COMPARED WITH CREDENTIAL PLATFORMS
They can prove the certificate is real. Not that it should have been issued.
Accredible, Credly and Sertifier issue verifiable badges and certificates, host a wallet for the learner, publish a page anyone can check, and report on who shared what. They are good at the last two steps of this chain, and they are honest that the result arrives from somewhere else.
WHERE EACH TOOL STOPS
The last two steps, and nothing before them.
Drawn from what these platforms publish. This is not an omission on their part: they integrate with the system that decided the result, and that system is the part this page is about.
Credential tools: Apply to Assessed by staff, not published; Credential to Employer verifies, in Issue, share and verify. Alethris: Apply to Employer verifies, in One record per learner.
THE JOINS
The question is where the result comes from.
A credential platform takes a row of data and turns it into something checkable. Everything that makes the row true happened before it arrived.
The issuer sends a name, a course and a date from an LMS or a spreadsheet. The platform attests that your organisation issued it. Whether the learner did anything to earn it is a question about the system that sent the row.
A credential that can only be issued from a completed record: the assessments that passed, the assessor who signed them, and the competencies the academy approved.
A badge names a skill. The work that demonstrated it, the criteria it was judged against and the level reached are not inside the badge, so the claim is as strong as the reader's trust in the issuer and no stronger.
Each competency recorded with the assessor and method that judged it, and a verification page that can show the assessed work itself, as it was handed in, where the learner chooses.
The record lives in your LMS and the credential lives here. When a result is corrected or revoked, somebody has to remember to do it twice, and a check made a year later may return the version nobody updated.
One record. Revoking or replacing a credential is the same act as changing the result behind it, and a check next year returns what a check today returns.
SIDE BY SIDE
Two halves of the same job.
There is genuinely less overlap here than anywhere else on this site. These platforms do the end well; the argument is about what feeds them.
| CREDENTIAL PLATFORMS | ALETHRIS | |
|---|---|---|
| Issuing a verifiable certificate or badge | The core of the product | From a completed record |
| A public page anyone can check | Built in | Built in |
| A wallet the learner keeps | Built in | A Skills Passport across every academy |
| Sharing, analytics and campaigns | Built in, and deeper than this | — |
| Open Badges and interoperability | A standard they lead on | — |
| Where the result comes from | Your other system, by integration | The assessment, in the same record |
| Who assessed the work | — | Named on the assessment |
| Which competencies were demonstrated | — | Recorded, with the evidence |
| What the credential certifies | As the issuer defines it | Assessed skills, or completion only, stated on it |
| Who checked the assessor | — | A second assessor, or whether the assessor taught the cohort |
| Collecting the fee | — | Card, a bank transfer your staff confirm, or a sponsor |
| Correcting a result | In both systems | Once, where the result lives |
WHAT IT COSTS
Per recipient, on top of whatever you already pay.
A credential platform is an addition to a stack, not a replacement for one, and its bill is shaped that way.
| CREDENTIAL PLATFORMS | ALETHRIS | |
|---|---|---|
| Each year | By unique recipients, usually with a minimum | A plan, by the size of your academy |
| Setting up | Often a one-off setup fee | Included |
| Quoted in | Dollars | Naira |
| The system that decides the result | Bought separately | The same product |
| Issuing a credential | Counted against your recipients | Inside the plan's allowance |
This bill plus your LMS, against ours
When a credential platform is the right answer
- You already have a system you are happy with, and the only thing missing is a badge somebody can check.
- You need Open Badges or 1EdTech interoperability, a standard these platforms helped build and Alethris does not implement.
- You issue at a scale where sharing analytics, campaigns and a directory genuinely change enrolment.
- You issue credentials for things you did not teach — membership, attendance at a conference, a licence renewal.
Nothing here competes with them on issuing. If your assessment record is already sound, one of these bolted onto it is a perfectly good answer and probably a cheaper one.
MOVING
The choice is what feeds the credential.
If your cohort already produces a defensible result, keep your platform and buy one of these. If it does not, a verifiable badge over a weak record is a verifiable badge over a weak record.
ONE
Ask what the badge would attest
Write down the sentence a reader should believe. If your current system cannot support that sentence, the badge will not either.
TWO
Bring the cohort where the sentence matters
The programme whose result an employer or a funder will actually rely on is the one to run here.
THREE
Issue from the record, not alongside it
Credentials come out of completed assessments, so a correction upstream is a correction everywhere, once.
FOUR
Keep the badges you already issued
Anything issued elsewhere stays verifiable there. Alethris issues from the cohorts it assessed, not retrospectively.
A verification page is the easy half.
The hard half is having something behind it worth verifying: work somebody read, criteria they applied, a name against the decision and a record that survives being questioned a year later.