California
New York
Illinois
Connecticut
Maine
Delaware
Last updated: May 2026
The compliance and People Ops teams who leave Traliant for Ethena rarely have a problem with the videos themselves. What they describe is everything around them: what it takes to change a course, what the admin work really looks like, and what the bill adds up to.
We talk to teams who spent years on Traliant before switching. Here's what they told us.
1. Real customization required going back to Traliant
The most common reason teams give for leaving: you can change branding and add an industry scenario or two, but reshaping a course to fit your company means going back to Traliant to have the work done.
A nonprofit coordinator who switched off Traliant told us why he moved: "I met with Traliant, but they didn't have the customizations." He liked their videos and their examples, but customization was the gap.
An HR leader at a food and beverage manufacturer described what Traliant's industry customization actually looked like for her team. Traliant told her they had a manufacturing module. What she found was a few small snippets of training set in a manufacturing scene. She "was not super impressed."
The teams we talk to consistently say the library is good and the videos are well-produced. The gap is what happens when they want to tailor a course to their company: their harassment reporting paths, their industry's real situations, their own policies and voice. The work either doesn't happen, or it goes back to Traliant as a paid services request. It's a pattern we hear consistently.
Ethena's Training Agent puts customization in the People Ops admin's hands. Open a course, tell the agent what you want to change, and it rewrites scripts, regenerates scenarios, and applies updates across all your language versions in one motion. You review and approve before anything ships, compliance in the loop. Build a course from scratch using your own policies, or tailor any Ethena course to your jurisdictions, examples, and tone. No tickets, no waiting, no extra invoices for what should be table-stakes flexibility.
2. The content didn't keep up
Teams tell us the content fell behind in two ways: how it feels to sit through, and how current it stays.
First, engagement. A People Experience Manager at a global tech company told us Traliant relied on "very cold and static imagery," and her team had complaints. A Senior L&D Specialist at an 800-person semiconductor manufacturer said the courses didn't focus on learner experience and the quizzing was cumbersome. A VP of People at a 200-person services firm was blunter: "We hate them. They're not great." For an HR Generalist at a 120-person tech company, the move onto Traliant was "nothing short of a disaster."
Then currency. Traliant says it refreshes content annually. The teams we talk to describe a slower rhythm: when a new state regulation lands, when DOJ guidance shifts, when a high-profile workplace issue changes how harassment scenarios should be framed, updates can take 18 to 24 months to show up. One Capterra reviewer says the videos "can sometimes feel dated." When a new requirement lands two months after your annual launch, your team is left explaining to leadership why this year's training doesn't reflect it, or building supplementary materials internally to fill the gap.
Ethena audits its catalog quarterly and refreshes annually, so the courses your employees take next year don't feel like the ones they took last year. Real scenarios, real workplaces, real people. And when a new regulation lands, we add it on the same cadence as the regulation itself, so you're not stuck choosing between the version you launched in January and the version that reflects what changed in March. Both can be live.
3. The admin work didn't match the sales promise
Teams choose Traliant in part because it feels modern and easy. The day-to-day admin reality often tells a different story.
An HR Generalist at a global business services firm walked us through hers. The person who signed her three-year Traliant contract had reassured the team that adding global capabilities later would be straightforward. What it actually looked like was a manual process of importing employees and locations one by one, plus additional costs because the global content wasn't in the original headcount.
A Co-Founder and Principal HR Consultant told us what she heard from her peer network: "With Traliant, it seems like the automations don't work as promised." A People Ops lead at a software company who paid for an API integration to fix the gap found that Traliant could sync users from BambooHR, but the integration couldn't auto-assign courses. Public reviewers describe the same shape: an admin platform that "works" but "feels a bit clunky and not very user friendly."
Ethena's admin experience is built for the People Ops generalist who manages compliance alongside 10 other things. Real HRIS integrations with the platforms our customers actually use. Automated assignment by role, location, and tenure. Reminders that go out without you setting them. Reports that show what you need without exporting to BI. Plus, all Ethena courses include country-specific tracks for comprehensive global coverage, without hidden costs.
4. The seat-and-course model created surprise costs
Traliant's pricing runs by user and by course, customers tell us, and that sounds simple until the program changes. Compliance programs always change.
A People Ops lead at a global business services firm described what locked her in. Her team was paying $22 per user for a single course, and that's all the contract allowed. Her boss's directive was direct: find something that costs less than this and offers more. A People Ops leader at a staffing company hit a different wall, with seats capped at 100 user licenses and additional licenses around $17 each on top. "It's pretty costly," she said.
The friction goes deeper than per-seat pricing. Because Traliant is a content provider rather than a full platform, teams commonly buy Traliant content and license a separate LMS to deliver it. The model that feels approachable on day one is the same one that creates two bills, two vendors, and two integration projects by year two.
Ethena's pricing is straightforward. You pay for active seats, not for headcount that isn't using the platform. The course library is the course library. Add jurisdictions, swap topics, layer in new training when your program expands: that's program work, not a procurement cycle.
5. The program needed more than a content library
Teams running mid-market programs tell us the job is no longer just training. It's a reporting hotline employees actually trust. It's case management that doesn't live in a spreadsheet. It's rolling out a new module when a regulation changes, without filing a vendor ticket.
We hear where that leaves them. A CHRO at a market research company described a Traliant content acquisition that broke her UKG admin experience and left her team to clean up the mess. An HR Manager at a national law firm came to us simply because she wanted to know what else existed before her renewal landed. She wasn't even unhappy with Traliant yet.
Ethena is a platform of four AI compliance agents working together. A Training Agent that builds and calibrates your annual courses from real risk data. A Disclosure Agent that reviews every conflict, gift, and outside-employment submission, with the Ethics Hotline and Case Management built in and a workflow employees trust. A Policy Agent that catches gaps and drafts the updates. A 3rd Party Risk Agent that screens your vendors before they become your liability. Compliance in the loop on every one: the agents draft, flag, and surface, and your team approves and decides.
And the compliance side of the house gets what it needs too. Your General Counsel, your CCO, the legal partners who care about defensibility and audit trail: Ethena was built with their requirements in mind. Susan Divers, our compliance advisor, was a Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer twice before joining us. Our General Counsel is in-house. The legal credentials are how the platform was built.
Making the switch
Ethena was built for People Ops teams who want training their employees actually finish, an admin experience that doesn't fight back, and a platform that grows with the program. Real customization in your hands with compliance in the loop, transparent active-seat pricing, integrations that work the way they were sold, and content that stays current with the regulatory environment rather than the calendar.
People Ops teams who move from Traliant to Ethena tell us the same thing once they're live: their employees notice the difference, and their legal partners stop asking whether the platform is enough. 96% of our customers renew year over year. We think that says more than we could.
