If you're evaluating Northpass in 2026, start with the fact most comparison pages miss: Northpass is no longer a standalone product. Gainsight acquired it in July 2023 and renamed it Gainsight Customer Education, though the app still lives at app.northpass.com. Then in April 2025 Gainsight also acquired Skilljar, the enterprise customer-education platform, and now leads with "Skilljar by Gainsight" as its education flagship. Even G2's old Northpass listing carries the Skilljar by Gainsight name today.
So this comparison is really Elite Recall versus the Gainsight education suite, and the short version is:
- Choose Gainsight if you're an enterprise team that wants education data flowing into customer-success health scores, has a procurement process, and can wait out a sales cycle.
- Choose Elite Recall if you're an operator who wants a branded academy live this week, pricing you can read without a demo, and a delivery engine designed so learners still know the material a month later.
Full disclosure: Elite Recall is our product. A rigged comparison would be easy to write and easy to smell, so this one is specific about where Gainsight wins.
What happened to Northpass?
The product has worn several names. Capterra still lists it under an earlier one, SchoolKeep. It became Northpass, then Gainsight Customer Education (Gainsight CE) after the 2023 acquisition. Since the Skilljar deal closed in April 2025, Gainsight has run two education platforms side by side: Gainsight CE, the former Northpass, and Skilljar by Gainsight, which is the one Gainsight's site puts front and center. Gainsight said CE would continue to be supported, and pitched the combination as Skilljar's enterprise scalability plus CE's customer-centric approach.
None of that makes Northpass a bad product. It does mean that if you buy it today, you should ask questions you wouldn't ask of a standalone vendor:
- Which platform will my team actually be onboarded to, CE or Skilljar?
- Where do new features land first?
- If the two platforms consolidate further, what does migration look like for my academy, my content, and my learner history?
If the answers steer you toward Skilljar, the direction Gainsight's own marketing points, you're now evaluating a demo-gated enterprise product, and it's worth reading our rundown of the best Skilljar alternatives for 2026 alongside this page.
The short version
| Elite Recall | Northpass (Gainsight CE) / Skilljar by Gainsight | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | Operators building customer academies, paid education, enablement, compliance, and franchise training | Enterprise customer-education teams, especially existing Gainsight CS customers |
| Buying process | Self-serve; workspace provisioned in minutes; 14-day trial | Demo-gated; "Request Pricing" |
| Published pricing | $9 / $59 / $199 per month | Tier names and inclusions public; dollar amounts not |
| Core learning model | Recall engine: SM-2 spacing, staged retrieval, adaptive revisit loops | Courses, learning paths, certifications, live and on-demand training |
| Monetization | Stripe-backed checkout, member tiers, paid academies | Subscriptions, credits, à la carte course sales |
| Branding | Custom subdomain (acme.eliterecall.com), custom domains, multi-tenant workspaces | Branded academy with SSO and custom themes |
| CS-suite integration | No CS-suite tie-in | Deep: Gainsight health scores, Salesforce dashboards, 80+ integrations |
| Enterprise proof | Newer product; no enterprise logo wall | Asana, DocuSign, Procore, Paycor on the customer list; G2 enterprise badges |
Where Northpass, now Gainsight, wins
The customer-success suite. This is the real reason to buy. Skilljar by Gainsight pulls training data into Gainsight health scores, triggers alerts when courses go unfinished, and reports course activity next to retention and adoption inside Salesforce. Gainsight advertises integrations with more than 80 other tools. If your company already runs on Gainsight CS, buying its education product is the obvious move, and nothing below changes that.
Enterprise feature depth. Live instructor-led sessions alongside on-demand courses, certification programs, admin SSO, a sandbox environment on the top tier, and syndication of your courses into the LMS systems your customers already use. Elite Recall doesn't claim any of that.
Unlimited seats on every published tier. Gainsight's pricing page lists unlimited seats and courses even on the entry Skilljar tier. Elite Recall meters by member count. If you plan to push free training to an enormous audience, that difference matters, so do the math for your own numbers in the pricing section below.
Track record at scale. The Skilljar customer list includes Asana, DocuSign, Procore, and Paycor, backed by a shelf of enterprise G2 badges. Elite Recall is the newer product and doesn't have a logo wall. If your procurement checklist starts with "show me ten companies our size," Gainsight has the easier answer.
Where Elite Recall wins
A retention engine, not a content host. Most LMS metrics stop at completion, and completion is where forgetting starts. Learners lose most new material within days unless it's deliberately resurfaced. Elite Recall is built around that problem. SM-2-based spacing schedules each learner's reviews, retrieval practice is staged from guided to supported to independent, and adaptive revisit loops bring back exactly the material a learner is about to lose. Any platform can host a course customers finish. The point of a customer academy is customers who still know the product a month later, and that's the job this engine does.
Self-serve, in minutes. Sign up, get acme.eliterecall.com, connect a custom domain, brand the workspace, invite members. No discovery call, no scoping call, no implementation project. A 14-day trial is long enough to launch a working pilot, and here's a day-by-day plan that does it in one week.
Pricing you can read. Creator is $9/month for 10 members. Professional is $59 for 100. Platform is $199 for 1,000, then $0.15 per additional member, so an academy with 5,000 members runs $799/month, a number you can compute before talking to anyone. As of July 2026, Gainsight's pricing page publishes tier inclusions but no dollar figures, and the path to a number runs through a sales conversation.
A business model in the box. Stripe-backed checkout, member tiers, and paid academies are part of the platform, so a paid certification program or a customer masterclass is a pricing decision, not an integration project. To be fair, Skilljar monetizes training too, through subscriptions, credits, and à la carte sales. The difference isn't the capability, it's the entry price at which you get it.
Blueprints instead of blank pages. Model your subject once as a sequence, grid, cycle, tier structure, node map, Venn, or memory palace, and the delivery engine handles scheduling and retrieval for whatever content fills that shape. You design the structure of the knowledge instead of assembling another folder of videos.
Pricing side by side
| Plan | Elite Recall | Skilljar by Gainsight |
|---|---|---|
| Entry | Creator, $9/mo, 10 members | Essentials: 1 academy site, unlimited seats and courses; price on request |
| Middle | Professional, $59/mo, 100 members | Professional: 2 academy sites, premium integrations, admin SSO; price on request |
| Top | Platform, $199/mo, 1,000 members, then $0.15/member | Enterprise: 3 academy sites, sandbox org; price on request |
| Trial | 14 days, self-serve | Demo first |
The metering cuts both ways. Skilljar's unlimited-seat model can favor very large free-training audiences, while Elite Recall's per-member pricing keeps small and mid-size academies at a number an operator can expense.
How to choose
Choose the Gainsight suite if:
- Education data must feed CS health scores and Salesforce reporting
- You need instructor-led training, enterprise certification programs, or LMS-to-LMS syndication
- Procurement expects an enterprise reference list and a formal sales process
Choose Elite Recall if:
- You want the academy live this week, not this quarter
- Retention is the metric, meaning customers must remember the training, not just complete it
- You want published pricing that starts at $9 and is still computable at 5,000 members
- Selling education through paid tiers, memberships, or certification revenue is part of the plan
The bottom line
Northpass, as the standalone academy product people remember, effectively no longer exists. Its lineage continues inside an enterprise customer-success suite. If that suite matches your requirements, it's a strong one. If what you wanted was the thing Northpass used to promise, a branded customer academy one operator can stand up alone, start a 14-day Elite Recall trial and have the academy live before a demo call would have been scheduled.