Moodle review: the open-source LMS used by schools and enterprises worldwide. See features, MoodleCloud pricing, pros, cons, FAQs and top alternatives.
Moodle is an open-source learning management system created by Australian educator Martin Dougiamas, who began development in 1999 and released the first public version on August 20, 2002. The name originally stood for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment. Moodle Pty Ltd (Moodle HQ), the organization stewarding the project, is headquartered in Perth, Western Australia, with roughly 51 to 200 direct employees and a much larger global network of certified Moodle Partners.
Because Moodle is released under the GPL, institutions can self-host it for free with no license fees and no cap on the number of servers or users, which has made it the dominant open-source LMS globally, powering courses for several hundred million registered users across K-12 schools, universities, corporate training programs, and government agencies.
Moodle organizes learning into courses built from activities (quizzes, assignments, forums, wikis, workshops) and resources, governed by role-based permissions for administrators, teachers, and students. A large plugin ecosystem extends the core with integrations for video conferencing, plagiarism detection, custom reporting, and more.
Two commercial products extend the free core: MoodleCloud, a hosted SaaS edition for organizations that don't want to manage their own servers, and Moodle Workplace, an enterprise edition sold through certified partners that adds multi-tenancy, compliance tracking, and HRIS integrations for large corporate and government deployments.
The core, self-hosted Moodle LMS is completely free to download and run, with no license fees regardless of the number of users or servers — institutions only pay for their own hosting and any technical support they choose to bring in.
MoodleCloud offers paid, managed hosting tiers scaled by user count (roughly 50 to 750 users) for organizations that want a turnkey SaaS option, while Moodle Workplace is a separately licensed enterprise product sold through certified Moodle Partners with custom, quote-based pricing.
Yes, the core Moodle LMS is free and open source under the GPL, with no license fees for self-hosting. Paid options exist for managed hosting (MoodleCloud) and the enterprise Moodle Workplace edition.
Moodle was created by Australian educator Martin Dougiamas, who began development in 1999 and released the first public version in August 2002.
Moodle originally stood for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment.
Moodle is the free, self-hosted open-source LMS. MoodleCloud is a paid, hosted SaaS version for organizations that don't want to manage servers. Moodle Workplace is a separately licensed enterprise edition with multi-tenancy and compliance features, sold through certified partners.
Moodle has been translated into more than 100 languages by volunteer contributors through its AMOS translation platform.
Common alternatives include Canvas and Blackboard Learn in higher education, and TalentLMS, Docebo, Absorb LMS, and 360Learning for corporate training.