Compare Microsoft Hands-On Labs vs. QA

At ACI Learning, we don’t just teach IT and cybersecurity—we prepare you to thrive in the real world. Our training is hands-on, outcome-focused, and built to give you the practical skills that matter most, from immersive labs and certification prep to expert-led lessons by pros who’ve been in your shoes. Whether you’re leading a team or leveling up your own career, myACI—our dynamic training platform—turns learning into doing. It’s where knowledge meets performance. With virtual labs, engaging video content, and gamified elements like skill points and microcredentials, learners stay motivated and career-ready. Managers get powerful dashboards and reporting tools to track progress and align training with business goals. Trusted by companies around the world, myACI also offers Marketplace access to expand learning beyond IT and cyber. Scalable, flexible, and built for today’s learners, ACI Learning helps you grow your people, boost retention, and show the ROI of every training dollar.

CBT Nuggets has been a leader in on-demand IT training for more than 25 years. Subscribers have 24/7 access to training from trusted vendors like Cisco, Microsoft, AWS, and more. Our training library also offers office productivity courses for project managers, and end user courses on security best practices, Microsoft Office, and more. The CBT Nuggets training team has years of experience in their respective fields — these are certified experts in fields like networking, wireless, cybersecurity, data analytics, AI and machine learning, and more. Many CBT Nuggets courses map to IT certification exams, which are an excellent resource for those who want to become certified. As an on-the-job resource, CBT Nuggets training breaks down tricky technical topics into specific skills. Teams and training admins can assign videos to employees and track their progress. Whatever your goal, CBT Nuggets provides the training needed to be successful in your job.

Windocks provides on-demand Oracle, SQL Server, as well as other databases that can be customized for Dev, Test, Reporting, ML, DevOps, and DevOps. Windocks database orchestration allows for code-free end to end automated delivery. This includes masking, synthetic data, Git operations and access controls, as well as secrets management. Databases can be delivered to conventional instances, Kubernetes or Docker containers. Windocks can be installed on standard Linux or Windows servers in minutes. It can also run on any public cloud infrastructure or on-premise infrastructure. One VM can host up 50 concurrent database environments. When combined with Docker containers, enterprises often see a 5:1 reduction of lower-level database VMs.

Accelerate your data journey with AnalyticsCreator—a metadata-driven data warehouse automation solution purpose-built for the Microsoft data ecosystem. AnalyticsCreator simplifies the design, development, and deployment of modern data architectures, including dimensional models, data marts, data vaults, or blended modeling approaches tailored to your business needs. Seamlessly integrate with Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Synapse Analytics, Microsoft Fabric (including OneLake and SQL Endpoint Lakehouse environments), and Power BI. AnalyticsCreator automates ELT pipeline creation, data modeling, historization, and semantic layer generation—helping reduce tool sprawl and minimizing manual SQL coding. Designed to support CI/CD pipelines, AnalyticsCreator connects easily with Azure DevOps and GitHub for version-controlled deployments across development, test, and production environments. This ensures faster, error-free releases while maintaining governance and control across your entire data engineering workflow. Key features include automated documentation, end-to-end data lineage tracking, and adaptive schema evolution—enabling teams to manage change, reduce risk, and maintain auditability at scale. AnalyticsCreator empowers agile data engineering by enabling rapid prototyping and production-grade deployments for Microsoft-centric data initiatives. By eliminating repetitive manual tasks and deployment risks, AnalyticsCreator allows your team to focus on delivering actionable business insights—accelerating time-to-value for your data products and analytics initiatives.

GitLab is a complete DevOps platform. GitLab gives you a complete CI/CD toolchain right out of the box. One interface. One conversation. One permission model. GitLab is a complete DevOps platform, delivered in one application. It fundamentally changes the way Security, Development, and Ops teams collaborate. GitLab reduces development time and costs, reduces application vulnerabilities, and speeds up software delivery. It also increases developer productivity. Source code management allows for collaboration, sharing, and coordination across the entire software development team. To accelerate software delivery, track and merge branches, audit changes, and enable concurrent work. Code can be reviewed, discussed, shared knowledge, and identified defects among distributed teams through asynchronous review. Automate, track, and report code reviews.

Project Insight is a project and portfolio management software for growing companies. It centralizes project data from across expanding teams and multiplying software systems to streamline workflows, automate processes, and help you make confident, data-driven decisions about your business. Project Insight also empowers you to manage work at the project, program, and portfolio levels–simultaneously. Identify priorities and keep work aligned with strategic objectives. Track cross-level progress, resources, budgets, and risks & take immediate action from a centralized hub that automatically notifies teams of adjustments. Integrate & sync project data between the software tools you are already using like Azure DevOps, Jira, Microsoft Project, and ServiceNow. Optimize cross-team workflows, reduce double-entry, and get a clear picture of capacity, progress, budgets, and risks across your organization.

The leading golf course software. Lightspeed is the golf course management software used by more than 2000 golf clubs worldwide. It is supported by a team of golfers who are passionate about golf. Lightspeed gives you the peace of mind that comes with being able manage your entire facility on a single platform. The industry's most advanced tee-sheet will help you run your business like a professional. Lightspeed is the industry's most powerful cloud-based golf course management and tee sheet software. All from one system, and more efficiently than ever. Modernize your pro-shop and improve customer service by using a POS system that is tailored for golf retail. It's also fully integrated with your tee-sheet. You can run your pro-shop from anywhere, on any device.

Whether you already have a platform team or are just at the beginning of your internal platform development, Cycloid is designed to complete your internal solution with high-quality building blocks focused on specific DevOps and hybrid cloud best practices. Self-service portal, cloud governance, RBAC, CI/CD pipelines, built-in FinOps, and GreenOps are all modules that you can pick and choose to complement your internal solution or begin your digital transformation. Like a piece of a puzzle, Git-based and lock-free Cycloid can fit into your organizational strategy and solve the burning issues at hand. We can be a pillar for your organizational transformation by empowering and upskilling your existing teams, as well as improving DevX, the developer experience. How? We offer an engineering platform dedicated to DevOps and hybrid cloud adoption, allowing you to optimize how DevOps and end-users use technologies and clouds while working in alignment on common projects.

Software testing must be centrally managed and visible from conception to production in order to make software releases more secure and faster. Tricentis qTest enables teams to collaborate and ship faster, with less risk, by unifying, managing, and scaling testing across the enterprise. Robust testing includes a variety of testing tools, teams, test types, and testing methods. Tricentis qTest combines them all so that teams can release more confidently and reduce risk. It also helps identify opportunities to move faster - collectively. Automate more testing, increase the release velocity, and bring together teams throughout the software development process. Native DevOps integrations such as Jira, Jenkins and GitHub keep QA and development in sync. With a full audit trail, trace defects and tests back to development and requirements. Align teams with cross-project reporting.

A10 Defend Threat Control is a SaaS component within the A10 suite. It offers a DDoS attack map in real-time and a proactive, detailed list DDoS weapons. A10 Defend Threat control is unlike other tools that are available today, which provide convenience but at the expense of false positives or false negatives. It provides insights into attackers and victims, analytics and vectors, trends and other characteristics. This helps organizations establish a stronger security posture by providing actionable insights that block malicious IPs who can launch DDoS attacks.