Kandji vs Rippling IT for a Corporate Training Provider

Split your fleet by purpose before picking a tool. Exam and testing devices need strict, single-purpose lockdown so a candidate can't tab out to search for an answer. Staff laptops for instructional design, LMS administration and sales need normal management: updates, encryption, access control. Contractor instructor laptops, if they're personally owned, generally need neither full MDM enrollment nor exam-grade lockdown, just scoped access to the LMS and course materials they're teaching that cohort.

If your certification exams run on company-owned iPads, largely yes. Kandji supports single-app lockdown on Apple devices, the same underlying capability Apple calls guided access, and it's a reasonable way to make sure a testing iPad can only run the exam application during a session. That only covers Apple hardware, though, so if your exam platform runs on Windows terminals instead, Kandji won't reach them.

For the instructional design, LMS admin and sales side of the business, Rippling IT's coverage across Mac and Windows matters more than exam-grade lockdown, because that's rarely what those roles need. What it adds is tying a new instructional designer's laptop setup to the same hiring record used for payroll, so credentials and course access are provisioned once instead of separately in three systems.

If a client or accreditor ever asks how you guarantee an exam wasn't compromised, the answer needs to reference device configuration specifically: was the testing device locked to a single app, was network access restricted during the session, and who has admin rights to override that lock. Neither Kandji nor Rippling IT is a proctoring tool on its own; they're the device layer underneath whatever proctoring or exam software you already run, so the integrity story has to combine both.

A contractor instructor teaching a single course for you usually shouldn't have their personal laptop enrolled in your MDM platform at all. Scope your management to what you actually own: the exam kiosks, the office laptops, any loaner gear you issue to an instructor for the length of an engagement. For instructors using their own hardware, control access through LMS permissions and revoke them the day the course wraps, rather than trying to extend device management onto equipment that isn't yours.

A small training provider often handles kiosk lockdown and staff onboarding manually for years before it becomes a real problem, and that's a reasonable choice as long as someone is actually following the checklist every time. Say you're weighing whether to bring on a dedicated technical hire to manage this instead of adopting a platform: national wage data puts the median salary for a software developer, a reasonable proxy for the kind of technical role many training providers actually post for, at $135,980 a year¹, and filling that kind of role typically takes over a month from posting to accepted offer, with SHRM's 2025 benchmarking putting the median time-to-fill for a nonexecutive position at 44 days². That timeline is worth knowing before you assume a hire will solve an exam-integrity gap faster than turning on automatic lockdown policies would.

Before evaluating either platform, walk through a live exam session end to end and write down every point where a candidate could plausibly leave the testing application: a home button, a notification banner, a browser tab switch. That list becomes your actual requirements document. A platform that can't close every item on it isn't ready to run your certification exams unsupervised, no matter how well it handles staff laptops elsewhere in the business.

Run that same audit again after any policy change, not just once at rollout. A single-app lockdown configuration that worked at launch can quietly stop enforcing itself after an OS update changes how a setting is applied, and the only way to catch that is to actually sit down with a test device on the current software version and try to break out of the exam application yourself, the same way a candidate looking for shortcuts would.

Use this walkthrough to build your requirements before evaluating either platform:

1. Walk through a live exam session end to end, from the candidate's seat.
2. Write down every point where a candidate could plausibly leave the testing application, such as a home button, a notification banner or a browser tab switch.
3. Record whether the testing device is locked to a single app, whether network access is restricted, and who holds admin rights to override the lock.
4. Turn that list into your requirements document, the standard every candidate platform must meet.
5. Check each candidate platform against every item, and rule out any that cannot close them all.