Trainual Review: My Honest Take on Trainual

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, efficient employee onboarding and seamless training are crucial for the success and growth of any organization.

If that isn’t possible in your business, then you just won’t be able to scale your business quickly enough to keep up with the competition.

Enter Trainual, whose name should explain what they do; a portmanteau of “training” and “manual”.

Trainual, as they say on their website, helps users systemize and scale their businesses. From onboarding to training to SOPs, everything can be centralized in this one app.

Having all of your documents online is a massive benefit nowadays; as more and more business operations go online, the less need there is for a physical archive of documents and paperwork that takes forever to sift through and organize.

Through Trainual, however, management of documentation is barely even a factor. After getting it into Trainual’s step-by-step playbook, anyone can access documentation or SOPs at any time, even all at once.

In this Trainual review, I’ll go over what you get with a Trainual account, what features Trainual includes, its pros and cons (spoiler: there are more pros than cons), and finally whether or not you should use Trainual as your training manual for your whole team.

Trainual Features

1. Processes & Policies: With Trainual, users can transform SOPs (standard operating procedures) into step-by-step training manuals with minimal effort, just by starting with a subject, naming your topics, creating the steps, then assigning that training to a person or specific roles.
2. People & Company: Trainual provides users with an organizational chart displaying helpful information like who does what and how, plus includes a full employee directory with employee bios. Additionally, you can create a proper employee orientation that captures everything good about your company and provides new hires with the best first week possible.
3. Templates: Although Trainual is a paid software, they offer hundreds of free policy and process templates which you can use and customize as you wish. From role and responsibilities documents to comprehensive policies to fit your business, Trainual covered pretty much everything with their templates.
4. Customer Support: Along with Trainual’s best-in-class customer support, users also have access to tutorial videos, help docs, and the ability to hire a consultant certified by Trainual to get the most out of their Trainual account.
5. Integrations: Trainual can natively integrate with 30+ tools, including Slack, QuickBooks, Gmail, and more. Plus, through Zapier, the doorway is opened to over 5,000 more integrations.

Processes & Policies

The process of creating and distributing a step-by-step training manual (A.K.A. the “processes” part of “processes & policies”) is criminally simple using Trainual. All you need to do is start with your subject, name your topics, create the steps, then assign it to a person or role for them to complete.

That does kind of dumb down the process, but for the most part, creating informative training guides and SOPs is incredibly simple using this software.

Additionally, you can embed content in these training guides and SOPs like PDFs, GIFs, videos, and more to make getting a new employee (or co-workers) up to speed as efficiently as possible.

Even if you aren’t a great writer and are hesitant to create SOPs and training guides, Trainual has you covered. Using Trainual’s built-in AI capabilities, users can have the content written for them in a well-structured format.

Or, if you don’t want AI to be involved, you could just record yourself doing something and explaining yourself as you do it.

It’s as simple as you want to make it; you can write content and make videos to document any processes you want your employees to be in the know on.

As for the “policies” part of “processes & policies”, Trainual is incredibly helpful for managing company policy simply because there’s no need for it all to be on paper.

With Trainual, employees can have a centralized list of important need-to-knows and rules of the workplace all in a guided and organized digital employee handbook, that can not only track who knows what but can test them on it.

Trainual also allows a company and its employees to assign new policies or push updates to an entire team in just a few clicks. In that case, if everyone went remote (for some reason), you could easily create or update a work-from-home policy and broadcast that update to employees in record time.

To add an extra layer of accountability to any topic, you can turn on the “require e-signature” button and have those signatures stored in Trainual itself.

People & Company

Every company with a good amount of employees likely has an organizational chart, where they can get an overview of who does what and where they fall in the organizational hierarchy.

With Trainual, not only can you create these organizational charts and directories, but they are incredibly intuitive and dynamic so it’s easy to keep track of who’s who, who does what, and how.

On top of that organizational chart, a company can create an entire directory for their employees, including profiles that can display important information on individuals like job titles, roles, who they report to, what team they’re on, and much more.

This directory system also makes it very easy to tag people with certain Roles or Responsibilities and shift those tags as needed. You can also link responsibilities to related processes so that task doesn’t need to be done manually.

Templates

Whether or not you’re paying for Trainual, you have access to their library of process, policy, and role templates so you never have to start from scratch on pretty much anything.

From 401k matching to cybersecurity to breastfeeding-at-work policies, Trainual covers almost every important beat in the policy department. That isn’t even mentioning their extensive list of process templates, where a user could (for free) easily just take the information from those templates and use them as-is for their own company.

Customer Support

Trainual has an incredibly robust knowledge base filled with help options for all kinds of people, from a standard (but incredibly helpful) help center with video tutorials to a certified consultant directory where you can hire a consultant or agency partner to help make the most of your Trainual account.

All the effort Trainual puts into its help documentation and videos shows how much Trainual cares about its customers and is willing to help companies out when it comes to their SOP needs.

Integrations

Trainual has a few featured integrations, those being Loom for video, QuickBooks for payroll, and Slack for team communications. In total, Trainual integrates with 30+ apps, extended to over 5,000 more due to the ability to integrate with Zapier.

Their “Staff Picks” include Justworks, Paylocity, and Zenefits, all for HR and payroll.

Trainual Pricing

While Trainual doesn’t offer a free version like some of their competitors might (see Best Trainual Alternatives here), they do offer a 7-day free trial in which users can try out all of the features included as a part of both of their plans.

Speaking of their plans, Trainual offers two different types: their Train plan and their Scale plan.

Note: the prices listed below are if you are paying monthly; if you pay annually, you get 20% off those numbers.

Train

Trainual’s Train plan, starting at $124 per month for 10 users and $3.75/mo for additional users past 10, includes staple features like unlimited documentation for processes and SOPs, employee testing with tracking and reporting to gauge employee ability, a team directory, custom branding, and more.

Trainual’s integration library includes 30+ integrations, the most popular of which are QuickBooks, Gmail, Slack, and Zapier, which opens the floodgates for over 5,000 more integrations.

Plus, on top of that, Trainual has a mobile app that allows users to view and complete training from wherever they want.

Overall, the Train plan is helpful for businesses in need of a centralized training manual to get new employees up to speed as fast as possible and upskill existing employees to keep them at their best.

Scale

As for Trainual’s Scale plan, which starts at $249/mo for 20 users and $5/mo for additional users past 20, includes all of the features from the Train plan plus personalized setup support, premium integrations with HR software like Gusto and JustWorks, single sign-on (SSO), unlimited chat and email support, and even the ability to customize your domain.

On top of custom branding, you can essentially create an entirely unique piece of software for your business as if Trainual was a white-label product.

Overall, the Scale plan, with many features on top of the Train plan’s features, is less built for small businesses and more geared toward bigger operations, where a business needs to train employees on an enterprise level and consolidate their SOPs in one place with simple access.

Trainual Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Simple and clean user interface, making creating content on their platform smooth.
• Instant availability of edited documents to an entire team.
• Incredibly intuitive search function, so finding documents is as easy as possible.
• Adding new users, onboarding, tracking, and assigning training is straightforward.

Cons:

• No freemium version, unlike some competitors (e.g. Connecteam)
• Lack of “get started” help unless you choose the “Scale” plan.
• On tests, will tell you if an answer is wrong, but not what the correct answer is.
• Due dates are only accessible with the “Scale” plan.

Trainual Review Conclusion: is it right for your business?

In this Trainual review, I’ve gone over Trainual as basically a training manual for any company from a semi-subjective angle plus its objective features, and how to use the app.

Not only that, but Trainual is friendly to new users and has an intuitive interface to make searching for and creating content as simple as possible.

Also, if you don’t want to start from scratch when building your SOPs or policies, you don’t have to; there are hundreds of free templates which you can use even if you don’t choose to go with Trainual.

Overall, I’d highly recommend Trainual to any company with a need for centralized resources and employee training.