What Training Management Software Costs: The Seven Lines on the Bill

The monthly price on a vendor’s pricing page is one of seven lines on the bill for a training management system. The other six are usage fees, implementation, add-on modules, payment processing, the contract terms and your own team’s time. For a provider growing from three administrators to five, the published three-year cost of the same job runs from $23,364 to $48,467 on the systems that publish a US dollar price, and most of the gap comes from the lines that are not the headline.

Cademy is our product and it is in the comparison. Every figure is from the vendors’ own pages, checked on 6 and 7 October 2026, and the example is sized for a team that fits Cademy’s Teams plan.

Key takeaways

• A training management system is priced on some mix of seats, usage and capacity. Two systems with the same monthly headline can differ by thousands a year once registrations are counted.
• Implementation is often a required, separate fee. Arlo’s starts at $695 and is required on every plan, Dante’s runs from £500 to £2,500, and Administrate charges a setup fee on a three-year contract.
• A system priced per registration costs more every year you grow. A system priced by capacity costs the same until you outgrow the tier.
• In the worked example, three years cost $23,364 on Cademy Teams, $38,027 on Arlo Simple and $48,467 on Arlo Professional. In the first year alone the gap between the lowest two is about $1,100.
• Ask every vendor the same ten questions before you compare, starting with who counts as a user and what happens when you go over your estimate.

The seven lines on the bill

A pricing page answers one question, which is what the software costs per month at its smallest size. A provider with a team needs the answer to a different one: what the system costs over the years it will be in use, at the size the business will be.

Line	What it is	Where it hides
1. Seats	The price for each person who logs in	Who counts as a user: administrators only, or trainers and read-only managers too
2. Usage	A fee for each registration, learner or booking	Free and private registrations, which are often charged as well
3. Implementation	Set-up, onboarding and migration	Whether it is required, and whether moving your data is included
4. Add-on modules	E-learning, integrations, portals	Features on the comparison grid that turn out to be priced separately
5. Payment processing	Card fees, and any cut the vendor takes	A platform fee on top of the payment provider’s own
6. Contract terms	Length, renewal and what happens when you change size	Whether you can reduce seats or leave before the term ends
7. Your own time	The switch itself, and training the team	The weeks of running two systems side by side

Seats: who counts as a user

Most systems charge for the people who run the training, and they define those people differently.

Arlo sells administrator licences. Its pricing FAQ says a licence is “designed to be limited to one person”, and that a second person logging in on the same licence disconnects the first. The price per licence falls as you add them: on its calculator a single Simple licence is $121 a month billed annually, and five are $98 each. Read-only users for managers are unlimited on the Enterprise plan.

Dante prices per user on two plans, Essentials from £70 a month and Professional from £200 a month for one user, and its calculator shows five users at £190 and £400 a month.

Cademy sells capacity tiers. The Teams plan includes five admin users and fifty facilitators, so trainers who only need their own dates are not charged as administrators.

The question to settle before comparing is who in your business needs to log in. Count the administrators, then the trainers, then anyone in finance or management who only reads reports.

Usage: what you pay each time someone books

This is the line that changes a bill most as a provider grows, and it is the easiest to leave out of a comparison.

On annual billing, Arlo charges $2.15 for each paid registration and $1.07 for each free one. Its FAQ counts a registration as paid when it has an order or invoice attached, and adds: “Registrations on private events/courses are classified as ‘free’.” A closed course for a client is therefore charged at the lower rate. accessplanit names “number of delegates trained annually” as one of the four factors in its quote.

Dante lists “Unlimited Courses & Delegates” on both plans, and Cademy charges no fee per registration: Teams includes 5,000 registrations a year.

A usage fee is small on one booking. At 5,000 paid registrations a year, $2.15 each is $10,750, which is more than the five licences beside it cost ($5,880 a year at $98 each).

Implementation: the fee before you start

An implementation fee pays for the vendor’s people to set the system up with you. Check whether it is optional, what it includes, and whether moving your existing data is part of it.

System	What it publishes about implementation
Arlo	”Required with all plans”. Basic $695 with 4 hours of onboarding support, Standard $1,395 with 8 hours, Premium $3,995 with 20 hours. Data migration is listed in Premium
Dante	£500 to £1,100 on Essentials and £1,250 to £2,500 on Professional
Administrate	A setup fee. Its pricing FAQ says its team will “scope needs, desired integrations, help you prepare your data, and to project manage your onboarding”
accessplanit	”Implementation package required” is one of the four factors in its quote
Cademy	No implementation fee on Teams. Imports of contacts, organisations, courses, dates, registrations and orders are on every plan

Add-on modules: what the headline leaves out

A feature can appear in a vendor’s comparison grid and still carry its own price. E-learning and integrations are the usual ones.

Arlo’s e-learning is an add-on: $99 a month for authoring, plus $50 for each additional author, or $99 a month for SCORM hosting, plus $0.30 per enrolment, or $149 a month for both. Its Salesforce integration is listed as optional at $150 a month. accessplanit names “integrations or additional modules/addons” as a pricing factor.

Cademy puts the course builder, booking, LMS, CRM and training management on every plan. Teams adds SCORM courses, the Xero integration, automatic tax handling, API access and scheduled exports.

For a provider that delivers blended courses, the e-learning line alone can add $1,788 a year to an Arlo bill before any per-enrolment fee.

Payment processing: check for a second fee

Card fees are charged by the payment provider, and they are the same whichever training system takes the booking. Stripe’s standard rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents for domestic cards in the US, and 1.5% plus 20p for standard UK cards. On a $350 seat in the US that is $10.45.

What differs is whether the vendor adds a fee of its own. Cademy charges a 5% platform fee on its free plan and none on its paid plans. Ask each vendor the question directly, and ask whether seats paid by invoice or bank transfer carry any fee at all.

Contract terms: what you are committed to

The term decides how much of the total you are committed to on the day you sign.

System	What it publishes about the term
Administrate	Contract terms are “Three years”. It gives its reasons as the time it invests up front and the return it expects you to see as use expands
Arlo	Pay-as-you-go monthly, or an annual plan with 10% off. On the annual plan the price is based on the registrations you estimate, registrations above the estimate are charged at the pay-as-you-go rate, you cannot reduce licences or move to a lower plan during the term, and the contract renews unless you give 30 days’ notice
Dante	”Flexible rolling monthly agreements” under the heading “No Lock-In Contracts”
Cademy	Billed monthly or yearly. Yearly is 17% less

An annual discount is worth having when your numbers are steady. If your registrations vary a lot from year to year, price the monthly option as well.

Your own time: the cost nobody invoices

The switch costs your team time whichever system you choose: exporting from the old one, checking the import, training the people who will use it, and a period of running both. A vendor’s implementation hours are a guide to how much of that it expects to do with you. Arlo’s packages include 4, 8 or 20 hours. Administrate describes onboarding “in as little as 12 weeks”.

How to switch training management system covers the move step by step, including what to export from each system and what to leave behind.

A worked example: three years, three admins growing to five

Take a provider that runs public and in-house courses and expects to grow. In year one it has three administrators and 2,000 paid registrations. In year two, four administrators and 3,500. In year three, five administrators and 5,000. Prices are in US dollars, billed annually, before tax and card fees.

System	Year 1	Year 2	Year 3	Three years
Cademy Teams	$7,788	$7,788	$7,788	$23,364
Arlo Simple	$8,879	$12,516	$16,632	$38,027
Arlo Professional	$11,615	$16,020	$20,832	$48,467

System	What the figures assume
Cademy Teams	$649 a month billed yearly. Five admin users, fifty facilitators and 5,000 registrations a year are included, so the price does not move across the three years
Arlo Simple	$682 a month in year one, $1,043 in year two and $1,386 in year three on Arlo’s calculator, billed annually. Year one adds the Basic implementation package at $695
Arlo Professional	$910, $1,335 and $1,736 a month on the same calculator, with the same implementation package
Administrate and accessplanit	No published price for this team. Administrate’s pricing page says packages “typically range from five to mid-six figures”

The year-by-year columns say more than the totals.

Year one is close. Arlo Simple at $8,879 and Cademy Teams at $7,788 are within about $1,100 of each other. A comparison made on the first year alone would call them level.

Growth is what separates them. By year three the same provider pays $16,632 on Arlo Simple and $7,788 on Cademy Teams. Each extra 1,000 paid registrations adds $2,150 a year to the Arlo bill, and each extra licence adds between $98 and $121 a month.

Dante prices in pounds only, so it is not in the chart. Five users cost £190 a month on Essentials (£2,280 a year) and £400 a month on Professional (£4,800 a year), plus implementation, whatever the number of registrations. Cademy Teams in sterling is £499 a month, £5,988 a year. For a UK team that does not need e-learning, Dante is the lowest published price here.

Which pricing model suits which provider

No model is the cheapest for everyone. The right one depends on how your own numbers move.

Ten questions to put to every vendor

Send the same list to each vendor on your shortlist and put the answers side by side. A vendor that publishes its prices will have answered most of them already.

Line	Question
Seats	Who counts as a user, and are trainers and read-only users charged?
Seats	What does each extra administrator cost at the size we will be in three years?
Usage	Is there a fee per registration, learner or booking, and are free and private registrations charged?
Usage	What happens to the price if we go over the volume we estimated?
Implementation	Is implementation required, what does it cost, and is data migration included?
Add-ons	Which of e-learning, SCORM, the accounting integration, the CRM integration and the API are in the price?
Payments	Do you charge any fee on bookings on top of the payment provider’s?
Contract	How long is the term, does it renew automatically, and how much notice do you need?
Contract	Can we reduce seats or change plan during the term?
Time	How many hours of onboarding are included, and how long does a provider of our size take to go live?

The same sums in Cademy

Cademy’s Teams plan is built for the provider in the worked example: a team of administrators, a larger group of trainers, organisation clients and registrations that grow. The seven lines look like this.

The price is public in three currencies: $649 a month billed yearly or $779 monthly, £499 or £599, and €649 or €779. There is no implementation fee and no platform fee on a paid plan, so the payment provider’s own charge is the only cost on a booking. Imports are on every plan, and every plan includes all five products: course builder, course booking, LMS, training CRM and training management.

A provider with one administrator starts on Pro at $129 a month billed yearly. A provider beyond the Teams numbers, or one that needs single sign-on, a service level agreement and a named engineer for onboarding and migration, moves to Enterprise, which is shaped and priced around the organisation.

The full table is on the pricing page. To run the sums on your own numbers, book a call and bring your admin count and last year’s registrations, or start a free trial of Teams.

Frequently asked questions

How much does training management software cost? Published prices for a team of three to five administrators run from about $7,800 to $20,800 a year, depending on the system, the plan and the number of registrations. Enterprise systems such as Administrate quote, and describe a range from five to mid-six figures. The headline monthly price is one of seven lines: seats, usage fees, implementation, add-on modules, payment processing, contract terms and your own time.

What is a per-registration fee? A per-registration fee is a charge for each booking the system takes. Arlo charges $2.15 for each paid registration and $1.07 for each free one, on top of its licence price. At 5,000 paid registrations a year that is $10,750.

Is implementation always a separate cost? No. Some vendors require a paid implementation package, some include onboarding in the subscription, and some charge only for larger projects. Arlo’s is required on every plan from $695, Dante’s runs from £500 to £2,500, and Cademy charges no implementation fee on its Teams plan.

Is a per-seat or a capacity-tier price better? A per-seat price suits a provider with one or two administrators. A capacity tier suits a team, because the price holds while the number of administrators and registrations grows inside the tier. Work out both at the size you expect to be in three years.

How long are training management system contracts? It varies from rolling monthly to three years. Dante offers rolling monthly agreements, Arlo offers monthly or annual, Cademy is billed monthly or yearly, and Administrate states that its contract terms are three years.

What should I compare besides price? Compare what the system does after the booking: scheduling, invoicing organisations, registers, certificates and delivery. Best training management software compares seven systems on those, and what is a training management system lists the jobs one should cover.

Sources

Prices and terms checked 6 and 7 October 2026 on the vendors’ own pages. They change, so check before you decide.

• Arlo: pricing and calculator and implementation packages
• Dante: pricing
• Administrate: pricing and FAQ
• accessplanit: pricing
• Stripe: US pricing and UK pricing
• Cademy: pricing