CloudShare

What CloudShare is

CloudShare is a virtual IT lab platform that lets software companies put customers, partners, employees and prospects inside live, hands-on copies of their product. Its home page describes "AI-powered virtual IT labs for training, sales demos, POCs, and cybersecurity" and promises to "Spin up live, interactive environments in minutes." The headline puts the two audiences side by side: "Turn users into experts and prospects into customers."

The company behind it is CloudShare Inc., with addresses in Denver, Colorado and Tel Aviv, Israel. The home page states it is trusted by 1M+ users worldwide and puts its track record at ~20 years of delivering results.

For a customer education team the case is simple. Instead of teaching software through slides and screenshots, each learner gets a working environment of the real product to explore, practice in and break safely, while the trainer watches and helps. The company's argument is that hands-on practice with the real product is usually "too slow, too costly, or too hard to scale," and that its labs solve that.

What the labs do

Replica environments. CloudShare builds "hands-on, software replica environments with guided content paths and real-time collaboration," which the site calls risk-free "play and break" environments, so that skills transfer directly to the real software. Training can run as self-serve sessions or as virtual instructor-led training (VILT), and the solutions menu lists self-paced learning and onboarding alongside VILT. Immersive tasks and activities inside the environment are meant to speed up onboarding and lift course completion rates, and Nirit Peled of Thales singles out "the ability to create a complex environment within minutes."

Guidance while people learn. Instructors and sales reps can monitor users "over their shoulder" as they explore the software and offer AI-powered assistance. In-built AI assistants guide users and help them get unstuck, and users can chat live with each other, with trainers and with always-on AI assistants. Slack integrations and webhooks keep the team informed about what is happening in any session. A trainer at Dominion, Daniel Torres, describes it this way: "Every student has an environment with several VMs. If they have problems, I can take control to help them in no time."

Building and scaling. Environments are created with one-click cloning and customizable templates, without installation or complex configuration, and learners reach them from any web browser anywhere in the world. The site describes a cloud-agnostic architecture that supports existing infrastructure, and a company blog post says custom environments spin up "in any cloud with no code and minimal configuration." The same Thales trainer also values the flexibility to modify the setup and to save the state of an environment, and Vinod Nair of RSA Security notes that "Pausing and restarting of VMs does not affect their integrity."

Measurement. Dedicated dashboards show how many demos and training sessions are running, when and where, with deep dives into individual and group engagement and course completion analytics, plus resource management analytics for scaling decisions.

LMS integration. The FAQ says CloudShare "integrates with standard LMS platforms so lab access, completion tracking, and reporting flow into systems you already use."

Customer training, onboarding and partners

The home page frames four problems the labs address. For slow onboarding, every new hire and new customer gets instant, hands-on access to a live environment. For low course completion, the company says hands-on practice labs "drive measurably higher completion and retention than lecture-based training." For partner product fluency, every partner gets "a live, always-accurate environment to train in and demo from," so they stay current as the software changes. For stalled sales, reps get a ready environment that mirrors the real product for demos and POCs.

The customer education angle is explicit: the site says better confidence with the product encourages "greater product adoption and long-term customer retention." Andres Perez, Trailhead Academy Solutions Architect Lead at Salesforce, says CloudShare "allows me to view students' progress and offer help in real time," and Harold Cowan of Aria Cybersecurity says he can "quickly provide demos and training to customers."

Sales, POCs, cybersecurity and sandboxing

Beyond training, the solutions menu covers sales enablement (POCs, demos and channel sales), cybersecurity training "in a risk-free environment," and sandboxing, which creates "even the most complex testing environments in minutes." A company blog post on cybersecurity practice labs says CloudShare's platform is designed for hands-on training in any industry and that teams can simulate threats, provide tactical field training and gather insights into team performance.

Resources for training teams

CloudShare publishes a good deal of material for training managers: eBooks, webinars, whitepapers, case studies, brochures, videos and a glossary of virtual lab terms, plus a downloadable guide to creating software training that covers the most effective ways to use AI. Its blog covers why real-time software training fails and how collaborative labs fix it, AI learning agents in corporate training, and the training KPIs a training manager should track.

Results, costs and buying

The home page lists its own impact figures: a 311% increase in buyer engagement, a 365% higher course completion rate and 1M+ people worldwide using CloudShare. A June 2026 post on its blog celebrates 39 G2 badges.

On cost, the site says "you don't pay for idle infrastructure" and that customers only pay for lab environments while they are active. Admins can automate environment suspension and deletion, set usage time controls and limits, and enforce policies through the admin dashboard, and multi-region hosting reduces latency for global users. Itai Weisman of ControlUp sums up the appeal: "Policies enable us to control consumption and not exceed our budget." The FAQ describes usage-based pricing so onboarding does not require a large upfront infrastructure investment. The home page shows no price list; the menu links to a pricing page and a Security & Compliance page, and the main calls to action are "Experience a lab" and a personalized demo.

Who it suits

CloudShare fits a software company whose product is complex enough that customers and partners need to use it to learn it: an enterprise software vendor running a customer academy, a security vendor training customers and partners on its tools, or a training team that delivers live virtual classes where every attendee needs their own environment. Teams that also want demo and POC environments for sales get both from the same platform, and the live monitoring and AI assistants help when a class is too large for one trainer to reach every learner.

The caveat is focus. CloudShare is a lab platform that plugs into an LMS rather than a full course builder, so most teams will pair it with the LMS they already use, and training that needs no live software environment gains little from it.