When choosing an LMS, an open-source option like Moodle can be appealing — the cost is lower and there are large user communities to get support from. We often answer questions about why someone should go with a cloud-based SaaS LMS like Academy of Mine instead of Moodle (or another open-source alternative).

Which LMS will be the best for you depends on a lot of variables, but if your business offers professional training, certifications, or continuing education, we're here to guide you along the way.

Advantages of Moodle

Open-Source Customization

Since Moodle is open-source software, you can theoretically build and customize the LMS as much as you like with plugins and the help of a development team. Open-source software originated in 1983 by a programmer from MIT named Richard Stallman. Mr. Stallman created open-source software on the principle that software should be accessible to all programmers, so everyone can continually modify, improve, and contribute to it.

Like most open-source software, Moodle is designed to be used by programmers. There is documentation and a large community to help you with problems you encounter, but it can still be difficult to succeed without technical knowledge/skills. Even with a developer on hand (or having those skills yourself), customizations in particular can be tricky. Any incompatibility between different plugins or customizations is your responsibility to troubleshoot and fix, along with platform crashes and bugs of all sorts.

Support Community & Documentation

The Moodle support community is very active, so if you do need help, most of your questions will have been answered online. That said, the support for open-source software is largely forum-based, so even though there are many support options at your fingertips, you don’t have a dedicated support team to contact when things get tricky.

If your company needs an LMS that provides you with 24/7 dedicated support, you'll want to work with a SaaS LMS like Academy of Mine.

Translate your site to 100 different languages

If you’re offering training in a wide variety of languages, Moodle definitely has an advantage here. Moodle offers what’s called language packs, which are packages that admins install into the LMS to change the language. Currently, Moodle has 100 language packs available. Language packs allow admins to change the language of their LMS or an individual course on-demand. Academy of Mine currently allows you to translate from English to Spanish, French, and ten other languages.

Moodle is Free

You can download Moodle for free, but there’s no such thing as a free lunch! Open-source software won’t cost you anything upfront, but it can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars after you hire freelancers, purchase a domain and hosting, and customize your platform. Unlike Academy of Mine, Moodle requires you to purchase additional services and plugins in order to effectively use the LMS. One customer of ours was paying twice as much with Moodle as they are now with Academy of Mine, and they were extremely unsatisfied during their time with Moodle.

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Disadvantages of Moodle

Primitive User Interface

Moodle's user interface feels dated in comparison to current norms. In other words, if you want your LMS interface to look and function smoothly as though you're using the latest iPhone, it’s going to take a lot of technical experience and may not be possible to build in Moodle.

This will affect not only your experience, but your customers' experience as well. If your bread and butter is selling courses that people take through your LMS, and that LMS has a clunky or unintuitive UI, your customers are going to struggle with it. This is especially relevant for our customers like Model Teaching, who often works with retired teachers — an audience that's both short on time and may not necessarily be tech-savvy.

Security Issues

With Moodle, whenever a plugin is patched, you need to manually update the software ASAP or you'll be at risk. With a SaaS LMS, your software and plugins are regularly updated by an expert tech team. That leaves you free to focus on managing and scaling training, not worrying about security issues.

Not User-Friendly

Managing your eLearning using Moodle is much more effective than using a homegrown solution, like a combination of Google Drive links, emailed PowerPoints, and private YouTube videos. Still, the user experience Moodle provides isn't necessarily great. On top of that, even if you do spend money on freelancers and take the time to customize Moodle, there’s no guarantee you'll match the user experience you can find elsewhere.

For example, if you’re creating self-paced courses in the Academy of Mine LMS, there’s a drag-and-drop course builder for you to create eLearning content and upload content like PPTs, SCORM, and videos. Then admins can report on the learner engagement and the progress they’re making in one place.

Self-Hosting the LMS

Unlike cloud-based LMSs that are hosted for you, with a platform like Moodle, you have to install the LMS on your own server. This means purchasing a domain name, self-hosting the LMS, manually updating plugins, backing up your data on a separate server, and more technical work.

Technical Skills (or Team) Needed

Open-source software is designed to be used by developers. So, if you don’t have a tech team – or developer experience yourself – using it can be a challenge.

Moodle requires you to:

• Self-host your LMS
• Customize your LMS without formal support, relying on community forums for help
• Purchase a domain and support it yourself
• Purchase, install, and regularly update plugins
• Install security measures and more

Hidden Fees

Open-source platforms come with a lot of hidden fees, as we've referenced in other sections above. On the other hand, we provide 24/7 support, 15 hours of free onboarding help for new enterprise clients, and consultations for custom development to make your LMS your own or add necessary integrations.

Advantages of Academy of Mine

B2B Portals for Organizations and Groups

Using our B2B Portals, you can create separate areas to train people from different organizations. Portals are managed by a representative from the company or group of customers using the portal, so the LMS site owner isn't inundated with questions. Using this functionality, you can sell training licenses to and onboard entire organizations at once in bulk, without using more than one LMS.

Portal admins can:

• Customize the URL of their training portal, including using a custom domain
• Attach their logo to their portal to eliminate vendor ties
• Enroll learners into courses
• View learner reports for users in that portal
• Purchase more training access
• Add learners manually or in bulk

...and that's just the start. To learn more about what portal admins can do, check out our support documentation.

24/7 Expert Support

With Academy of Mine, our software is only part of the value you get from managing training with our LMS. Your cloud-based LMS is installed, hosted, and backed up by our team of developers, and we have agents on call 24/7 to answer questions and help with anything you need. That way, you can focus on providing high-quality education and training to your customers, while we handle all the technical aspects.

Built to Scale

With a cloud-based LMS like ours, you don’t have to worry about running out of storage for content or server space to onboard more users. From 200 monthly active users (MAUs) to 1,000+, we have you covered. Our LMS is designed to scale with you as you grow, and if that means building out new features and adding different integrations during your growth, we can help you do that.

If you want more proof that Academy of Mine can help your business scale and scale with you as it does, check out these customer stories:

• We helped our customer grow their business, without sacrificing user experience: How an OSHA-Certified Safety Training Company Grew from 3,000 to 15,000 Customers
• This customer went from zero online courses to 300+: How RTI Transformed Training and Continuing Education with Academy of Mine’s LMS
• Our LMS let this customer transfer their thriving offline business to being eCommerce based: How Model Teaching Seamlessly Trains K-12 Teachers & Schools Online

SCORM Compatible and Supports SCORM Reporting

SCORM stands for Shareable Content Object Reference Model. In short, when eLearning materials are put into SCORM packages, your courses can be easily moved from one LMS to another. If you have SCORM courses that were created using external authoring tools, like Articulate, you can easily import them into Academy of Mine. Even better, we support SCORM reporting, so you can track students’ progress in a SCORM course.

Easily Build Courses Inside the LMS

In addition to uploading SCORM courses, you can easily build self-paced courses in Academy of Mine, even if you don't have any design or development skills.

Using the course-builder, you can:

• Upload PowerPoints, videos, PDFs, and more
• Create multiple-choice quizzes, along with other types of quizzes
• Create text/HTML modules
• Create discussion board assignments to engage learners

Customize Your LMS

One major advantage of Academy of Mine compared to other SaaS LMS companies is that we offer custom development to our users. For example, if there’s a tool you use that doesn’t integrate with the LMS by default, or a feature you need to have built out, you can always get in touch to see how we can help. Check out one of our customer’s websites, AchieveCE, to see an example of what Academy of Mine can do to customize the front end of your LMS website.

White-Label Your LMS

If you'd like to customize the appearance of your LMS to match your branding, our built-in tools can let you do that.

You can:

• Upload your logo
• Adjust the colors of the LMS to match your brand
• Use your own domain or subdomain
• Customize titles, text, buttons, and menus of the platform
• Add custom CSS styling
• Use and modify email templates for learner notifications

Disadvantages of Academy of Mine

Higher Upfront Cost

Academy of Mine offers two pricing plans, starting at $999 monthly. This might seem steep initially, but you can end up paying just as much (or more) with Moodle. You just won't be paying it directly to them — you'll spend that on software, plugins, and additional services to get the most from the LMS.

Moodle Cloud does offer plans that start at $160/month for 50 users and goes up to $1,990/month for 750 users, although you won't be able to install any plugins or integrations.

Limited Language Translations

With Academy of Mine, admins can switch the language of their site from English to Spanish, French, or German. We also allow you to switch the language of your LMS to eight other languages currently not supported on-demand, but you need to reach out to support to get started.

Why Choose Academy of Mine?

Long story short, if:

• You're not technically savvy and/or don't have a team of developers on hand
• You need deep customization, especially combined with 750+ users
• You want high-touch customer support available 24/7
• User-friendliness is a high priority for you

...then Moodle is probably not the right choice for you and your business. A cloud-based SaaS LMS like Academy of Mine might cost more money upfront, but that will pay dividends over time with ease of use for you and your customers. And of course, when it comes to scaling professional development, compliance training, continuing education, and other accredited training programs, the support we provide at Academy of Mine is hard to beat.

So if you’re ready to upgrade the way you manage and report on eLearning today, let’s talk.