How to Choose a Learning Platform: What to Compare Before You Decide

Compare the platform by the record, the expiry and the take-out, not by ticks on a slide. Moodle is one candidate, not the default.

Picture a meeting with two suppliers at the table, both showing the same slide: a course catalogue, a polished progress bar and a green tick against the word “SCORM”. After forty minutes you still do not know whether the system will be able to say, a year from now, that Inese’s repeat instruction expires in March, that Jānis opened the course and did not complete it, and that this row can be taken out in a format someone else can read, not only this supplier’s support desk. How to choose a learning platform is not, at this point, a question of which button looks more modern, and it is not a question of which brand is this year’s best LMS: it is a question of what you compare before someone sells you a word.

We are writing this article because we implement Moodle for schools, institutions and companies, and because the people who most often reach us have already sat through three demonstrations and still cannot explain to the board how one system differs from another. The answer “take Moodle” is not the default here, because Moodle is one candidate we know how to implement, not the test to start with. The test starts earlier: write on one page who has to complete which course by which date, where that record will live in three years, and whether you will be able to take it with you if the supplier disappears, and only then compare products.

What a learning management system is, and when one is needed at all, we have already written separately, and this article starts where that one ends: you already know that the folder and the spreadsheet no longer carry the load, and now you have to choose which platform to put in their place, rather than buying the word that looks best in the procurement table.

Comparison starts before the product names

A comparison that starts with product names ends before it has begun, because the table shows what the manufacturer has named, not what you will be able to prove a year later. Two suppliers can tick the same columns (enrolment, courses, reports, standards) and still, in one system, “completed” means the file was opened, and in the other that conditions you yourselves wrote were met, and a procurement Excel does not see that difference, because both columns carry the same word, so if at this point you choose by brand or by the number of slides, you are buying a presentation, not a record.

The consequences cost more than the feeling of a bad choice, because after the contract is signed you are no longer comparing, you are maintaining, and if it turns out that the expiry column did not contain an expiry date but a note saying “that can be added during implementation”, you have bought work the demonstration hid behind a feature list. A year later that work is more expensive than any licence difference, because it is a person holding the system and the spreadsheet together, and we have seen it often enough to stop believing a table in which every candidate is green.

So the first object of comparison is not a product but the work the system has to do in your absence, and it starts with one page on which three things are written: which person, which course, which date; what happens when the date has passed; and what you will take out if you change supplier tomorrow. If that page stays empty or holds only “so that we have a modern platform”, you do not yet have anything to compare, and the demonstration will only fill the emptiness with other people’s words, but if the page is full, you can ask each candidate to show it on screen in your words, not theirs.

We apply this order to ourselves as we do to others, because Moodle too can look like the answer where the answer is a folder, and Moodle too can look like an exaggeration where the answer is an obligation with a deadline. The article on when a learning management system is needed at all stays next door, and this text does not rewrite it: here we assume that you have already crossed that threshold, and we talk about what to compare next, not about whether the threshold exists at all.

What you are actually comparing

The word “platform” in this market names at least three different things, and the same people sell all three: the first is a system in which the organisation decides who has to learn what, and accounts for completion by a date that can be checked; the second is a library or a content hub in which the person chooses what to watch and the system recommends but does not impose; the third is a classroom tool in which a teacher hands out assignments, collects work and awards grades, and which knows the rhythm of a term, not the expiry date on an employee’s certificate. If you compare these three things as one category, you are comparing a hammer with a shelf because both have wood.

Google, in its Classroom help text, shows a school tool (classes, assignments, grades, and parents can receive an email summary of a child’s work), and that is not an insult to the product, it is what the manufacturer itself has written in the first sentence. Microsoft calls Viva Learning, in its own documentation, a learning hub in Teams, where content can be discovered, recommended and watched from the organisation’s and partners’ libraries, and in its frequently asked questions it says plainly that this differs from a learning management system because it aggregates content from host systems, including from an LMS. If you buy a hub and think you have bought accounting, a year later you will have a handsome catalogue and the same spreadsheet you started with.

The consequences of this mixing are not symmetrical, because a classroom tool in a company that needs an expiry date becomes a place where the courses exist but the answer to the auditor does not, whereas a content hub that promises “learning in the flow of work” is useful for voluntary professional development and entirely useless if somebody has to prove that a particular person completed a particular course by a particular date. A learning management system put onto a school that only needed assignments and grades adds maintenance the teachers did not ask for, and a year later that maintenance looks like the reason “the LMS does not work”, although what failed was the choice.

The practical test is one question that can be asked before any brand: what in the system determines that this person has to complete this course by this date, and where is that decision visible without a commentary from the supplier. If the answer is “the system recommends” or “the teacher gives the class an assignment”, you are not comparing learning management systems but a library with a classroom, and that may be the right thing, but then it has to be named as such, because otherwise the procurement table will hand you a third green tick against a word that means something else.

Three worked examples, not a product line

The first example is a company for which training is a duty, not a hobby, and in Germany section 12 of the Occupational Safety and Health Act requires the employer to instruct employees sufficiently and appropriately on recruitment, when duties change, when new work equipment or a new technology is introduced, and to repeat the instruction regularly as needed, and no software is named there. In the United Kingdom the threshold is the same in form, and we have already set that out in the article on when a system is needed at all: the law requires a record, not a screen. What is worth comparing in this example is whether the candidate can show a named person with one course completed, a second overdue and a third whose deadline has expired, because if that cannot be shown without three reports and one spreadsheet, you have not bought accounting.

The second example is a school or a course whose rhythm is the term, not the end of a certificate, and Google Classroom is an honest candidate in that shape, because it does what Google has written: classes, assignments, grades, and the Workspace for Education edition is, under the terms last modified on 7 October 2025, intended for educational institutions that meet Google’s criteria and for non-profit organisations. Classroom can also be opened with a personal Google Account or with an organisation’s Workspace account, so to say that it “belongs only to schools” would be untrue; to say that it is built around the class is what the manufacturer itself shows. If your work is an assignment and a mark, comparing it with Moodle by the number of plugins is a worse test than simply looking at whether the teacher will open the tool at all on a Tuesday morning.

The third example is a training organisation that, after the course, has to be able to issue a confirmation and, a year later, show who received it. In France, from 1 January 2022, an organisation that wants public or mutualised funds needs Qualiopi quality certification, and in no government text we were able to read for this article is a learning management system named, because the certification requires a process that can be shown to an auditor, not a software brand. What is worth comparing in this example is whether the system issues a confirmation with the aim, the type and the duration, and whether that same row can be taken out if you change platform tomorrow, because otherwise you have bought a handsome course editor and left the proof in a folder.

In none of these three examples is the winner automatically Moodle, Canvas or Classroom, and we do not rank them as “best of 2026” either: a company with deadlines usually needs accounting, a school with a term often has enough in a classroom tool, a training organisation needs a confirmation and a row that can be taken out. If your case is a mixture of two examples, write both pieces of work on one page rather than looking for the product that does everything on a slide, because the product that does everything on a slide usually shows, in the demonstration, the half that looks better.

Five questions that belong in every demonstration

The first question is about the record, not the screen, and Moodle already draws that distinction itself: a teacher can put criteria on an activity, including that the material has been viewed, that a set grade has been received, or that the learner marks themselves as having finished, but course completion is a separate marker that gathers those pieces together. If the demonstration only shows you that a video was played, you have seen an activity log, not a competence register, so ask for one person, one course, three states, and watch how long the supplier needs to show them without an explanation.

The second question is the expiry date, because without it the reminders, the recertification and the report to management stay in a calendar someone is keeping in their head. In cheap systems this column is most often missing, or it is hidden behind “that can be added later”, and “later” means after the contract, when you are no longer comparing. If the deadline cannot be shown today with your date on it, it is not a hidden treasure, it is work you will buy separately, and that is worth knowing before the price looks small.

The third question is the take-out, and here the word “export” is not an answer until a format has been named. 1EdTech Common Cartridge is a standard with which learning materials and assessments can be packaged and carried to another certified system, and Moodle’s documentation shows this path as IMS Common Cartridge 1.1 in a backup, not as the latest 1.4 version, which is still in candidate status, whereas Canvas calls the course take-out an .imscc file and itself ties it to Common Cartridge. Ask for your real course to be taken out in this hour and opened somewhere else; if the answer is “we will do that in implementation”, you have already learned the answer.

The fourth question is where the system learns that the person is your person at all, because a learning platform is not a personnel register and will not become one, and if new employees have to be enrolled on courses by hand, you have moved the same spreadsheet to a new address. The fifth is the report someone will actually ask for: how many people in this department have missed the mandatory course, and when each one’s deadline expires, not how many courses were opened this month. If these five questions stay unanswered, the remaining columns (the mobile app, artificial intelligence, the “modern interface”) can be left in the second row, because they will not survive the first audit.

SaaS, installation on your own server, open source and commissioned work

The licence and the implementation are two different lines, and mixing them up means imagining that “free Moodle” is a cheap project. Moodle’s source code is available under the GPL, and that applies to the platform, not automatically to every plugin someone has put on the market, because each has its own stated licence, whereas the word Moodle and the logos are Moodle Pty Ltd trade marks, whose commercial use requires prior written permission. That means you can take the software, but you may not put the brand on your own shopfront as if you were the manufacturer.

MoodleCloud is Moodle’s own SaaS (software as a service), with published user quotas from 50 to 750 active accounts and storage from 1 to 50 gigabytes, and a site administrator there cannot install their own plugins and cannot install their own theme, which is not an insult to the cloud, but what Moodle’s support page says so that the platform stays simple. If you need a plugin that is not there, the official answer is to download the full Moodle onto your own server or to go to a certified partner. Moodle Workplace is yet another line, licensed, not open source, and available only through Moodle Premium certified partners, and we sell Moodle 5 implementation, not Workplace as our product, so this boundary is worth naming in good time, so that you do not buy from us what we cannot honestly deliver to you.

Installation on your own server gives you plugins, a theme and integrations, and it also gives you maintenance you no longer share with thousands of other cloud customers. Moodle 5.2 came out on 20 April 2026 and requires at least PHP 8.3.0 and one of PostgreSQL 16, MySQL 8.4, MariaDB 10.11.0 or Microsoft SQL Server 2019, and you can upgrade from 4.4 or newer, but Oracle is no longer supported from 5.0. The major versions arrive in April and October, an ordinary release has twelve months of general support and eighteen of security fixes, an LTS release has thirty-six months of security support, and in August 2026 the current LTS is 4.5 with security support until 4 October 2027, while the next LTS, 5.3, is scheduled for 5 October 2026. These dates are Moodle’s calendar, not a promise of ours, and they have to go into the budget before the licence looks free.

A commissioned layer on top of the product is a third line, not the default, and our own sentence, which we have written in the service FAQ, still holds here: if the process fits an off-the-shelf tool, take the off-the-shelf tool, it will be cheaper, and a custom system is justified when the process is your competitive edge or ready-made products demand too many compromises. A new Moodle implementation with us starts from €15 000 and usually takes 6–14 weeks, and that is a starting figure, not an invoice; the hourly rate for work on an existing environment is €50. A non-standard system with us starts from €8 000, and that is not an argument that a build is cheaper than Moodle, because those are the starting prices of two different pieces of work. When this test leads to a choice between an off-the-shelf product and a build, not between two learning platforms, that is written separately in the text on an off-the-shelf product or custom software.

How to read the “supports SCORM” and “supports LTI” columns

The column in which every candidate is green is the most useful place to stop, because the sentence “we support LTI” (Learning Tools Interoperability) without a version number is not an answer: 1EdTech now certifies LTI 1.3 and LTI Advantage, and LTI 2.0 looks newer by its number, but it stands with those versions whose support has ended. Which number has ended and which is still current we have already written in the neighbouring article; here it is enough to ask for the version in writing, because that is one line which later decides whether the next external tool attaches in an hour or as a new project.

On the SCORM side Moodle’s documentation says that 1.2 is supported and that it has passed ADL conformance test suite 1.2.7, and that SCORM 2004 is not supported in Moodle, even though part of the basic API has been implemented and some 2004 packages may look as if they work. That is not a promise that 2004 “never works”, and it is not a promise that 1.2 will work with your particular file, so the only check that says anything here is an upload of your real course during the demonstration, not a slide that carries the name of the standard. A newer version number is not a measure of quality until the file has been opened.

The 1EdTech TrustEd Apps directory is an official list of products the consortium has reviewed, vetted or certified, and it is a useful source the seller themselves did not write. That a product is not there is not a judgement that it is worse, because those who never applied are not there either, and the list can also include uncertified products if review data is available, so the directory is a question worth asking in writing, not a stamp with which to strike a candidate from the table. Five minutes in this list still say more than fifty slides, if you read what is there, not what you would like to see there.

We are not reading these standards again here as a textbook, because we have already done that in the neighbouring article, and here one sentence is enough to put in the procurement table in place of the tick that stands there now: name the version, show our file, take it out. If the supplier cannot do that in this hour, the “supports the standard” column has given you a feeling, not a fact, and a feeling is the worst thing you can buy with money meant for a learning system.

When the honest answer is Classroom, Teams or a folder

The honest answer is Classroom where the work is a class, an assignment and a grade, and where you are not asking the system to prove, three years later, an expiry date for a person who has long been in another department. Google has written that on the first help page, and we do not repaint it as “not a real LMS”, because that would be our slogan, not their sentence. If the teachers already live in Google documents and the calendar, one more system with its own sign-in is often a worse pedagogical decision than the assignment being done at all.

The honest answer is Teams and Viva Learning where the work is to find, recommend and watch content in the flow of work, and where the completion row, if it is needed at all, stays with the learning management system from which Viva can gather content. Microsoft itself says that assignment and completion sync with an attached LMS is not included in the Microsoft 365 bundle and that it sits in a separate Viva Learning or Viva suite, and that Viva is not intended for children or students, and that licences may be assigned to people from the age of eighteen. If you buy Viva thinking you have bought accounting, you have bought a door into a library and left the register where it was.

The honest answer is still a folder and a signature sheet where there are fifteen people, one course and one deadline a year. We have already said that, and we repeat it here only so that this article does not look like a hidden reason to buy a system anyway. If at this point you feel guilty that “everyone has been on a platform for ages”, that is not a test: the test is whether someone will ask you, next quarter, a question the folder cannot answer, and if there is no such question, the system will solve a problem you do not have.

We say these three answers out loud, because otherwise the comparison becomes one in which every candidate is “almost Moodle”, and then the only win we can sell is our implementation. Sometimes the most expensive service we can sell you is the one you do not need, and that sentence still holds when it means this week’s deal is not our Moodle line. Better to lose an implementation in which we would have to maintain an empty system than to gain a client who a year later asks why they have a platform in which nobody presses a button.

The hour that decides, before the contract

The whole of the preceding page is pointless if in the demonstration you are looking at the supplier’s course with the supplier’s data, so bring one real course in the format it already exists in for you today (a SCORM 1.2 package, a video with a test, or even the same PDF people now receive by email), and ask for it to be put into a test environment in this hour, not “at the start of implementation”. If the environment is not ready for your file, it is not ready for your work, and that is the cheapest fact you can obtain in this project.

The other half of the same hour is one named person, not “demo students”, but a row that looks like your staff list: name, department, course, deadline. Ask to be shown that this person has completed one course, missed a second and that the deadline has expired on a third, and ask for the report you would show to management, not the one about how many videos were opened this month. If that view needs three screens and one explanation, after go-live you will live in those same three screens, only with the contract already in your pocket.

The third action is the take-out: ask for the same course to be taken out and name the format you want to see (a Moodle backup, IMS Common Cartridge 1.1, Canvas .imscc), and then ask what this file will carry with it — materials, assessments, LTI links, or only titles. Common Cartridge does not promise that the process will travel with the file, just as an export does not promise that the course will open the same way in the other system. What you are buying in this minute is honesty: a supplier who shows the losses is more useful than one who promises there will be none.

If any of these three things is moved to “the implementation phase”, you are no longer comparing platforms, you have started a project with a supplier you have not yet chosen, and that is the most expensive way to choose, because after that every mismatch looks like your requirement, not a hole in the slides. The hour before the contract is the only moment in which you can still stand up and go to the next candidate without saying that “we have already invested”.

What we implement and what we will tell you not to buy

We implement Moodle 5: a new environment from scratch or a migration from 3.x and 4.x, with a theme in your colours, with roles and course categories, with VPM, eParaksts, LDAP or SAML where that is the right identifier, and with a connection to the student or personnel register, so that people are not created in two places. The work starts with an audit, then configuration, then customisations, then training for teachers and administrators, and if a plugin is needed we first check whether one already exists and only then write our own. We have written all of that on the Moodle implementation and maintenance page, and this article does not turn it into another price list.

We will not tell you to buy Moodle where the work is a class in a Google environment, where the work is a content hub in Teams, and where the work still fits in a folder. We will also not say that MoodleCloud with a cap of seven hundred and fifty users and without your own plugins is the same thing as Moodle 5 on your own server, and we will not say that Workplace is “the same Moodle under another name”, because it is a licensed product in a different channel. If after the demonstration hour it turns out that your course will not open or that the take-out is a promise, we will say so, even when that means this week’s estimate stays unopened.

If you already live in a system and the question is whether to stay, the test is the same, only against the existing environment, not against a slide. Stay if the record, the expiry and the take-out already work and the pain is only in the colour or in one missing column that can be added without rebuilding the core. Change if you are already keeping a second truth in a spreadsheet, if updates no longer come, or if the take-out is a file nobody has opened. Migration is one of our more frequent kinds of work, and that is not an argument for changing the system only because we know how to do it; it is an argument when the existing environment no longer answers those same five questions.

Before you write to us, write that one page without a product name and mark which of the five demonstration questions you cannot answer today. If the page is empty, start with the neighbouring article, not with an implementation, but if the page holds work the folder no longer carries, write to us, even when the more honest answer will be not to buy what we sell, and to stay with the tool you have already named.