The LearnUpon alternative for organisations inside organisations.
You train several audiences that must not see each other — employees, partners, resellers, client companies — and you are deciding whether a portal per audience is enough, or whether you need organisations nested inside organisations, each on its own domain.
Which of the two you should buy
LearnUpon is a corporate LMS built around multi-portal delivery: employees, partners and customers each get a portal, run from one account. Lurno is built around a nested organisation tree instead — an organisation contains sub-organisations, those contain sub-organisations, and each level carries its own branding, custom domain with automatic TLS, roles and reporting. Choose Lurno if your structure runs more than two levels deep, if each audience must sit on its own domain under its own brand, or if you want a price before the first sales call: Lurno publishes plans at $119, $299 and $599 a month with stated member caps. Choose LearnUpon if you need a handful of clearly separated audiences and value a mature, well-supported product — that is the shape it was designed for. LearnUpon does not publish pricing; third-party benchmarks put a typical contract at roughly $25,000 a year, charged per active user.
- Sub-organisation
- A full tenant inside another tenant — its own members, roles, programmes, branding, domain and reports — inheriting its parent's settings until it overrides them. A portal partitions one account's content for a different audience; a sub-organisation is the account, repeated, with a parent that reads across the tree.
Lurno and LearnUpon on the points that decide this
Every LearnUpon figure below is sourced. Where public material gave no answer, the cell says so rather than guessing.
| Capability | Lurno | LearnUpon |
|---|---|---|
| Published pricing | $119, $299 and $599 a month on the [pricing page](/pricing), plus a quoted institution tier | None published |
| How you are charged | A plan with a stated member cap — 1,000, 5,000, 20,000, or custom | Per active user |
| What a contract typically costs | List price on three tiers; only the institution tier is quoted | ≈ $25,000+ a year, on third-party benchmarks |
| How audiences are separated | Sub-organisations nested inside an organisation | Portals, one per audience |
| Depth of hierarchy | As deep as your structure goes, plus a branch tree inside each organisation | Portals separate audiences; deeper hierarchies need workarounds |
| Brand and domain per audience | Logo, palette, login background and a custom domain with automatic TLS, per organisation | Portal-level branding — confirm the domain scope with them |
| Roles across the structure | Custom roles from a permission catalogue; a role granted at a branch cascades down it | Confirm how one role spans several portals |
| Tenant isolation | separation enforced underneath the platform — enforced underneath the platform, not just in the screens on top | Not published |
| AI in the product | Grounded authoring, an in-course tutor, grading drafts and a copilot over your own data | Narrower than platforms that treat generation, tutoring and grading assistance as native |
| SCORM 1.2 / 2004, xAPI, LTI 1.3 | In development — modelled in the product, runtime being built | A long-established corporate LMS; confirm the versions you need |
| Beyond corporate training | Guardian portal, competency frameworks, adaptive IRT/CAT psychometrics, verifiable certificates | Designed for employees, partners and customers rather than accredited or K-12 programmes |
LearnUpon figures come from a third-party benchmark at trainingcost.com, checked on 24 August 2026. Prices move — ask them for a current quote, and read Lurno's on the pricing page.
What actually changes
Your org chart becomes the product
An organisation in Lurno contains sub-organisations, and those contain sub-organisations. A group, its operating units and their client academies are one tree, not a row of accounts to reconcile at quarter end. Inside each organisation sits a branch tree for departments, regions or campuses, and a role granted at a branch cascades down it. You grant once, not once per portal.
- A corporate academy runs training for 15 client companies from one tenant.
- A K-12 publisher runs 114 schools on a single platform.
- Reporting reads at any level — one client company, one region, or the whole tree.
Each audience arrives at its own front door
Every organisation carries its own logo, palette, login background and custom domain, with TLS issued automatically. Sub-organisations inherit their parent's branding until they override it, so a new client academy looks right the day it is created. Notification email leaves from your own sending domain, not ours.
- Partner sign-on (silent SSO) hands a learner from a partner's own portal into Lurno, already signed in.
- Interface terminology is set per organisation, so one client's word is not imposed on another's.
- Multi-language, with full right-to-left support — in the product itself.
The bill stops moving with headcount
Per-active-user pricing on an unpublished contract makes cost hard to model before a sales cycle and hard to predict as a rollout grows: the month a client company finally activates its people is the month the invoice moves. Lurno charges per plan, against a member cap you can read before you talk to anyone.
- Sub-organisations come with the plan, not as an add-on: five on Growth, unlimited on Scale.
- Member caps are stated — 1,000, 5,000 and 20,000, or custom on the institution tier.
- There is no checkout yet: payments and self-serve signup are in development.
Where LearnUpon is the better choice.
LearnUpon is the better choice for corporate L&D teams who need a handful of clearly separated audiences and value a mature, well-supported product. If your structure is employees, partners and customers — three portals, one flat level, no client-of-a-client underneath — the multi-portal model is exactly the right shape, and paying for depth you will never use is a bad trade.
Two more reasons to stay. If your committee weighs years in market and the size of the support organisation heavily, LearnUpon has both and we are younger. And if a packaged SCORM or xAPI catalogue is what you are migrating, ask us before you shortlist us: those runtimes are modelled in the product but still being built, and we would rather lose the deal than have you find out in week three of an implementation.
The case for Lurno is narrower and sharper: a tree deeper than a portal list, a domain and a brand per audience, AI inside the same product, and a price on a public page. If none of that is what is hard about your rollout, buy the mature product.
What comes with Lurno
Shipped unless the badge says otherwise.
Sub-organisations, nested
An organisation inside an organisation, as deep as your structure goes. Members, programmes, roles, branding and reports belong to the level they sit on, and a parent reads across the tree.
A domain per organisation
Custom domains with TLS issued automatically, plus a logo, palette and login background per organisation. Branding is inherited from the parent until a sub-organisation overrides it.
Roles that cascade
Custom roles assembled from a permission catalogue, granted at a branch and cascading down it. Groups for cohorts, access reviews for the annual clean-up, an audit log that cannot be quietly edited underneath.
Reporting at any level
Certified metrics and plain-language questions, scoped to one client company or the whole tree. Enabled per organisation, so an academy sees its own numbers and nobody else's.
SCORM, xAPI and LTI 1.3
In developmentModelled in the product; the runtimes are being built. Talk to us early if standards conformance gates your rollout, and we will tell you exactly where it stands.
The rest of the shortlist
Teams weighing LearnUpon usually look at one or two of these.
Before you shortlist
Bring your org chart to the demo.
Sketch the structure you need to run — the parents, the sub-organisations, who must never see whom. We will build one of them live on the call, and tell you where Lurno does not fit.