Skills Base

Skills Base builds a skills inventory from two ratings: the one each employee gives themselves and the one their manager gives them, and where both exist, the level shown by default is the average of the two. Its AI drafts your skills framework and writes insights from the ratings, and plays no part in setting anyone’s level. Skills Base publishes prices for three of its four plans, so you can compare them before you speak to sales.

By Ashish Manchanda Published 16 Sep 2026 Last updated 16 Sep 2026
In one line

A skills matrix with published prices, built on employees rating themselves and managers checking those ratings.

Buy it if

You want graded skill levels for technical, field-service or consulting staff, a per-person price you can budget against before you speak to sales, and managers who will keep up regular rating rounds.

Do not buy it if

You want skills to appear without anyone rating them, you need proof of ability from a test or from peers, or your managers will not rate their people, because without a manager’s rating the level shown is the employee’s own.

Price

Teams is $2.25 and Enterprise $4 per person per month as of 14 September 2026, in a currency Skills Base does not state. The Free plan costs nothing for up to 25 people. Ultimate and the AI Module have no published price.

How it works

How it arrives at a skill level

Skills Base is a skills matrix run as software. You build a framework of skills, and each person is given the skills they will be rated on, taken from their team, their role, a custom selection or the whole list. The employee rates their own level on each skill (and their interest in it, if you switch that on), and their supervisor can rate them as well. Both kinds of rating are optional, and only the employee can give a self-rating: each person has to log in to rate themselves, and nobody else can enter it for them, not even an administrator.

There are three kinds of assessment: the employee’s own, the supervisor’s, and a target level for the skill, so a level rests on at most two ratings. You choose the scale, anywhere from two levels to eleven, with 1 to 5 as the default. The level the system reports is the average of the latest self-rating and the latest supervisor rating, and when several supervisors have rated the same person, only the most recent one counts. Where no supervisor has rated, the level shown is the employee’s own. A supervisor’s rating of zero is averaged with the employee’s rather than replacing it, so an employee who rates a skill at 2 against a supervisor’s 0 shows as 1, and a dashboard can be switched to show supervisor ratings on their own.

What Skills Base calls competency is the difference between that level and a target level you set, shown as a percentage up to 100%. By default, each person’s reassessment falls due on a rolling schedule counted from their last round. Ratings can also change between rounds: employees and supervisors can both update a set of ratings on one screen, and an ad hoc review lets people raise their own ratings straight after a project, a training session or coaching.

Skills Base’s AI cannot assess or measure employee skills, and it does not infer skills nobody has measured. What it does is draft a skills framework from your HR system, job descriptions or performance data, for your team to review and publish. With the AI Module, a paid add-on, it also writes insights from the ratings and answers free-form questions about your data through an assistant called Sam, which uses Anthropic’s Claude AI model on Amazon’s cloud service. Without the module, Sam still answers support questions, but on your own data it can only answer the questions suggested on dashboards.

Your IT team will want to know how data gets in and where it is kept. Skills Base takes people records from your HR system through a scheduled file upload, ratings in bulk from spreadsheet files on paid plans, and almost any other data through a programming interface on certain plans. It runs only as cloud software, hosted on Amazon Web Services in the United States by default, with Germany or Australia on request.

A Skills Base level, then, carries the employee’s view and, wherever a manager has rated, the manager’s too. How many levels carry a manager’s rating is the figure that decides what the inventory can support, so before a level feeds a promotion or pay decision, switch the dashboard to supervisor ratings and see how many there are.

Skills Base Pty Ltd, the company that owns and develops the product, is small. It was registered in Australia in 2013, is based in North Geelong, Victoria, and was already selling licences in 2014. It employs between 11 and 50 people, and its chief executive, Nick Stanley, wrote in January 2025 that the business is self-funded with no venture capital and that revenue grew 30% in 2024. Your contract may be with that company or with Educrowd Pty Ltd, which distributes the product from the same address. Either way, the contract is governed by the law of the US state of Delaware, which your legal team will want to review before you sign, and with a supplier of this size, use the same review to write the support and continuity you need into the contract.
Its figures

What its figures measure

Most of the figures Skills Base publishes come from its 2026 report on its own customers, and each one measures a different part of how the inventory gets filled.

41.4% of assessments checked by a supervisorSkills in Practice Report 2026

Across the report’s detailed sample of customers, supervisors had validated 41.4% of assessments on average, with a median of 47%, and some organisations had a supervisor’s check on as many as 97%. The figure measures how much of an inventory carries a manager’s view as well as the employee’s, which is what a level can support in a people decision.

71.8% of people assessedSkills in Practice Report 2026, wider sample

Across the wider sample, an average of 71.8% of the people customers set out to assess had been assessed, with a median of 82%, which leaves nearly one person in five at the typical customer without the rating they were meant to have. The figure measures how far a rollout gets people rated, a separate job from switching the software on.

400+ enterprise customersSkills Base, January 2025

Skills Base counts more than 400 enterprise customers and, separately, over 2,000 users of its free version. When a customer count comes up in a sales conversation, ask which of those groups it means.

Training time cut from six months to threeVodafone Retail New Zealand, 2020

Vodafone Retail New Zealand used Skills Base to cut training time for new hires from six months to three. Skills Base’s customer stories describe it being used to plan training and to assign people to projects, and a promotion or a pay decision asks more of a rating than a training plan does.

Money and contract

What it costs, and what leaving costs

Skills Base publishes prices for three of its four plans. As of 14 September 2026, Teams costs $2.25 per person per month, Enterprise costs $4 per person per month, and the Free plan costs nothing. Ultimate is priced on request, and the AI Module, which carries the insights and the full version of the Sam assistant, is an additional fee with no published price. The price list does not state a currency, does not say whether plans are billed monthly or annually, and gives no minimum number of people, while the licences are described elsewhere as annual subscriptions. Ask about all three in your first conversation with sales.

Above 25 people, features rather than headcount decide which plan you need. Teams adds target levels, bulk import, custom fields and the programming interface. Single sign-on, competency analysis reports, multiple roles, scheduled reports and fixed assessment dates start at Enterprise, so if your IT team insists on single sign-on, your price starts at $4 per person per month. C1, one of Skills Base’s published customers, made that step up, moving from a basic version to the enterprise version with single sign-on.

Every person record counts as a paid seat from the moment it is created or an invitation is sent, whether or not that person ever logs in or has any data. If you load the whole workforce on day one and roll out team by team, you pay for everyone from the start. For large staged rollouts, Skills Base may, at its discretion, provide licence capacity up front for people who have no login yet, so agree those terms in writing before you import anyone.

The Free plan, which Skills Base calls “Free Forever”, covers up to 25 people and 250 skills, and comes without the data exports that the paid plans include.

The price list leaves out the contract terms that cost money. The contract renews automatically unless you give notice at least 90 days before the term ends. At renewal, fees can rise by up to a percentage set in your order form or, where there is no order form, by an amount Skills Base decides. If the agreement is terminated, fees for the rest of the term fall due at once. The pricing you agree is also confidential. Put a cap on renewal rises in the order form, and put the date 90 days before the end of the term in the diary.

Leaving is mostly a contract question, since you own your data and on every paid plan it exports as spreadsheet files, including the full history of changes to each person’s skill levels. Three details still need planning before you sign. The export of skill assignments leaves out skills people inherit from their team or role, which come out through the Report Builder instead. Your access ends with the contract, at which point you ask in writing for an export, and anything left behind can be permanently deleted at any time afterwards, so take the export before the end date. If a paid licence lapses, the account drops to the Free plan and, above 25 people, locks down, although administrators can still log in and export the data. If you want to stay but move to a cheaper plan, that goes through Skills Base support rather than the software.

There is a second route to this. The same job, built on the systems you already run, is usually a narrower piece of work, and we have mapped what that version looks like. See it as an agent

Limits

Where it stops

Any one of these limits could rule Skills Base out for you, whatever the price.

You want skills to appear without anyone rating them

Every level starts as a rating, whether it was entered in Skills Base, uploaded from a spreadsheet or sent in from another system. If the aim is to find skills nobody has declared, you need a different kind of product.

You need proof of ability that does not come from the person or their manager

Skills Base’s method is a self-assessment combined with a supervisor’s assessment, and it considers that objective measurement of ability should generally come from a formal examination run by an independent body. Where a role needs proven competence, a Skills Base level records what the employee and their manager think, and the proof has to come from somewhere else.

A lapsed certificate has to stop someone working

Skills Base tracks certifications that people have completed, are completing or are nominated for, in an optional qualifications module that is not available on the Free plan. By default they are entered as free text, employees with permission can update their own, and people who subscribe to expiry notifications get one notice a day listing every qualification due to expire a week from that day. If a lapsed or withdrawn certificate has to keep someone off a job, look at a product built for regulated frontline records as well.

A level is only as recent as the last round

In Skills Base’s 2026 customer report, the gap between reassessments averaged 9.5 months, with a median of six, and employees can unsubscribe from the reassessment reminders that are meant to bring them back for the next round. A setting that only Skills Base staff can switch on, at an administrator’s request, takes chosen skills out of a person’s assessment and fills them in automatically with the previous rating, so an old number can be carried into a new round without anyone looking at it.

AI insights can lag behind the ratings

The AI insights are built from the same self-assessments and manager checks, plus certifications and training records, and can take up to seven days to catch up when ratings change, so an insight can describe ratings that are no longer current. Skills Base’s contract gives no warranty on what its AI features produce and tells customers to check factual statements in the output before relying on them.

You expect your HR system to keep it up to date on its own

The scheduled file upload, which Workday supports as standard, keeps employee records in sync and nothing more. Single sign-on can fill in someone’s role, location or employee ID, but only when they log in. Beyond that there is a programming interface on certain plans, and Skills Base does not typically provide integration services, so that work falls to your own developers. Two further connections exist: Skills Base’s support team sets up a Credly connection for customers who subscribe to Credly Workforce, bringing digital badges in as qualification records, and Delaware, a consulting firm, integrated Skills Base with SAP SuccessFactors.

Your security review asks for the supplier’s own ISO 27001 certificate

ISO 27001 is the international standard for information security, and Skills Base describes itself as “ISO 27001 Aligned”, meaning it follows the standard’s principles and controls. The SOC (System and Organization Controls) and ISO 27001 certificates in its security documentation belong to the data centres that host it. If your review needs a certificate in the supplier’s own name, ask for it before the demo.

Two smaller limits need an answer before you sign. If your IT policy requires software to run on your own servers, Skills Base cannot meet it, although sign-in and account credentials can stay on your servers. The rating scale also needs settling before the first round, because if you change it after people have been rated, Skills Base rewrites the stored ratings to fit the new scale and the change cannot be undone.

Fit

Who it suits

The customers in Skills Base’s 2026 report are mostly Fortune 500 businesses, with a median rollout of 1,262 people, an average of 3,198 and the largest at nearly 19,000. If you plan to roll it out to around a thousand people, you would sit a little below the median in that sample.

Your managers will rate their people

Some organisations in Skills Base’s 2026 report had a supervisor’s check on as many as 97% of assessments, so a well-checked inventory is possible. Where managers take part, a level carries their view as well as the employee’s, and where they do not, the inventory holds only the employees’ own ratings.

Technical, field-service and consulting staff

Skills Base’s customer stories include Trane’s service technicians, C1’s engineers, Delaware’s consultants and the cyber security division of an unnamed “Top 4” accounting firm, and it serves manufacturing, engineering, mining, energy, technology and government. Trane started with a pilot of 250 technicians and grew to 2,926 service users in its commercial heating and air-conditioning business in the Americas. At C1, a company of 1,000 to 5,000 employees, the average time to assign engineers to projects fell from three days to 30 minutes.

You want to see the price and try it before a sales call

The per-person prices are on the website, and the Free plan lets up to 25 people try the method before anyone signs a contract. Ellucian rolled Skills Base out to more than 500 employees without running formal training for them.

You would rather nobody’s skills were guessed

Every level comes from the employee’s rating, the supervisor’s, or both, and Skills Base’s AI does not assess anyone. When an employee asks where a number came from, the answer is a rating rather than a machine’s guess.

Before you sign

What to ask on the demo

  1. Your dashboards show the average of the employee’s and the manager’s rating by default. Can we make the manager’s rating the official figure, or give it more weight?
  2. How do we see which skill levels have no manager’s rating behind them, and what did the customers whose supervisors checked close to 97% of assessments do to get there?
  3. Can colleagues rate a person’s skill level, or can a test result set one, and if so, where does that sit in the product?
  4. Are the $2.25 and $4 prices in US or Australian dollars, are they billed monthly or annually, and is there a minimum number of people?
  5. If we load our whole workforce before people start logging in, do we pay for every one of them from the first day?
  6. Would we sign with Skills Base Pty Ltd or Educrowd Pty Ltd, and what cap on renewal price rises will you put in our order form?
  7. What does the AI Module cost, and what can our HR team ask Sam without it?
  8. Is the ISO 27001 certificate your own, or your hosting provider’s?
  9. If we leave, will the export include the skills people inherit from their team or role as well as the full rating history, and how long after the contract ends do you keep our data?
Other options

Alternatives to Skills Base, including buying nothing

Alternatives to Skills Base depend on what the record is for: AG5 for certificates on regulated sites, Microsoft People Skills and TechWolf for skills worked out from people’s work, and a single rating round on the Free plan, with nothing bought.

The cheapest way to find out whether Skills Base would work for you is to run one rating round with a single team before you buy anything. The Free plan covers up to 25 people, but confirm with Skills Base first that it includes supervisor ratings, because those are what you are testing. It has no data export and no qualifications module, so treat it as a test of your managers rather than the start of your records. What you want to learn is whether they rate their people, and how far their ratings sit from the employees’ own. If they do not rate, buy nothing yet: on a paid plan, the levels you paid for would be the employees’ own ratings.

If you want skills to appear without anyone filling in a form, Skills Base is not built for that. Microsoft People Skills works out people’s skills from their work in Microsoft 365, and it costs $0 extra, so far, on top of a Copilot or Viva licence. Microsoft says it is not designed for promotion or pay decisions, and proficiency levels are not described in Microsoft’s People Skills documentation. TechWolf also works out skills from people’s work, with a proficiency scale of five levels by default, adjustable from three to eight, but its price is not published and the smallest customer it names in a case study has about 5,000 people. That is about four times the median rollout in Skills Base’s own customer report.

If the record has to prove that certificates are in date on a regulated site, look at AG5 as well, which is built for industrial and frontline workforces and manufacturing organisations. Renewi, an AG5 customer, found more success when HR facilitated the process and operations took ownership of compliance, so if certificates are the problem, bring operations into the decision before you draw up a shortlist.

If a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is on your plans, Skills Base’s exports are built to carry all the data across when that system goes live. Plan separately for the skills people inherit from their team or role, because the export of skill assignments leaves them out.

Our guide to skills intelligence software sets out the other products that ask people to rate themselves, and helps you work out whether you need that kind of product at all.

Sources and method

Every statement about Skills Base comes from Skills Base’s own website, help centre, contract, customer stories and Skills in Practice Report 2026, from articles its chief executive has published, from its LinkedIn company page and from the Australian Business Register, all read on 14 September 2026. What Skills Base publishes about its own product is taken as its description of that product. AG5’s description of itself and its Renewi case study come from AG5’s website, read the same day. Facts about Microsoft People Skills and TechWolf come from the sources listed below, each with the date it was checked.

Skills Base website
Skills Base help centre and contract
Other sources
Microsoft People Skills and TechWolf