FAQ

CYPHER Learning® is leading the necessary disruption of learning platforms to unleash human potential with modern learning. 

We exist to ignite lifelong learning passions through personalized, engaging, and limitless learning experiences for all. We give learning and development (L&D) professionals and educators more time to teach and train, build human connection into everything we do, and deliver tailored learning experiences that are meaningful and measurable. The CYPHER platform is easy-to-use, beautifully designed, and infused with AI-powered technology.

Just the way modern learners expect.

CYPHER Learning is headquartered in Plano, Texas. The company has a global presence in locations such as the USA, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Jordan, South Africa, Dubai, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Australia.

CYPHER Learning is like no other. Key areas that set-us apart:

Make personalized skills development a reality

Achieve personalized skills growth through up-skilling, re-skilling, and cross-skilling, driven by a competency-based strategy. CYPHER seamlessly integrates advanced features, including automation, mastery tracking, digital profiles, learning groups, learning paths, Q&A forums, and 16+ assessments. Our comprehensive toolkit encompasses standard ontologies, job titles, and competencies, materializing tailored skill enhancement. Notably, our AI-powered tools ensure scalable personalized learning across your entire organization, fostering expertise and growth. This synergy between personalized learning paths, learning groups, and AI-powered tools reshapes skills development, turning aspirations into achievements.

Create more time to teach and train

The only platform built from the ground-up around automation. AI-powered tools take care of the mundane and tedious tasks supporting skills development, gamification, competency mapping, compliance, course creation, onboarding, mastery, and more. Even without AI technology, we offer 25+ automated actions that give trainers, L&D pros, HR, and admins the gift of time. Time to focus on training. Time to be creative. Time to problem solve. Time to connect with learners. If you want to maximize your time, our AI-powered tools can help you create a comprehensive course with competencies, gamification, assessments, and more - in 10 minutes.

Drive engagement

Go beyond badges. Awards, competition, and motivation keeps learners engaged with CYPHER leveled-up gamification. Use leaderboards, periodic leveling, and games in courses and learning paths for individual, group and site-wide points based on participation, scores, and more. Supporting the world’s largest implementation of gamification with over 120,000 users. Embed gamification automatically with the help of our AI-powered tools.

Keep the human connection

The only platform to provide a Universal Translator for real-time communications such as messages and posting. Connect with others who share the same learning goals. Feel close to your learning community even when physically apart with wikis, forums, chat, the Green Dot activity indicator, and scrolling real-time widgets.

Valuable training ROI

eLearning Industry recognized CYPHER Learning as a Top Platform to Measure Training ROI. CYPHER empowers HR and L&D pros to measure competency and mastery ROI for further insights. Customers gain a comprehensive set of analytics and reporting tools to get valuable data on training initiatives.

When you choose CYPHER Learning, you gain an unwavering ally. Our dedicated team is committed to your success, providing exceptional support, comprehensive training, and unmatched customer satisfaction.

The company first started with an LMS for academia in 2009 which soon grew into a very popular LMS for schools - known as NEO LMS. In 2010, the company launched the business version - called MATRIX LMS. In 2017, an LMS for Entrepreneurs was also launched - called INDIE LMS. In 2023 CYPHER Learning consolidated the names of the platform in favour of using "CYPHER" or "CYPHER Learning" to refer to the platform. The CEO and Founder of CYPHER Learning is Graham Glass, an educator, speaker, published author, and serial entrepreneur with a track record of innovation.

CYPHER for academia is for educators like teachers, instructors, and admins in schools, universities, colleges, and trade schools that need hybrid learning, personalized learning, teacher productivity, course creation, student engagement, and more.

CYPHER for business is for learning and development (L&D) professionals like HR leaders, trainers, admins, and managers in businesses that need training, up-skilling, employee performance, on-boarding, trainer productivity, compliance, and individuals like course creators, course sellers, and content creators.

Read success stories from our clients worldwide for academia and business.

The functionality caters to each market. For example, CYPHER for academia provides parent accounts to allow parents to monitor the progress of their children, whereas CYPHER for business allows users to be associated with specific organizations and provides manager accounts to allow managers to monitor the progress of learners in their organization. Both provide unlimited storage, but CYPHER for business supports larger individual file size limits.

See the features for academia and business.

CYPHER is a modern learning platform with an intuitive design and powerful features that provides a large set of indispensable functionalities that schools and universities need to support efficient teaching and learning online. CYPHER is highly customizable and easy to adjust to suit any grade level. Many of the features can be enabled or disabled to suit young children through to college students. Check these pages for more details on how CYPHER works for K-12 and Higher Ed institutions.

CYPHER won the 2022 CODiE Award and is proud to be one of the Representative Vendors in the Gartner®️ Market Guide for Higher Education Learning Management Systems (LMS).

CYPHER is a powerful learning platform that provides all the functionalities schools need to create and manage learning activities.

Google Classroom is also a learning platform, but it lacks many features that are essential for academic institutions. CYPHER is a more modern, powerful, and intuitive LMS, for both K-12 and Higher Education institutions.

CYPHER offers more features in a single platform designed to help schools manage all classroom activities in an easy and efficient way.

CYPHER is the only platform built from the ground-up with sophisticated automation, world-class gamification, enterprise-strength integrations, and thoughtful human-centered connections (forums, 50+ languages, Universal Translator, wikis, chat, etc.)

Easy adoption and scalability - our platform is designed for seamless implementation and easy adoption by students, learners, and entrepreneurs. Brandon Hall Group says: "The technology behaves the way humans think and act."

Sophisticated automation - our platform supports a range of functions, platform-wide, including reporting/analytics, world-class gamification beyond badges (periodic leveling, leaderboards, points, awards, etc.), and AI infused teacher and instructor copilots to accelerate and scale engaging modern learning. Designed to increase teacher and trainer productivity. Brandon Hall Group says… “this tech truly does save time and energy and is infinitely scalable."

Competency-based learning approach - with our unique approach to learning, learners advance by demonstrating mastery of a topic/class through reliable and accurate assessment (over 16 types of assessments). Easily track performance and progress in a single, comprehensive view. Smart and proactive recommendations. 2022 CODiE Award Winner, Forbes Advisor Top LMS, eLearning Industry Top LMS for product training, onboarding, gamification, training ROI, #1 PeerSpot Top LMS Leader, Representative Vendor in the Gartner®️ Higher Education Market Guide.

At CYPHER, we're committed to providing continuous 24/7 support to ensure that your experience is seamless. Our dedicated team is available everyday to address critical issues, so you're never left without assistance.

For support, please open a ticket within our help center system

We offer two support models to cater to your needs:

• CYPHER Care: Our premium support option, delivering world-class assistance at a premium cost.
• Standard Support: Available to all users, ensuring that everyone has access to the help they need.

Also, you can join our CYPHER Community to learn best practices, connect with CYPHER Experts, and learn new ideas. Whether you choose CYPHER Care or our standard support, you can trust that we're here to support your success with our platform. 

We have support teams located in the US, Latin America, the Philippines, and Europe. Through our various support teams, we make sure to cover all time zones when our customers may need help.

Yes, you can download our mobile app for academia on iOS or our mobile app for academia on Android to enjoy using CYPHER anytime, anywhere. You can also download the mobile app for business on Android or the mobile app for business on iOS. 

We support all browsers on the latest two versions of Android and iOS. Our system has a responsive design so it will adapt to the size of your device's browser.

We support the current and previous release of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge. Each time a new browser version is released, we begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third most recent version.

We currently support over 50 languages, using the Universal Translator that automatically translates in real-time. Our translation system makes it easy for volunteers to add additional languages.

Our sites have had 99.99% uptime, no data loss, and no security breaches since we launched in 2009.

Yes, our company is GDPR compliant - Data processing.

By default, all web pages are served using HTTPS. Our Amazon cloud infrastructure is hosted in a virtual private cloud. All personal passwords are encrypted. Our e-commerce integration is PCI compliant, and financial data never even touches our servers. All access to files, such as images and videos, are via URLs that are individually encrypted for each user to prevent unauthorized sharing of resources. Our database is encrypted at rest. We perform automated vulnerability scans on our systems and source code. We perform regular penetration testing.

No, we do not charge any kind of setup fee. You can upgrade or downgrade at any time, and the change takes effect on the next billing cycle.

Our platform is very easy to implement in just a few simple steps. Here are the first steps when getting started with CYPHER for academia and business.

Our SIS integration allows you to synchronize data such as accounts, classes, and sessions from your SIS to CYPHER without any manual intervention. Our SIS integration partner is Clever and we can also assist with a custom SIS integration if needed.

Our team of EdTech specialists can assist you in migrating your existing content to our platform, including the creation of custom migration tools when appropriate.

Our EdTech team can deliver online training or live training at your location in a classroom environment. All our instructors are experts with our platform, and the training includes plenty of hands-on experience for all user types.

CYPHER integrates with 1,000+ third-party apps and tools. On the features page for academia and business expand the Integrations section to see some of the most popular connections.

No, we provide unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth.

Our automated backup system creates an on-site and off-site copy of our database every day. In addition, we maintain secure off-site copies of every document that is uploaded to our site.

We are primarily a cloud-hosted service, which allows us to offer the site at a low cost as well as easily add new features and fix issues when they are detected. We do not provide a downloadable version for individual schools, but we offer source code licensing for large companies or well-funded startups who wish to deploy our platform on a large scale.

Our servers are located in the Amazon data centers in Virginia USA, Frankfurt Germany, and Sydney Australia.

Our platform is built using the latest software and hardware technology. The code is written using Ruby on Rails and a small number of third-party libraries. It is hosted using Phusion Passenger Enterprise on Apache2. The system runs on the Amazon Cloud, and is designed for security and reliability. For example, there are no single points of failure in the architecture, which spans multiple availability zones. The hardware infrastructure includes the Route 53, ELB, EC2, S3, RDS, SES, ElastiCache, and CloudSearch services from Amazon.