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Ask an LRN customer whether you can customize the content, and they'll tell you yes. Ask what it took, and the story changes.
That gap runs through most of the conversations we have with compliance teams who leave LRN for Ethena. Customization, translations, pricing, and the training itself all come up.
Here's what they told us, starting with the one we hear first.
1. Customizing a course was a project, not a setting
The single most common reason compliance teams give for leaving LRN: customization is technically available and practically painful.
"LRN allows us everything, but it's very onerous and cumbersome and time consuming to make it more [our company] and less either corporate," one Senior Director of L&D at a tech company told us. A Senior Counsel for Employment on her team described the work itself: "Their cookie-cutter template, going through changing language or different examples based on our industry, things like that, it's not something easy that I just want to rubber-stamp."
A compliance lead at a global pharma described how it ate their calendar: "A lot of our time had been spent on customizing the content purely because it was just so long. And when it comes to the updates of the content itself, that was quite difficult for us to determine which updates we wanted to implement, because the way the information was given to us by LRN, it wasn't easy to read or identify which parts were relevant to us."
And it hits a wall on anything past the standard library. "If you want a specialty course like an ethics and compliance game or something that deals with a particular pain point in your compliance universe, that's where the company really doesn't want to do customization anymore," one compliance program owner at a global IT services company told us. "That's where you hit a wall in my experience." (And this isn't something new: it's a pattern we hear constantly.)
Ethena's Training Agent puts customization in the compliance lead's hands. Build a course from scratch using your own policies, or tailor any Ethena course to your jurisdictions, examples, and tone. You review and approve every change before it goes live, compliance in the loop on all of it. No vendor ticket. No quarter-long project to change a line of text. The work that used to need a content team becomes an afternoon.
2. Translating those customizations was a project of its own
For teams running training in more than one language, customizing and translating are the same headache twice. We hear it consistently from LRN customers: you customize a course, you send it for translation, and then a small change to the source means routing that edit back through every language you run. A one-line update becomes a multi-language, multi-week project.
The result, several teams tell us, is that they stopped making edits they knew the content needed, because the cost in time across languages wasn't worth it. The content stayed slightly wrong on purpose.
Ethena's Training Agent applies a change once and regenerates it across every language version, including automatic AI translations, in the same motion. You edit the source, you review it, you approve it, and the translations come with it. Compliance in the loop, in every language. A correction that took weeks across LRN's languages takes an afternoon.
3. Every customization and translation came with a price tag
The other pattern we hear from LRN customers: the price tag grows one change at a time. A customization is a charge. A translation is a charge. A tweak to a translated course is another charge.
Teams describe a base contract that looked reasonable on signing, then a running tab of add-on fees for exactly the kind of changes a living compliance program needs all year. The add-ons, several tell us, ended up rivaling the contract itself, and none of them were obvious at the start.
Ethena's pricing is active seats, full stop. Customizing a course is something your team does in the platform, not a line item. Translations are included. You're not billed per edit, and you're not billed per language. What you're quoted is what you pay.
4. The training was a slog to sit through
Set the customization aside, and compliance teams still describe the training itself as dense, dry, and hard to get through.
A Learning and Development Manager at a renewables company called the LRN anti-harassment course "incredibly condescending." The design problem underneath was simple, he said: "The LRN content just does not land because it is so legalese and reading heavy. It's so easy to lose focus, and the design of the training is just bad."
An Ethics and Compliance Manager at a consumer goods company put the format itself at the center: "LRN's content is very scripted. It's a lot of reading on the screen. It's not a lot of video. It's more you're looking at slides and reading and Q&A."
Ethena's courses are written and shot the way modern video content gets made. Real scenarios, real workplaces, real people. The experience plays like something employees would actually watch, not a slide deck they read through.
5. It read like a law class
Tone and format aside, compliance teams take issue with what the training actually teaches: dense legal theory employees won't remember and can't act on.
The same Learning and Development Manager at a renewables company was blunt about the substance: "There's a lot of deep dives into the legality of anti-harassment, which are like, people do not need to know that. They need to know that it's founded in law, but not what the law is. And then the exact verbiage of the law, people, you're not going to remember it. There's no point."
A Compliance Lead at a global manufacturer described their trade compliance course as "overkill," content that "would teach as if you're giving a law class." She took it herself and "kept failing the test. If I'm failing it, what's our poor team going to do with this course?"
Ethena's courses don't recite legal statutes line by line. They teach the recognition and reporting behaviors that protect your program and your people. Employees learn what to do, not the case law behind it.
6. The content never changed
Tone and format aside, the thing employees notice is that nothing changes. The course this year is the course from two years ago, and five years ago.
"I used LRN in my past company and it's been the same exact thing for 10 years," one compliance partner at a renewables company told us. "Once you take it once... it wasn't engaging to begin with. And so as people take it every year, it's like, 'oh my gosh, this was awful the first time. But now I'm taking it every year, this is equally just as bad.'" An Assistant General Counsel at a 5,000-person manufacturer put it more bluntly: "We've seen the same crap over and over again. We're not learning anything."
Ethena refreshes course content every year. New scenarios, new knowledge checks, new framing, so an employee on their third annual harassment prevention course isn't watching the same training they saw on their first. The content reflects how people actually work today. See how the content holds up.
7. Adding a course meant paying more or swapping one out
Compliance programs change. New jurisdictions, new regulations, new acquisitions, each one a reason to roll out new training. What LRN customers tell us is that they're locked to the courses they contracted for. Adding a new one costs extra, or it means dropping a course they already use.
A compliance manager at a 5,000-person consumer goods company described her contract this way: "We have 10 contracted courses with them. If we wanted to add more, we can from their catalog, but it comes at an additional cost, or you have to swap out courses. There are certain ones that you can swap out and some that you can't." When her team needed HIPAA training and conflicts of interest training that weren't in their slotted set, they looked at adding them through LRN. "It didn't make sense cost-wise."
Ethena's pricing is straightforward. Active seats only. You're not paying for headcount that isn't using the platform. The course library is the course library. Once you've purchased your first four courses, you have access to our full course library of over 200+ topics. Add new training, swap topics, layer in jurisdiction-specific content, expand to a new region: that's program work, not procurement work. And if your AGC walks in tomorrow with a new attestation requirement, you don't open a contract to handle it.
Making the switch
Ethena was built for compliance teams that take their programs seriously, and refuse to choose between rigor and modern content. Customization your team controls with compliance in the loop, translations that keep up, transparent active-seat pricing, content that refreshes every year, and a dedicated CSM from day one.
The CCOs, VPs of Compliance, and program leads who move from LRN to Ethena tell us the same thing once they're live: their training stopped being something they apologized for, and started being something they were proud of. 96% of our customers renew year over year. We think that says more than we could.
