The Sana alternative for institutions outside the Workday suite.
Workday completed its acquisition of Sana in November 2025 and relaunched the product as part of the Workday suite in March 2026. If your HR system is not Workday — or 300 licences is more than you will ever need — this page is the honest comparison.
Who should move, and who should stay
Lurno is the closest standalone alternative to Sana for organisations that are not Workday customers. Workday completed its acquisition of Sana in November 2025 and relaunched the product inside the Workday suite in March 2026, which leaves buyers outside that suite unsure about standalone direction and pricing. Sana's published price is $13 per user per month with a 300-licence minimum — roughly $46,800 a year — which rules out most schools, academies and mid-sized training providers. Lurno is built by Augmental Learning Inc., is not part of a larger HR suite, starts at $119 a month with 1,000 members included, and covers three things a corporate learning platform has little reason to build: nested sub-organisations for running separate client academies, competency frameworks with evidence for accredited programmes, and a guardian portal. Move to Lurno if you liked the shape of Sana but cannot justify a 300-seat floor or a suite you do not run. Stay with Sana if Workday is already your HR system of record.
- Nested multi-tenancy
- One platform hosting separate organisations — each with its own members, branding, domain and data — where an organisation can contain further organisations beneath it. A training provider runs a tenant per client company; a publisher runs one per school. In Lurno the isolation is enforced underneath the platform, not by a filter on top of it: separation enforced underneath the platform.
Lurno and Sana on the points that decide it
Both are AI-native. The difference is who they were drawn for.
| Capability | Lurno | Sana |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | Per organisation, by tier, with members included | $13 per user, per month |
| Licence minimum | None | 300 licences |
| Entry point | $119 a month on Team — up to 1,000 members | ≈ $46,800 a year at the 300-licence floor |
| Ownership | Independent — built by Augmental Learning Inc. | Acquired by Workday, completed November 2025 |
| Where the product lives | A standalone platform | Relaunched as part of the Workday suite, March 2026 |
| Learning inside your Workday HR stack | No | Yes — that is the point of the suite |
| Separate branded academies per client company or school | Nested sub-organisations, each with its own domain and branding | Designed for one enterprise rather than separate client academies |
| Guardian portal for parents | Yes | No |
| Competency frameworks for accredited programmes | Yes | No |
| Primary audience | Schools, academies, training providers and corporate teams | Corporate L&D in large enterprises |
| AI in authoring, tutoring and grading | Native, and every write is a draft a person accepts | Native — the product was built around it |
Sana pricing checked on 24 August 2026 against G2's Sana Learn pricing page. Prices move; if this is out of date, tell us and we will correct it.
What actually changes
The bill stops being a seat count
A 300-licence floor is a pricing decision aimed at large enterprises, and it works there. It is the wrong shape for a school with 400 pupils, a training provider with 60 active learners per client. Lurno prices the organisation, not the head. Team is $119 a month with 1,000 members included; Growth is $299 and adds five sub-organisations, a custom domain, competency frameworks and guardians; Scale is $599 with sub-organisations uncapped.
- Billed annually, each tier drops 15%.
- Members are counted across the whole tree, so a sub-organisation is not a second bill.
- Nobody buys 240 licences they will not use to reach a minimum.
One tenant per client, or per school
Sana is built for a company teaching its own staff. If you teach other people's staff — client companies, franchisees, member schools — you need each of them to be a real organisation with its own members, branding and reporting, not a folder. Lurno gives you nested sub-organisations, plus an internal branch tree where a role granted at a branch cascades down it.
- Every organisation can have its own domain, with TLS issued automatically.
- White-label branding is inherited by sub-organisations, then overridden where a client wants their own.
- Partner sign-on (silent SSO) drops a learner into your academy from the client's own portal, already authenticated.
AI you can put in front of an assessor
Lurno's AI drafts lessons and assessment items grounded in documents your organisation uploaded, and cites the document, version and page it used. The tutor climbs from reformulate to hint to reveal, with a check on our side that compares each reply against the answer, rather than trusting the model to behave. Grading runs over an anonymised submission and produces a suggestion; an instructor confirms and releases it. There is no mode in which the model writes to a live programme on its own.
- OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are all supported, chosen per organisation. Bring your own key and the call is billed to your account.
- What the model proposed and what a person applied are separate entries in an audit log that cannot be quietly edited.
- A learner who withdraws AI-processing consent gets no tutor: nothing is sent to any provider.
Where Sana is the better choice
Large enterprises already standardised on Workday for HR, who want learning inside that suite. If your workers, job architecture, skills data and performance cycle already live in Workday, learning that sits in the same suite is worth more than any feature list we can put next to it. Roster and role changes arrive without an integration project. Learning shows up beside the record it belongs to. Your identity, procurement and security reviews are already done, which in a large organisation is often the longest part of buying anything.
Sana is also a genuinely good product, and it was AI-native before that was a category. If the AI experience is what you liked, say so out loud in your evaluation — it is a real strength, not marketing, and any replacement should be judged against it rather than against an older LMS.
So the question is narrow. If you run Workday, the suite argument is strong and you should probably take it. If you do not run Workday, you are paying a 300-licence minimum for a product now positioned around a suite you have no plans to buy — and that is the situation Lurno was built for.
What you get instead
Nested organisations and a branch tree
Sub-organisations inside sub-organisations, each a real tenant. Inside one, a branch tree mirrors your departments or campuses, and a role granted at a branch cascades down it.
Your brand, your domain, your sign-in
White-label branding per organisation, custom domains with automatic TLS, and partner sign-on (silent SSO) so a client's learners arrive already authenticated.
Assessment built for accreditation
19 question types, 7 assessment types, analytic, holistic and single-point rubrics, peer review, portfolios and one grading queue. Psychometrics with adaptive IRT/CAT when the test has to defend its scores.
Competency frameworks with evidence
Map outcomes to a framework, attach the submission that proves each one, and let mastery follow the evidence. Certificates carry a public verification page, so a credential can be checked by whoever asks.
A guardian portal, scoped by data category
Parents see progress, attendance or grades — whichever categories the school has granted, and nothing else.
SCORM, xAPI and LTI 1.3
In developmentModelled in the product; the runtime is being built. Talk to us early if standards conformance gates your rollout.
Before you shortlist
Bring the courses you already run.
Half an hour, your material, your questions about the migration. If Workday is the right answer for you, we will say so.