheets, making data analysis and reporting much more effective.

In this blog, we’ll explore why teams need spreadsheets for monday.com , identify who benefits most from it, and review the top options available in the marketplace.

Why do teams need a Spreadsheet for monday.com?

monday.com is designed to help teams plan, execute, and track work in a highly visual and collaborative environment. But when it comes to advanced data operations, like multi-variable calculations, budget modeling, or cross-team data rollups, many teams still rely on traditional spreadsheet tools outside the platform.

Spreadsheets are deeply ingrained in how teams work. They provide flexibility for custom calculations, enable centralized views of data from multiple sources, and support complex filtering, sorting, and reporting that may go beyond the native column features in monday.com . Finance, operations, HR, and project managers all benefit from the ability to manipulate large datasets with precision and control.

However, switching back and forth between spreadsheets and monday.com introduces challenges: version mismatches, manual updates, and fragmented collaboration. That’s why the ability to work with spreadsheet for monday.com is more important than ever.

Rather than replacing spreadsheets, the goal is to bring their core strengths calculations, structure, and flexibility into the same space where your workflows already live. That’s where Live Spreadsheets for monday.com steps in. It’s not just another spreadsheet tool; it’s a collaborative data environment built to work with your monday.com boards in real time.

What can Live Spreadsheets for monday.com do?

Live Spreadsheets combines the flexibility of monday.com with the familiar power of Excel, offering a fully integrated experience for teams that manage and analyze data regularly. Instead of switching between external tools and your monday boards, Live Spreadsheets for monday.com lets you bring your work into one space where collaboration, analysis, and updates happen together.

What sets Live Spreadsheets for monday.com apart is its ability to import specific board groups. Rather than pulling in an entire board or dealing with cluttered data, you can select the exact groups you want to work with. This means more relevant spreadsheets, cleaner views, and a setup that reflects how your team actually operates across boards and departments.

Another major advantage is instant synchronization. When something changes on your connected board a status update, a number edit, or a new task, you can instantly sync it and it’s automatically reflected in the spreadsheet. You don’t need to reimport anything. Your data stays current and consistent, reducing manual work and ensuring everyone is working with the latest information at all times.

Live collaboration is also built right in. Your team can work on the same spreadsheet at the same time, updating numbers, formulas, or comments together.

It also supports over 400 Excel-style functions, giving you the power to perform anything from simple calculations to advanced reporting logic. Whether you’re building project budgets, tracking KPIs, or analyzing performance metrics, the tools you need are already there.

You can also import data from Excel to get started quickly, or export your spreadsheet if you need to share it outside the platform. This makes it easy to connect your workflows with external stakeholders or save records for future use.

For teams that value clarity and insight, Live Spreadsheets for monday.com includes advanced formatting, pivot tables, and data visualizations like charts and graphs that help transform raw information into actionable insights. These tools help teams quickly interpret data and make smarter decisions without needing third-party solutions.

And if you prefer a more comfortable viewing experience, Live Spreadsheets offers Dark Mode, making it easier on the eyes during long work sessions.

In short, Live Spreadsheets for monday.com is more than just a table, it’s a collaborative, connected workspace built for data-driven teams. With features like board group import, real-time sync, and multi-user editing, it brings structure and flexibility to your monday.com workflows, helping your team stay aligned, efficient, and always in control of the data that matters most.

Who Should Use Live Spreadsheets for monday.com?

Live Spreadsheets for monday is designed for any team that works with data inside monday.com, whether it’s tracking performance, managing operations, or collaborating across departments. By enhancing native monday.com boards, dashboards, and items with advanced spreadsheet functionality, it empowers teams to do more without leaving their workspace.

• Operations Teams rely heavily on dashboards and cross-board reporting to align KPIs, monitor resources, and coordinate workflows. Live Spreadsheets acts as a flexible layer on top of their boards, enabling deeper data manipulation, bulk edits, advanced filtering, and calculations while keeping everything connected to their operational system of record.

• Project Managers often use boards to track deliverables, timelines, dependencies, and ownership across multiple teams. With Live Spreadsheets, they can pull in group-specific data from project boards, apply custom calculations for progress tracking or effort estimates, and instantly reflect updates from their boards.

• Finance Teams use dashboards and items to monitor budgets, expenses, and forecasts. Live Spreadsheets allows them to apply formulas, run multi-variable models, and build pivot tables perfect for month-end closing, variance analysis, or tracking spend across departments.

• Sales & Marketing Teams manage pipelines, campaigns, and CRM data using monday items, automations, and dashboards. By importing specific board groups into Live Spreadsheets, they can analyze performance, sort and filter leads, and visualize conversion metrics in real time without manual syncing or exporting to Excel.

• HR Teams typically track onboarding, hiring pipelines, and training progress using item-level status updates, forms, and timelines. Live Spreadsheets helps them consolidate multiple group views, calculate onboarding time, track compliance training, and spot trends across departments using dynamic formulas all while collaborating live with other stakeholders.

Understanding view and add page permissions in Confluence

Confluence spaces use simple permissions to control access and editing. View permission allows a user to find and open a space’s pages and content. Without this permission, the user won’t see the space at all. Add Page permission allows you to create and edit pages in that space, including adding or updating Confluence pages or child pages, whiteboards, and live pages. In effect, View permission determines who can access spaces, and Add Page permission determines who can edit them. If a user lacks the View permission, content in that space is hidden. Without the Add Page permission, a user can only view content, not create or edit it.

How Smart Courses inherits Confluence permissions

Smart Courses LMS inherits the Confluence permission model. In the cloud, course visibility follows space View permissions: anyone who can view a space can view its courses. Similarly, if a user has the “Add Page” permission in a space, they can create a new course there (they’ll see the “New Course” button). Smart Courses also offers course-level restrictions, allowing a course to be limited to specific groups or users, granting exclusive access to those named. In summary, Smart Courses content resides in Confluence spaces and adheres to the same View/Add Page rights as any other page, ensuring consistent course access and creation in accordance with Confluence’s own access rules.

How permissions shape the learning experience in Confluence

Permissions directly shape what learners and instructors see. Over-restricting View rights can hide valuable training: if a team lacks View permission on a space, its members will never know those courses exist. Conversely, Smart Courses’ restrictions can “hide” courses by hiding them from most users or risk exposing too much content. Properly mapping permissions, however, facilitates learning: teams that use their department space see only their relevant courses, and employees only see training meant for their role. In short, View/Add Page rights determine who can access and create content. A thoughtful permission scheme ensures that learners find the right courses while only instructors and administrators receive course-creation rights.

Global vs Space level course Catalogs: What’s the difference?

Smart Courses offers two catalog views: a global catalog and a space-level catalog. The global catalog (from the Apps menu) aggregates all courses the user has access to across the site( different spaces). Each space also has a space catalog (accessible via a “Courses” entry in that space’s sidebar), which displays only the courses created on that space. Administrators can even disable global courses, forcing every new course to belong to a specific space. This flexibility lets an organization choose between a site-wide learning hub (with global courses) or strictly space-bound course libraries.

Global catalog configuration

Global catalog settings are managed by Smart Courses admins. They can:

• Set the default sort order of courses and pin featured courses.
• Choose which metadata appears on course cards (such as creator name, attendee count, or space name).
• Enable or disable filter panels (e.g., by Difficulty, Categories, Labels, Contributors).
• Define default certificate templates and assignment rules.
• Insights permissions: Control who can access Smart Courses analytics

These global configurations enable administrators to consistently brand and organize the catalog across the site, providing learners with a uniform experience.

Space-level catalog configuration

Space admins can override certain configurations for their space:

• Comments: Enable or disable comments on courses within the space.
• Multi-language support: Turn on or off multi-language courses for that space.
• Certificates: Revert any customized certificate to the global default, or use space-specific ones.
• Space catalog branding: Most organizational settings (such as categories or difficulty levels) are defined globally. Space-level settings enable teams to tailor minor features (such as comments and certificates) to their specific needs without affecting other spaces.

Space admins and catalog management

Each space’s admin fully manages that space’s course catalog. A space admin can:

• Grant or revoke Add Page (course-creation) rights to users or groups in the space.
• Control which Confluence groups have View/Add permissions (thus governing who can see or create courses).
• Configure the space’s catalog filters and branding.
• (If they have Add Page rights) Create courses directly from the space’s catalog page.

In practice, this means each team “owns” its training hub. When a user clicks the Courses entry in a space, they see only that space’s courses. The space admin ensures that the right users have view and add rights, and can curate the course catalog for their team. Meanwhile, global admins oversee settings that affect the entire site.

Real-World Use Cases: Permission Strategies across 3 companies

Company A: Department-based access

Each department HR, Sales, Marketing) has its own Confluence space. Team members are only granted access to their respective department’s space. As a result:

• Learners only see relevant training
• Content is siloed but organized
• Each department owns and controls its catalog

Company B: Project-based cross-functional access

Spaces are organized around projects rather than departments. For example:

• Project 1: Sales, Marketing, Design
• Project 2: Operations, Quality
• Project 3: Sales, Operations, Marketing

Users are granted access to the spaces for the projects in which they’re involved. Smart Courses restrictions are used to fine-tune access to specific content. Course contributors and editors are defined per course, allowing precise control over who can view and edit.

Company C: complex shared spaces with guest and anonymous access

This setup includes a mix of:

• Spaces are restricted to specific internal groups
• Spaces shared by multiple groups
• Publicly accessible spaces

Public spaces can be opened to:

• All internal users
• Guest users (e.g., external collaborators)
• Anonymous users (if enabled)

This model is ideal for organizations that offer public training or work with external stakeholders. Permissions must be carefully audited to ensure both security and accessibility.

Best practices for managing permissions

• Map audiences to Confluence groups: Use role-based groups to manage space access more easily.
• Use space-level catalogs for decentralized ownership: Let each team or department manage its content.
• Restrict sensitive content: Utilize Smart Courses restrictions for confidential training, such as audits or leadership materials.
• Plan roles with a clear matrix: Define who can create, edit, and analyze courses based on job functions.
• Audit guest and anonymous access regularly: Review permissions frequently to avoid unintentional data exposure

Why use an LMS within Confluence?

Traditional LMS platforms often feel like overkill for internal training, especially when you’re onboarding, certifying, or reskilling employees who already live in Confluence.

Smart Courses for Confluence changes that.

It transforms your Confluence space into a native, user-friendly, easy-to-use LMS with no integrations, no external tools, and no context switching.

Step-by-Step: how to create a course in Confluence easily

Smart Courses turns your Confluence instance into a full-featured LMS inside Confluence, perfect for internal training, onboarding in Confluence, and employee training. You can create courses directly in Confluence, without the need for an external platform.

Just select a space and start a new course. Courses inherit the space’s permissions, so only authorized users or Confluence groups can see or edit them.
Smart Courses enables Confluence administrators and course creators to build courses within Confluence easily.
Smart Courses provides a powerful Course Editor. You can add Learning components with multimedia support, including Confluence pages, text, images, video/audio, PDFs, embedded content, and even SCORM packages.
For example, you can insert an existing Confluence page into a course, or upload an image, video clip, or attach a PDF. Every capsule can have a minimum reading time, descriptions, and display options. Additionally, Smart Courses supports industry-standard SCORM 1.2 and 2004 courses, allowing you to import legacy eLearning modules.

Interactive quizzes, exams, and assessments

Quizzes

Smart Courses includes Quizzes for assessments and exams right within Confluence. You can add quiz questions as capsules in any course, choosing from multiple question types: single-choice, multiple-choice checkboxes, matching pairs, ordering items, fill-in-the-blank, free-text answers, and essay questions.

Exam mode

In Exam mode, you can enforce strict grading: set a minimum pass score, limit attempts, hide answers/ results, and require completion before showing results.

Learners answer quizzes right in the course player, which tracks responses and reports scores automatically. This means you can run compliance tests or product certifications entirely within Confluence, complete with pass/ fail logic.

Navigation

Navigation in the Course Player is intuitive: a sidebar lists all sections and capsules (marking completed ones), and the player view displays the selected capsule content or quiz question. Learners can bookmark capsules as favorites, search and filter capsules, and submit feedback to course authors from the player interface.
Once a course or exam is finished, learners see a results Dashboard with overall progress, score, and they can download a certificate if enabled (see Certifications below).

Multilingual courses & AI translation

Smart Courses is built for global teams. You can enable multilingual support in the app configuration and specify available languages.

Once enabled, each course can have translations of its title, description, dashboard message, and all capsule content (text or captions) in other languages.
In fact, Smart Courses offers an AI-powered translation engine (utilizing OpenAI) to assist users. When the AI feature is enabled, an “AI” button appears in the editor to automatically translate course content.

Course catalog & customization

Users can navigate to “Courses” from the Confluence Apps menu or space sidebar to see a global or space-level catalog of training. The catalog can be fully branded by the Smart Courses admin (custom title, logo, announcements). Filters let learners find the right courses easily: by difficulty level, categories, labels, contributor names, language, and more. Pre-defined views include “All Courses” (everything the user can access), “Assigned” (courses the user must take), “Attending” (courses started), “Favorites”, and “Edit courses” (drafts). Sorting options include alphabetical, popularity (based on number of attendees), publication/modification date, and user ratings. The catalog supports both list and grid display modes, with infinite scrolling for a perfect and easy experience.

Administrators and instructors can also customize the catalog’s filters and views in the global configuration.
For example, you can limit “Featured courses” to 20. In short, Smart Courses offers a catalog in Confluence with different filters, making it easy for employees to find relevant training.

Permissions & role-based training

Smart Courses respects Confluence’s security model while adding fine-grained LMS permissions. A built-in roles matrix distinguishes Confluence Admins, Smart Courses Admins, Space Admins, course Creators/Contributors, assigned learners, and anonymous users. Each role has specific rights: for example, only authorized creators can publish or edit courses, while regular users can only view and take courses. Even within a course, you can add multiple contributors or co-authors and allow contributors to enroll in “their own” courses if desired.

You can also assign courses to specific people or groups (Role-Based Training) and track each assignee’s progress. This enables HR and L&D teams to deliver subject-based training (e.g., manager training, sales certifications) directly in Confluence, eliminating the need for a separate platform.

Certifications & Compliance

Smart Courses supports certifications and recurring training.

When an exam-mode course is completed, the system can automatically issue a customizable certificate.

Administrators can design the certificate template (using HTML/Thymeleaf) at the global, space, or course level.
Learners can then download their certificates (even in their own time zone) from the course dashboard.
For compliance training, you can mark courses as Recurrent.

A recurrent course automatically resets sessions after a defined period, requiring users to retake it. This ensures that mandatory training stays fresh. Learners can also “favorite” courses, rate them with stars, and submit feedback to encourage engagement.

Advanced Analytics & Dashboards

Course insights provide per-course metrics (enrollment count, progress, quiz success rate, score, feedback, and ratings). Global Insights show aggregate statistics across all courses, with filters by difficulty, category, label, or contributor.
You can export any Insights grid to XLSX or CSV for reporting. This meets the demand for robust eLearning analytics: HR can prove compliance completion rates, and instructors can identify challenging modules.

Start training, onboarding, and development today!

Smart Courses for Confluence brings an easy-to-use and powerful Learning Management System (LMS) right into your Confluence wiki. It supports all your internal training needs, including onboarding, compliance, role-based learning, and more, without leaving Confluence.

Ready to transform Confluence into an LMS platform? Download Smart Courses from the Atlassian Marketplace and start creating courses, quizzes, and certifications in Confluence today.
For more information regarding the app, you can book a demo with us.

The answer lies in combining the right platforms to streamline knowledge sharing, bring training content to life, and track employee learning with a Confluence learning Management system built within your workspace.

Why Confluence, Loom, and Smart Courses are a perfect match for training and onboarding

Training often feels like a burden. But what if you could make it simple, engaging, and accessible all within the Confluence workspace that your team already uses daily?

That’s exactly what this combo delivers: a complete LMS for Confluence that transforms the onboarding experience.

Confluence as your central knowledge hub

Confluence serves as a collaborative workspace where your team can create, organize, and share knowledge efficiently. It allows you to build a structured documentation system with spaces and pages, making it easy to maintain how-to guides, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and other essential resources.

Here’s how Confluence supports your workflow:

• Page templates for consistent formatting
• Inline commenting for interactive feedback
• Permissions & history tracking for compliance
• Whiteboards to visually map onboarding processes
• Smart Links to embed Loom, Jira, and more

With these tools, you’re essentially creating a lightweight Confluence LMS experience that scales with your team.

Loom to bring your content to life with quick, visual walkthroughs

Loom enables you to create quick, personalized video walkthroughs that can be embedded directly into your Confluence pages. By recording your screen and camera simultaneously, you can provide clear, visual explanations of complex processes, making it easier for team members to understand and retain information.
Key Loom features for effective onboarding:

• Confidently record: Live rewind, trimming, and auto-filler word removal make editing stress-free
• Natural reactions: Viewers can comment and react with emojis, making the experience interactive
• Call to action: Add clickable links to files and resources for easy reference
• Secure content: Control who views your videos using email and password protection
• Stitch clips: Combine multiple clips or share just the parts that matter
• Engagement insights: Track who watched, how long they watched, and how your CTAs perform

Smart Courses to build structured, trackable learning paths

Smart Courses for Confluence enables you to create structured, trackable training programs. You can build courses comprising various content types, including Confluence pages, videos such as Loom videos, quizzes, and more. Assign courses to individuals or groups, monitor progress through detailed analytics, and even issue certifications upon completion.

With Confluence, Loom, and Smart Courses your team gets:

• Faster onboarding with clear, visual guidance
• Stronger retention through short video learning
• Centralized access to everything they need right where the work happens
• Better insights tracking through built-in Smart Courses insights dashboards

Training becomes part of the workflow, not an extra step. That’s the kind of learning experience today’s teams expect.

Onboarding and training new team members

Bringing new hires up to speed shouldn’t be complicated. With Smart Courses, Confluence, and Loom, you can create a clear, visual, and structured onboarding and learning experience all in one place.
Here’s how it all comes together:

1. Build the foundation with Confluence
   Start by creating a Confluence page that includes essential onboarding instructions, key resources, and “must-know” information for new team members. This page becomes your central knowledge hub and serves as the base for your Confluence Course content.
   
2. Add context with Loom.
   Sometimes text alone isn’t enough. Use Loom to record quick video walkthroughs, like a welcome message, a tool demo, or an overview of company culture, and embed them right into your Confluence page. This adds a personal, visual layer to your onboarding page.
3. Tie it all together with Smart Courses.
   Now, embed the Smart Courses Card macro into the same Confluence page to turn it into a structured, trackable learning experience. This card provides instant access to a dedicated onboarding course.

With Smart Courses editor, you can combine:

• Confluence pages for detailed written guidance
• Loom videos for engaging, visual explanations
• Quizzes, PDFs, and more content types to test knowledge and create interactive learning

Assign the course to your new hire or onboarding group, then track their progress and completion through Smart Courses’ real-time analytics dashboard.

With Confluence as your knowledge hub, Loom to personalize and scale communication, and Smart Courses to organize and track learning, your onboarding process becomes structured, repeatable, and engaging, no matter where your team is located.

Among the options available on the Atlassian Marketplace, two apps,Smart Courses and IZI LMS , 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

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

Smart Courses delivers a complete compliance training ecosystem inside Confluence. You can create structured exams with configurable rules, including passing scores, time limits, limited attempts, and forced sequential navigation, ensuring learners move through the content as intended. The app also supports recurrent training, allowing learners to automatically renew certificates or refresh knowledge at scheduled intervals, which is essential for maintaining compliance over time. Assignment reminders help keep users on track, and certificates are automatically generated upon course completion.

In contrast, IZI LMS offers some foundational features like SCORM integration, user enrollment, and basic progress tracking. It allows teams to embed SCORM modules and assign them to users, which may meet the needs of smaller organizations or those using limited third-party content. However, IZI LMS lacks a dedicated exam mode at the course level. While you can set pass/fail criteria for individual quizzes, it doesn’t provide unified control over an entire course that includes mixed content types. Since courses are typically built as Confluence pages or standalone quizzes, it’s not possible to enforce course-wide completion rules, pass thresholds, or attempt limits.

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

Smart Courses is designed for flexible, scalable learning experiences that go far beyond basic training delivery. 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. Its 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. These capabilities make it easy to design engaging, skill-based learning paths that evolve with your team’s needs.

In comparison, IZI LMS gives learning teams a simple way to build and assign training content, especially for lightweight, quiz-based courses. Its quiz builder supports single or multiple choice, true/false formats, and essay questions, which are suitable for quick knowledge checks or basic assessments. IZI primarily follows a user-driven enrollment model, where admins or course creators manually assign users to courses—providing control over who accesses which training, and when.

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.
Smart Courses is built for teams with evolving training needs and higher demands for scalability, interactivity, and control. Available on both Cloud and Data Center, it enables organizations to manage everything from onboarding to compliance and global L&D initiatives, all within Confluence. With features like a modern course player, easy content discovery, AI-powered multilingual support, SCORM compatibility, exam mode, and advanced analytics, Smart Courses transforms Confluence into a robust, enterprise-ready LMS.

Meanwhile, IZI LMS remains a dependable solution for teams seeking straightforward training delivery, particularly on the Data Center. It includes essential features like 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 LMS offers a focused and efficient experience.

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:

Feature Category	Smart Courses	IZI LMS
Deployment	Cloud & Data Center	Cloud & Data Center
Installs ( March 2026)	1,100	911
Ratings & reviews ( March 2026)	3.6/4 49 reviews	3.4/4 34 reviews
Course Authoring	Rich multimedia courses with Confluence pages, PDFs, HTML embed, videos & audio, quizzes, SCORM, and more.	Basic course editor using Confluence pages, quizzes and SCORM
SCORM Support	SCORM integration as a course and export Smart Courses to SCORM	SCORM embedding as a course module
Multilingual Support	AI-powered translation with easy language switching	Not supported
Quiz & Exam Builder	Single choice, Multiple choice, Matching Ordering, Fill in the blanks, Freetext & Essay mode	Single choiceMultiple choiceTrue/False Free text
Exam Mode	Dedicated mode with navigation lock, pass score and attempt limits	Not available
Enrollment Methods	Manual assignment, self-enrollment via catalog, and continuous assignments with advanced settings	Manual assignment, self-enrollment via catalog, and continuous assignments
Skills & prerequisites		Not available
Recurrent Courses	Set when the attendees should revisit the course (based on the number of days, weeks, months or years)	Not available
Certificate Generation	Available and customizable template	Available
Learning Catalog	Brandable internal learning hub with filters like categories, difficulty levels, labels…	Courses accessed via direct Confluence pages or learning portal
Accessibility (Dark mode & Shortcuts)
Learning Path
User Roles & Permissions	Contributors & Learners with fine-grained access controls App Admin Insights viewing permissions	Admins, Contributors, Learners with fine-grained access controls
Progress Tracking	Visual dashboards with exportable reports, including time spent and pass rates	Basic progress view with limited reporting
Feedback	Collects and filters user feedback by type for continuous course improvement	No dedicated feedback collection

What are the best features of Confluence for Onboarding?

Confluence offers several features that make it ideal for onboarding:

Confluence streamlines the onboarding process by providing a centralized knowledge base, ensuring all new hires can access essential information without searching through scattered sources. With real-time editing and commenting, teams can collaborate on onboarding materials, fostering continuous improvement. (Read More)

Integration with Jira connects project documentation with task tracking, clarifying responsibilities and project statuses for new employees. Customizable templates standardize the onboarding process, while interactive checklists help new hires track their progress. (Read More)

By leveraging these features, organizations ensure a structured, efficient, and engaging onboarding experience that helps new team members integrate smoothly and contribute faster.

The Future of onboarding: Confluence and Smart Terms in action

Smart Terms for Confluence and Jira is a glossary and definition engine designed to enhance communication across teams. It bridges communication gaps by:

• Auto-highlighting Confluence terms like “BoC” or “IP” across Confluence pages and Jira tickets.

• Providing contextual definitions in Confluence with hover-over popups for extended explanations.

• Syncing updates globally: Change a definition once, and it updates everywhere.

Smart Terms for onboarding helps new employees quickly grasp essential concepts, minimizing confusion and speeding up their integration into the team.

How does Smart Terms enhance onboarding:

How to Start in 5 Minutes

1. Install Smart Terms from the Atlassian Marketplace.
2. Create a Glossary: Define key terms and organize them by category.
3. Enable Live-Highlighting: Customize how terms are highlighted in Confluence and Jira.
4. Train Your Team: Show new hires how to use itduring onboarding.
5. Iterate and Improve: Use AI insights to refine your glossary over time.

Why your team needs an LMS integrated into monday.com

According to Research.com, 77% of organizations in the U.S. rely on learning for professional development. That’s why bringing training tools into Monday.com is a game-changer. Teams need Smart Courses LMS for:

• Smooth onboarding: Create structured courses to help new hires hit the ground running.
• Skill development: Equip your team with essential knowledge and continuous learning.
• Compliance & Certification: Stay on top of regulations with clear tracking and reporting.
• Centralized learning: Build a one-stop learning hub where employees can access the training they need whenever they need it.

What makes Smart Courses LMS stand out?

Create courses and exams

Smart Courses LMS makes it simple to build interactive courses using multimedia elements like videos, PDFs, and audio. Learning should be engaging, and our app offers a variety of question types to make assessments more interactive:

• Single & multiple choice: Pick one or multiple answers for clear assessments.
• Matching & ordering: Drag-and-drop functionality to boost engagement.
• Fill in the blank & Free Text: Supports case sensitivity and validation for accurate testing.
• Essay questions: Open-ended responses that course creators can review and grade.

Enhance quizzes by adding images, videos, or audio, customizing feedback, randomizing answer order, or setting time limits.

Course navigation & customization

With Smart Courses LMS, everything is organized in a centralized catalog within monday.com.

Use tags, categories, and filters to locate the exact course in seconds. Plus, customize the catalog to display only what’s relevant to your team:

• Show or hide course creator details.
• Display course ratings for instant feedback.
• Highlight the total number of attendees.
• Show the difficulty level (if set).
• Choose whether to display course creation or modification dates.

This flexibility ensures a personalized and intuitive learning experience within your monday.com learning and training management system.

Gain actionable insights with reporting & analytics

How do you know if your training strategy is working? Smart Courses LMS provides in-depth progress tracking and reporting tools. Monitor individual and team performance, and if you need deeper analysis, export data to Excel or CSV for further analysis.

How to get started?

If you are a monday.com user, getting started and setting up Smart Courses LMS is a breeze. Here are the few steps to get started:

• Install the app: Find Smart Courses LMS in the monday.com marketplace.
• Set up your board: Use the Smart Courses template to jumpstart your training setup.
• Create your first course: Click “New Course,” fill in the details, or use the board view to complete the predefined template columns or simply add a new board item.
• Assign & track progress: Once published, assign courses to your team with due dates for structured learning.