ProPanel 2.0 or Tin Canny for LearnDash Reporting?

Yesterday marked the release of the ProPanel 2.0 plugin for LearnDash, which is a very exciting improvement for LearnDash users. We’re very pleased to see it available and it makes sense to include it on many of the LearnDash sites we support. Now that it is available, we expect to see a lot more questions from LearnDash users about whether it makes sense to use our Tin Canny LearnDash Reporting plugin or ProPanel, so in this post we’ll explain some of the differences and why one and/or the other might be appropriate for your site.

ProPanel 2.0

First, the 2 plugins are not directly competitive and they serve very different purposes. We fully expect to use both ProPanel 2.0 and the Tin Canny plugin on many of our sites. They actually work quite well together as complementary tools.

Our Tin Canny plugin is purely a reporting plugin for site administrators (at the moment). ProPanel 2.0 includes an invaluable tool for emailing learners by group and completion status, a learning activity stream, a Group Leader view, and easy access to assignments and essays. Tin Canny doesn’t do any of these things, and we never expect to add anything related to emailing, essays or assignments. If you rely on these things, you’ll want ProPanel.

Tin Canny, of course, does some things that ProPanel does not. The obvious, of course, is facilitating the upload and tracking of Tin Can modules, including Storyline, Captivate and H5P content. ProPanel doesn’t consider Tin Can/xAPI activity reporting. Our reporting also looks at activity trends and additional data points like time spent in LearnDash courses, quiz scores, specific activity inside a course, etc. Tin Canny is also going to push server load more, as it looks at a lot of data; it’s not recommended in shared environments where resources are limited, and it will provide the most value to large sites with a lot of users. If price is a consideration, our plugin is significantly more expensive than adding ProPanel.

In the end, both plugins can be invaluable additions to LearnDash sites, and choosing one doesn’t mean you can’t also use the other. The combination of both plugins really extends the reporting power of LearnDash.