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Accredible is a solid digital badge and certificate software, but it’s worth researching what else is there — another tool might be a better fit for your needs.
Sometimes, you just need to switch things up.
Accredible is a solid digital badge and certificate software, but it’s worth researching what else is there — another tool might be a better fit for your needs.
Who knows, right?
That’s precisely what we’ll cover here: three great Accredible alternatives with similar scope of features, yet different enough to bring a breath of fresh air.
We have tested about a dozen of the most popular alternatives and took organic reviews by verified users on multiple platforms into consideration for objective evaluation.
To replace Accredible, an alternative solution must provide these essential features:
Everything else is an added bonus that makes each tool different from the next and a better choice for specific use cases.
As a result, we concluded that the best Accredible alternatives are:
Depending on your certificate design and distribution needs, business size, and budget, one of these will be your new favorite.
But first, let’s see what is good and bad about Accredible.
With 4.8/5 stars on G2 Reviews and 4.5/5 stars on Capterra, Accredible looks hard to top — but it’s not perfect.
Accredible is praised for ease of use, thorough analytics, and certificate/badge distribution. On the other hand, it is costly, and the code could use some tidying up. Accredible is often slow to load and requires refreshing multiple times.
More on that below.
Accredible has digital certificates, badges, and credentials; it uses Digital Wallet Cards to validate them on the spot. This makes certificates and badges portable and enables its owners to display credentials on sight.
It integrates with plenty of LMSs and publishing tools, some of them being:
Job Market Insights is a feature that helps Accredible users show the value their certificate has for the job market. It will display accurate job data, salary ranges, and employers interested in employing the certificate-owners.
Open Badge Designer is easy to use and rich in design options:
Some certificate design templates are free for the ones just “looking around” the website.
Accredible won’t make you pay for each certificate you issue. Instead, its pricing is based on a unique recipient, which means they can receive as many certificates as you wish.
But really... how many different certificates do you need to issue to one person, per course?
Features for the free plan are pretty good: Accredible doesn’t skimp and provides unlimited badge and certificate design, email templates, along with basic branding and integrations.
However, the Free Forever plan only allows up to 20 unique recipients per year. No matter your business size or model, you cannot do much with a number of recipients that small.
Essentially, the “free” plan is more like a demo or a free sample as it’s not a feasible plan that works long-term.
Lite plan is the cheapest option, with costs starting at $960/year for up to 1000 unique recipients.
The Plus and the Premium plans come with custom pricing, with Premium being the only one to grant access to all the features.
Furthermore it is important to note that the price increases significantly due to opaque pricing, resulting in a tenfold jump when adding just 100 more certificates or badges.
Once the certificate expires, additional payments are required to re-issue them:
With its pricing, integration capabilities, and overall performance, Accredible is better suited for businesses (medium-sized at least) than individuals.
Accredible also has a severe lack of range: there are no plans for ones that belong between lite and corporate/enterprise.
Now, let’s proceed to Accredible alternatives that fill in the gaps.
The number one Accredible alternative is far more flexible, cost-effective, and has plenty of use cases — meet Virtualbadge.io:
Virtualbadge.io is a scalable digital certificate and badge software that can be used in multiple ways:
Digital certificates are stored on European servers and can be validated at any time.
Virtualbadge.io provides a rich knowledge base and, as a welcome gift, several awesome badge design templates! Check them out!
Virtualbadge.io puts special emphasis on social media. The badges and certificates are designed to be shared across LinkedIn and other networks easily.
LinkedIn integration lets you add the company’s LinkedIn ID while creating digital certificates. The certificates created by your participants will then point to your company’s LinkedIn page.
All course information is pre-filled and ready for participants’ approval.
All friction in the process of receiving or sharing badges, like creating user accounts, have been completely eliminated.
Course participants and badge owners turn into your online advocates and promoters.
Virtualbadge.io users receive authentic testimonials from clients, build their online presence and authority, and create and issue professional online certificates with ease.
Clients get noticed for improving their skills, while their network learns more about your work and the knowledge you provide.
Virtualbadge.io caters to different educators and participants — with badges and certificates made for:
With Virtualbadge.io, what you see is what you get, with no learning curves involved. Design is as simple as it can be so that a complete novice can create a certificate from scratch. Another option is to simply use the ready-made templates or upload designs from other platforms.
You can upload all the recipients in a single click or just drag the CSV file into the designer.
Enable instant sharing for Twitter and LinkedIn from admin settings, with more control over what gets published once you hand over the certificate:
This way, you can incentivize and inspire your recipients to create a heart-felt post about your course, and strengthen your online authority at the same time.
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Customize your certificate and badge validation page in an intuitive editor. You can even integrate your certificate validation page including a browsing function into your own website with our wordpress plugin or code snippet:
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Once you’re finished, all it’s left is to track and measure the success.
While Accredible is expanding its reach to address various HR-related use cases, Virtualbadge.io is laser-focused on the issuance, management, and creation of badges and certificates.
Skill management of the workforce is not a core feature of Virtualbadge.io.
Virtualbadge.io doesn't need users to create accounts on its own platform to access and collect certificates.
While this leads to a frictionless experience on the engagement side, this might be a disadvantage for organizations that want their recipient's certificates to be collectable on a third party platform besides LinkedIn.
Everything about Virtualbadge.io is scalable, including pricing.
The flexibility of the pricing plan makes Virtualbadge.io ideal both for casual users and companies looking to distribute professional certificates and badges.
Each plan has a 7-day free trial to test the waters, and yearly plans come with worthy discounts.
If you’re ready to start issuing digital certificates and badges in no time, try out Virtualbadge.io’s 7-day free trial and start rewarding the people who deserve it.
Sertifier is a digital credential management software that helps educational institutions create, manage and send digital certificates and badges.
What we noticed and really like is that Sertifier is free for students, proving their dedication to spreading knowledge.
Out of all Accredible alternatives (including Accredible), Sertifier has the best integration capabilities.
In addition to LMS integrations (Moodle, canvas, Thinkfic), the well-explained API documentation bridges the gap between Sertifier and the most popular software. Google, Zoom, Slack, HubSpot, Active Campaign — and more.
Further is Sertifier’s learning mobile application.
It acts as a personalized educational platform that helps users hone their skills and learn more about their interests.
Further ties together with Sertifier to reward users for pursuing knowledge, and it is available on AppStore and Google Play Store.
Sertifier is not that easy to use and requires some time to get a hold of it; it’s also clunky in the complete setup.
To store certificates and badges earned via Sertifier, participants need to download a different app — Verified. Sertifier advertises it in a pushy way, obstructing the view for recipients:
The certification process almost feels like an ad for Sertifier. It may be perceived as inconvenient and results in less engagement with the tool — making the experience far from frictionless.
Sertifier works great for educational purposes; while not a flaw in itself, it makes the software somewhat weaker for businesses.
Similar to Accredible, Sertifier’s pricing is based on unique recipients instead of the number of certificates issued.
Each plan has a week-long free trial. However, Sertifier is the most expensive alternative to Accredible:
Like Accredible, the Free plan leaves much to be desired: it has up to 20 recipients with decent features and working capabilities.
Credly is a well-respected Accredible alternative used to supercharge profiles by issuing digital badges, certifications and managing it all on one organized platform.
What we liked about Credly is its robust and polished platform that supports enterprises with a range of digital credential solutions.
Here’s what we liked (and disliked) about Credly.
It might sound confusing, but it’s really not. You’re essentially able to provide more context and narration to your digital badges and certificates.
By adding skill tags and attributes, you can differentiate your virtual badges from each other. Frequent attributes are for types, cost, time spent, seniority, and so on.
As someone earns a virtual badge or certification, they get recommendations for additional events, new certifications, job openings, and more. Learning never stops!
While Credly is terrific for enterprises, casual users like teachers, coaches, and small course creators should opt for more simple and cost-effective solutions. It’s hard to justify the cost when you’re not using it often.
To create an account (or learn about pricing), you’ll need to schedule a demo with the sales team. This makes it harder to budget in advance whether it’s cost-effective compared to other Accredible alternatives, and it is too much of a hassle for someone looking to try it first. Other tools enable interested parties to try their tools way faster.
Unlike other Accredible alternatives on this list, creating metadata can initially take some time getting used to as it’s not as intuitive and straightforward.
Some users complained that uploading a badge takes a lot of time. The upload process for issuing bulk badges is not difficult but involves multiple steps that all have to be properly done without errors.
Source: trustradius.com
Strangely, Credly provides no pricing information whatsoever. This is usually because pricing can depend largely on the specific needs of the enterprises.
To get in touch with Credly’s sales team, go to the pricing page and fill out the contact form with the required information, and they’ll get back to you.
For this reason, it’s not possible to compare Credly price-wise to other Accredible alternatives.
Here are our findings summarized:
If you’re ready to start issuing digital certificates and badges in no time, try out Virtualbadge.io’s 7-day free trial and start rewarding the people who deserve it.
* You can find the organisation ID in the URL when you access your LinkedIn Company page as an admin.
Writer
Nov 1, 2021
10 min
Use Virtualbadge.io to design and send digital certificates that create trust - in less than 10 minutes.
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