Should You Build or Buy a Learning Platform?

Asking yourself whether you should build or buy a learning platform for your education program? You’ve come to the right article.

Recent Forrester research found that investment in customer education has grown over the last five years—and is projected to grow even more. The top investment area for the 300 customer education leaders surveyed? Implementing a dedicated customer education/customer training platform.

So why would you buy an education platform vs. building your own? It’s a question worth asking.

In this article, we’ll break down what goes into a customer LMS, why you might build your own, why you choose to buy an LMS, and questions to consider in the decision-making process. Ready?

What’s a learning management system (LMS)?

A learning management system (LMS) is the hub that lets you create, deliver, manage, and measure training. This includes for people both inside your company (i.e., employees) and outside your company (i.e., customers, partners, resellers, prospects). With an LMS, you can launch product onboarding courses, certification tracks, or best‑practice micro‑lessons to anyone, anywhere: learners simply log in through a browser or mobile app.

Do you need an LMS to be successful?

If you’re running a formal education program, the short answer is “yes.” The LMS is the backbone of a successful education program because it brings scale, consistency, and the ability to measure your education content all under one roof. 

With a centralized platform you can launch courses to thousands of learners in minutes, personalize paths by role or segment, and track every click to prove business impact. Automated enrollments, progress tracking, and learning analytics allow your team to focus on creating great content instead of chasing logistics, while built‑in assessments, certifications, and integrations turn learning activity into actionable data for sales, success, and product teams. 

So… should you build or buy?

That’s the question, right? Some of the world’s leading education programs, like HubSpot Academy or Salesforce Trailhead, have built their own education platforms to serve hundreds of thousands of learners across the globe. So do you really need to buy an LMS?

When you’re weighing the choice to build or buy, start with your company’s priorities. Decide whether your main goal is a completely bespoke interface or a world-class learning experience that drives measurable business results.

Companies that elect to build typically do so for total control over the platform’s look and feel—a win for a seamless brand experience. The downside? Custom builds frequently fall short in helping learners reach their educational objectives. After all, LMS companies spend a lot of time focused on understanding and building for the learner experience. If that’s not your company’s bread and butter, you’re doing a lot of research to build something someone else has already built.

Let’s dive into some examples of when building is the right choice, then when buying is the right choice.

Building Is Right For You If…

Besides being able to completely customize the interface, building has other benefits, which makes it a great choice for certain companies. 

Building a customer education platform might be right for you if:

1. You want to deploy content, but delivering user-level personalization is not a priority.
2. You require full creative control over the look and feel of the destination's pages.
3. You can invest in a team of designers and engineers to build and manage the platform long-term.
4. You have identified a way to measure user engagement and efficacy, and can track how the LMS impacts business outcomes over time.
5. Your products and services are relatively simple. 
6. Your user base is small, or you're starting with a small pilot to test an MVP

Building doesn’t mean starting with a blank canvas. Companies that build their own learning platform fall into two categories: they either build everything from scratch (which is rare) or they purchase a content management system (CMS) and customize it to their unique needs. 

Build Case Study: When I was a Growth Product Manager for Learning at The Predictive Index, we opted to build our own experience using a combination of WordPress (our CMS) and LearnDash (a plug-in). This was after over a year of trying to get another platform (Docebo) to work without success. Within 6 months, our small team was able to launch PI Learn—a gated catalog of all of our learning and marketing content. While that served the purpose it was intended for (identify website visitors & make it easy to track content consumption without a million forms), it lacked the ability to personalize, customize, and segment learning dynamically.

Buying Is Right For You If…

While some companies choose to build their own LMS, others buy. Here’s a list of reasons when buying is a wise decision: 

1. You want to invest in a partnership with experienced education practitioners who can help you launch an initiative or improve the performance of an existing program.
2. You want to leverage a proven framework for creating highly-personalized education experiences that are grounded in learning science.
3. You don’t have the talent, resources, or time to dedicate to building something from scratch, or supporting its maintenance long-term.
4. You need more sophisticated features, such as single sign-on, localization, and integrations that support scale.
5. Your products and services are relatively complex. 
6. Your user base is large, or you are running a large-scale pilot.
7. You know you'll need to build highly-interactive courses that track a user's progress, or have existing SCORM courseware packages you need to upload.

One question to ponder might be: Do we have the resources to be a successful customer education platform, or do we want to focus our creative energy on producing the content?

Whether you choose to build or buy, the most important part of any successful customer education initiative is the content. Keep that in mind when budgeting resources and cost of the overall project. Expend all of your resources on building a platform and have nothing left for content production, and the entire initiative is at risk.

Buy Case Study: When wearable‑safety innovator Tended set out to launch a new product that required embedded learning, CEO Leo Smith weighed building an LMS in‑house against buying. Speed to market and a friction‑free user experience topped the requirements list. After evaluating several options, Tended chose Intellum because its open integrations, single‑sign‑on support, and white‑label customization let the team slot the platform directly into their existing tech stack. With Intellum’s implementation help, Tended rolled out a fully branded learning environment in just six weeks—achieving the polished UX and deep analytics they wanted without diverting engineers from core product work.

Questions to Consider When Deciding to Build or Buy

There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to building or buying. It comes down to what’s the best decision for your business—now and in the future. Use these questions to get an idea of what the right choice might be for you.

Strategic Priorities

• Is our money and time best invested in the R&D of an education platform or in the development and delivery of education content?
• Is owning every pixel of the learner interface a competitive differentiator, or is speed‑to‑impact more valuable right now?

Technical Resources & Timeline

• Do we have (or can we hire) the engineers, UX designers, QA, and DevOps talent needed to build and maintain an LMS?
• What competing projects will those teams forgo if they commit to this build?
• How soon do we want to launch our learning program? What’s the opportunity cost of a delay?

User Experience & Scalability

• How many learners must we support on day one—and at peak?
• How complicated is my education program or how complex will it become? Do we anticipate adding more audience segments, personalized content, etc.?
• Will we need role‑based paths, certifications, badging, or adaptive learning in the next 12–24 months?
• What accessibility, localization, or mobile requirements do we have?

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

• What will we spend on licenses, infrastructure, security audits, and ongoing maintenance in year 1—and in year 5?
• How will future enhancements (AI search, analytics dashboards, new integrations) be budgeted and prioritized?

Integration & Data

• Which systems must the LMS talk to—CRM, product usage analytics, support, community, marketing automation—and can we build/maintain those connections ourselves?
• How critical is real‑time data flow for executive reporting or customer success playbooks?

Measurement & Business Impact

• What KPIs (activation, retention, expansion, support deflection) do we need to tie learning activity to, and does our current tech stack let us expose that data?
  Will a vendor’s built‑in dashboards and benchmarking save us months of custom BI work?

Risk, Security & Compliance

• What security certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR) are mandatory for our industry and region?
• Who bears liability for uptime, data breaches, and regulatory changes if we build vs. if we buy?

Future Flexibility

• If our business model pivots—new product lines, partner channels, or acquisitions—can the platform evolve without a ground‑up rebuild?
• Does the vendor offer a headless API or extensibility layer if we outgrow their native UI?
  
  

Support & Community

• Do we want a partner with proven best practices, roadmap influence, and a customer community, or are we comfortable being our own help desk?
• How will we train internal admins and instructors on a home‑grown tool versus leveraging vendor certification and resources?

Use these questions as a scorecard: if most answers lean toward speed, proven functionality, and limited internal bandwidth, buying is probably the smarter path. If you have ample technical resources, unique UX requirements, and a long runway, building might be worth the investment.

Build, Buy, or Partner—Choose the Path That Accelerates Impact

Whether you assemble a platform from scratch or adopt a best‑in‑class solution, the real goal is the same: deliver learning that moves the business needle. If you decide your time is better spent creating stellar content than coding infrastructure, Intellum is ready to help. Our platform pairs decades of learning‑science expertise with enterprise‑grade customization and analytics, so you can launch faster, personalize deeply, and tie every course to clear, measurable outcomes. Let’s partner to turn your education vision into growth—without reinventing the wheel.