Most partner programs do not fail because the strategy was wrong. They fail because the strategy lived in one team's heads, and nobody else in the company knew what to do when a partner-sourced lead landed or a partner-related ticket came in.
That makes partner enablement a training problem, and training problems get solved with either process or software. The honest answer is that you should reach for software later than most vendors would like.
What actually matters in this category
External learners. Partner enablement means training people who do not work for you and never will. Some platforms treat external users as a bolt-on with awkward seat licensing. If you are training partners rather than only staff, check this first, because it is the difference that most often makes a tool a bad fit after purchase.
Role-specific paths. The single biggest failure mode in partner training is one giant course covering the entire program that nobody finishes. What a sales rep needs to know about partners is not what support needs to know. A platform that makes splitting by role easy will get finished; one that makes it a project will not.
Completion visibility. The reason to buy a platform at all is usually to answer "who has actually been trained". If you do not need that answer yet, a document may genuinely be the right tool.
Time to first course. Partner enablement competes with everything else on a partnerships team's plate. A tool requiring weeks of setup tends to lose to the shared drive in practice, regardless of how much better it is on paper.
How to choose
If you have no dedicated L&D function and the goal is getting a repeatable program documented and assigned quickly, start with the lightest option that gives you role assignment and completion tracking.
If you are building a genuine partner academy, with certification tiers that partners care about and external learners at real volume, that is a different purchase. Look at course platforms rather than documentation tools: the difference that matters is whether external learners, branding, and certificates are native or bolted on.
And if you have a handful of partners and no reporting requirement, do not buy anything yet. The failure mode we see most often is a platform purchased before there was a program worth putting in it.
The step most teams skip
Training the whole company on a partner program only pays off if the partners in it were worth the investment. Enablement amplifies whatever program design it is given, including a bad one.
Getting partner selection right is a separate discipline with its own method, which is what RevRadius exists to do. Worth sorting out before you spend on the enablement layer above it.
If you want the program-design side of this rather than the tooling side, we wrote that up in Turning Partnerships From a Team Into a Company-Wide Skill.