In today’s digital age, an LMS is a great tool for organizations to manage their learning and development programs. While there are many commercial solutions available in the market, some vendors offer free LMS programs that can meet your training needs without burning a hole in your pocket.

In this article, we’ll explore the best free LMS solutions and how they can help you build a valuable yet cost-effective training program.

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Best Free LMS

The online training and LMS markets are growing at a remarkable rate, and so are the number of solutions available for purchase. Finding the perfect match for your business needs within a fixed budget can be challenging.

According to a Mettl survey, 55% of organizations increased their L&D budgets. You could, too, but investing in an LMS that doesn’t serve your training needs or offers more than you require could waste your budget. Building employee skills and improving retention are becoming top training priorities amid the skills gap, making it essential to find a solution that adds real value to your business.

While most solutions come with tier-based, upfront or custom pricing, some also offer free versions with many features similar to paid plans, like multiple courses, customer support and customizations. You can easily test how the platform works with your training program for free before you purchase, or upgrade to a paid plan to meet growing LMS requirements later down the line.

Here’s our list of the top free learning management system on the market and how they can supplement your training goals without breaking the bank.

TalentLMS

TalentLMS provides training solutions to organizations of all sizes, including course creation and management, learner progress tracking, performance reporting, gamification and video conferencing. You can create personalized courses or course packages for different learners, localize the system in multiple languages and automate repetitive tasks to save time and effort.

Its free plan allows you to create a maximum of 10 courses and onboard 10 users with unlimited email support, with a 100MB per uploaded file limit and no cap on the total storage.

Make your LMS available to global users. Source

• Company Size: Small, Medium, Large
• Relevant Industries
  • Manufacturing
  • Healthcare
  • Retail
  • Call Centers
  • Food and Beverages
  • Automotive
  • Supply Chain
  • Real Estate
• User Suitability: Educators or trainers, students or learners, software engineers, business owners and sales and marketing managers. Also provides APIs to build custom integrations that need technical developers.
• Software Delivery Model: SaaS
• Mobile Support: Offers Android and iOS applications that allow users to access assigned courses and training anywhere from any device and download courses for offline usage.

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Content and Course Management – 100
• Platform Capabilities – 100
• User Management and Gamification – 99
• Assessments – 96
• Mobile Capabilities – 93

Top Benefits

• Easy Branding: The solution allows you to personalize the platform using your custom domain name, company logo, colors and themes, and interactive templates.
• Customer Support: Unlimited email support is available for all free plan users.
• Expanded Capabilities: You can integrate the software with programs across multiple software categories, such as HRIS, CRM, eCommerce, customization tools and more, with apps like Zoom, BambooHR, Salesforce, SAML 2.0 and Zapier. It simplifies workflows and helps you share information across systems from a single location.

Primary Features

• Course Builder: Create online training courses using colorful templates and drag-and-drop tools. Add various types of content in the form of documents, videos and presentations, and provide custom certificates to users upon course completion. Supports SCORM, cmi5 and xAPI specifications.
• Progress Tracking: View and track learner progress through courses, add completion dates, monitor scores and more on an interactive dashboard.
• Gamification: Enhance learner engagement with gamification tools like points, levels, badges and leaderboards.
• Learning Paths: Build connections between courses and allow learners to take them in a predefined order.
• Blended Learning: Offer a blend of self-paced courses as well as instructor-led training.

Monitor how students are moving through a course. Source

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer an integrated gradebook.
• Doesn’t support LTI specifications.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Push Notifications – Supported with partner integrations
• Anonymous Grading – Supported with partner integrations
• Group Chat – Supported with partner integrations

Cost Upgrades

You can upgrade to the Starter plan for $69/month which allows up to 40 users and unlimited courses and email support.

Other paid plans include:

• Basic – $149/month, up to 100 users and one branch
• Plus – $279/month, up to 500 users and three branches
• Premium – $459/month, up to 1000 users and 15 branches
• Enterprise – quote-based pricing for flexible user limits and unlimited branches

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Thinkific

Thinkific is a software platform that creates, sells, markets and delivers online courses. It enables users to learn online collaboratively and turn their unique skills and expertise into business profits. Some of the content types it supports include PDFs, audio files, quizzes, surveys, and resources such as Articulate Storyline and Typeform.

Thinkific free plan comes with one course, one community, two spaces, one administrator, unlimited students and 0% transaction fee. It also offers 100% ownership of content, along with 30-day email support and chatbot support.

Enable creators to build their own community and foster brand relationships. Source

• Company size: Small, Medium, Large
• Relevant Industries
  • Education
  • Non-profit
  • Media and Entertainment
  • Finance
  • Sports
  • Information Technology and Services
• User Suitability: Trainers, educators, students or learners, and business owners. Technical users or developers are required for building webhooks and apps or using the API.
• Software Delivery Model: SaaS
• Mobile Support: Thinkific Mobile is a native mobile application built for Android and iOS devices. Offered only with the Start and Grow plans.

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Ecommerce – 100
• Content and Course Management – 93
• Assessments – 90
• Platform Capabilities – 89
• User Management and Gamification – 83

Top Benefits

• Increase Profitability: The solution offers Ecommerce Suite, a built-in tool designed specifically for online sales with integrated payment processing, selling tools and bookkeeping features. It helps you enhance sales volumes and improve profitability.
• Connect Seamlessly: The Thinkific App Store, an application marketplace, offers a collection of free and premium integrations, with applications for various categories such as business operations, email and marketing, site design and assessment. Its Zapier integration allows users to share new ideas on a central platform.
• Improve Collaboration: Help your team stay connected in real time with a Space — a virtual room within a community where users can host discussions, facilitate introductions, post important updates, invite students to share assignments and more. You can create a Space for each cohort of students and Spaces with other groups for general discussions.

Primary Features

• Course Builder: A drag-and-drop course builder helps configure course settings, pricing, drip schedules and publishing. Create MCQs for quiz lessons and use the WYSIWYG text editor to insert a video or embed an image or audio file within questions and answers.
• Website Themes: Customize website themes, a set of style and layout options, to help build a consistent, attractive website. Thinkific offers three primary themes, each with three or four styles for a total of 12 combinations, to apply and customize the learning environment.
• Course Surveys: Administer course surveys to learn about why students enrolled and their expectations from the course.
• Community: Create a learning community and allow all users to build meaningful relationships, share interests and common goals and engage with each other.

Collect learner feedback through detailed surveys. Source

Limitations

• Doesn’t have partnership with third-party content providers who offer off-the-shelf courses.
• Doesn’t offer assignments, completion certifications, question bank or course compliance tools in its free plan.
• Mobile application not included with free and basic plans.
• Doesn’t offer custom branding in the free version.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Anonymous Grading – Not supported
• Test Builder – Moderately supported outside the box
• LTI Compliance – Not supported

Cost Upgrades

The solution offers a free plan and five paid plans. The paid plans are:

• Basic – $36 per month
• Start – $74 per month
• Grow – $149 per month
• Expand Plus – quote-based price

Annual payment plans come with a 25% discount.

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Canvas

Canvas LMS is a cloud-based platform that provides educational institutions with the tools to create, manage and deliver online courses and learning materials to students. The solution, widely used by universities, colleges and K-12 schools, provides a user-friendly, flexible and customizable platform for online learning.

Canvas is free to teachers through its Free-for-Teacher (FFT) account which comes with essential features and functionality. FFT accounts can be accessed by students, parents and administrators, and come with a file storage of 500 MB/course and 50 MB user/group.

Create interactive content and personalize learning by logging in on the FFT app. Source

• Company Size: Small, Medium, Large
• Relevant Industries
  • K-12
  • Higher Education
  • Corporate Education
  • Information Technology and Services
  • Hospital and Healthcare
• User Suitability: Teachers, students, parents and administrators. Developers are required for API, application and open-source development.
• Software Delivery Model: SaaS
• Mobile Support: Canvas offers a suite of iOS and Android-compatible native mobile applications for students, teachers, parents and events.

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Assessments – 100
• Collaboration – 100
• Platform Capabilities – 95
• User Management and Gamification – 94
• Mobile Capabilities – 93

Top Benefits

• Fairer Grading: The solution allows anonymous grading that hides the student’s information from submitted assignments when they’re being graded. This ensures that all evaluations are free of external bias and purely conducted based on each learner’s performance.
• Better Organization: Student context cards provide a simplified overview of each student’s progress with insights and context about their academic performance. The context is generated from grades in the gradebook, standard page view and participation activity in course analytics.
• Expanded Capabilities: The solution offers an open API for third-party integrations. It offers SSO authentication with Facebook, GitHub, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Twitter. Instructors can also use external collaboration tools like Microsoft Office 365 or Google Drive as LTI for additional teamwork and communication capabilities.
• Analytical Insights: Canvas’ reporting suite provides account and course analytics data to users, making it easier to make more informed decisions and improve course effectiveness.

Primary Features

• Assignments: Build assignments in the form of quizzes, graded discussions and online submissions (i.e. files, images, text, URLs, etc.). Sync them to automatically show up in the Grades, Calendar and Syllabus so students can view them.
• Learning Paths: Build Mastery Paths to facilitate skill-based learning for students based on their performance and unique needs. Create assignments with targeted learning activities for different users and sections. Automatically assign coursework based on the score achieved for a previous assignment.
• Anonymous Instructor Annotations: Enable anonymous instructor annotations, a course opt-in feature in DocViewer-supported submissions, so students don’t see the instructor’s name.
• Moderated Grading: Allow multiple reviewers to grade a single student’s work. Graders can submit suggested grades for the assignment and the moderator (or instructor) can review and assign a final grade.

Confirm all students have received the grades using Grader. Source

Limitations

Canvas FFT:

• Doesn’t allow users to search courses.
• Doesn’t offer sub-account management.
• Doesn’t offer a calendar course appointment scheduler.
• Doesn’t offer Student Information System (SIS) imports.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Screen Sharing – Supported with partner integrations
• Email White-Labeling – Not supported
• Ecommerce software integration – Not supported

Cost Upgrades

Canvas offers quote-based pricing.

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Moodle LMS

Moodle is an open-source LMS designed to provide managers, administrators and instructors with a single integrated system for creating and delivering online courses. Its mobile app lets you view and manage courses, grade assignments, communicate with learners, track course progress and more.

See your courses at a glance on your phone screen. Source

• Company Size: Small, Medium, Large
• Relevant Industries
  • K-12
  • Higher Education
  • Information Technology and Services
  • Hospital and Healthcare
  • Non-Profit Organizations
• User Suitability: Educators or trainers, students or learners, software engineers, administrators, business owners
• Software Delivery Model: SaaS and self-hosted
• Mobile Support: Moodle LMS offers Android and iOS applications and gives access to education and training activities on the go, even offline.

Highest Rated Modules According to Our Data

• Compliance – 100
• Mobile Capabilities – 100
• Assessments – 96
• Integrations and Extensibility – 95
• Platform Capabilities – 92

Top Benefits

• Customize Your Platform: You can customize the platform with your company’s brand colors and logos to match your branding and create a familiar experience for all users.
• Improve Extensibility: The platform offers more than 2,000 open-source plugins, along with certified third-party software integrations such as LearnerScript, Poodll, ReadSpeaker and BigBlueButton.
• Enhance Accessibility: The solutions’ Atto Text Editor and integrated Brickfield Accessibility Starter Toolkit automatically analyze courses and check all content to identify any accessibility issues and provide recommendations.
• Build Competency Frameworks: You can manually create or import competency frameworks that help describe the level of understanding or proficiency each learner has in certain subject-related skills. It helps you assess their competencies and come up with effective improvement plans to address shortcomings.
• Drive Collaboration: The solution facilitates collaboration via real-time discussion forums, team messaging and virtual classroom sessions. Teachers, students and other users may send and receive private messages within the platform and get notified about events such as new forum posts, ungraded assignments or new achievements.

Primary Features

• Course Creation: Allow educators and trainers to create and edit courses.
• Learning Plans: Create learning plan templates with competencies and assign them to individuals or groups of learners.
• Badges and Certificates: Recognize and reward top-performing learners with site-wide badges for activities like finishing a set of courses and course badges for activities that happen inside the course. You can also build certificates using custom-made templates and issue them from within the course.
• Grading: Enable teachers to rate students against each of the course competencies. Allow users with Teacher permissions for a given course to add manual grade items to the gradebook.
• Custom Reports: Create custom reports using a drag-and-drop interface. Apply filters in reports to sort data and generate previews.
• Calendar: Display site, course, group, user and category events in addition to assignment and quiz deadlines, chat times and other course events on an integrated calendar.

Set up templates to build different learning plans. Source

Limitations

• Doesn’t allow users to set up a Timetable for lessons and exams out of the box.
• Doesn’t provide native integration with data visualization applications.

Features Not Fully Supported According to Our Data

• Upload Video for Assessment – Supported with partner integrations
• Content Creation Tool – Supported with partner integrations
• Virtual Classroom Using Video Conferencing – Supported with partner integrations

Cost Upgrades

Moodle is an open-source platform, free to download, build and host a user’s own Moodle site.

MoodleCloud is the Moodle learning environment that is hosted in the cloud. Enterprise-level features are not available on MoodleCloud.

Its off-the-shelf plans (billed annually) are:

• Starter – $110
• Mini – $200
• Small – $300
• Medium – $830
• Standard – $1,600

Local taxes may apply to all models.

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Chamilo

Chamilo is a cloud-based learning solution that helps businesses develop virtual campuses to facilitate online or semi-online training. It has features like course catalogs, certifications, skill management, configuration and SCORM support. It also allows you to sell eLearning courses online to employees and other customers, and work on the go through the mobile app on Android devices.

View all student certificates on a single dashboard. Source

• Company Size: Small, Medium, Large
• Relevant Industries
  • Information Technology and Services
  • Education Management
  • Computer Software
  • Telecommunication
  • Sports
• User Suitability: Educators or trainers, students or learners, software engineers, business owners and sales and marketing managers.
• Software Delivery Model: SaaS
• Mobile Support: Provides an Android mobile application that only works with virtual classrooms.

Top Benefits

• Course Privacy: Hide exclusive or internal courses from the general public even if other course offerings are published. Configure user access to all courses to keep sensitive data safe.
• Engaging Elements: Fun, interactive elements help increase learner engagement. For example, the card game plugin allows you to upload images, divided into several “pieces,” for learners to unmask bit by bit each day they log in.
• Multi-language Support: The solution supports multiple languages such as Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Czech, Danish, German, Greek and French, making it easier for you to cater to users from all over the world without linguistic barriers.

Primary Features

• Course Management: Create, add and organize course documents and files (text, images, audio, video, HTML) using in-built directories/folders. Generate speech from text, upload and edit pictures from the user’s browser, drag and drop uploads and more on a single platform.
• Tests: Use the test tool to create, update and import tests, quizzes, assignments and exams in the course. Create multi-format questions like MCQs, Fill in the Blanks and Oral Expressions, use automated scoring to grade learners and exchange real-time feedback.

Learners can use the test ranking mode to view their scores in a ranking table of the best scores from other learners, ordered by score and test date.

You can also:

• Create, edit and delete questions.
• Import and re-use questions from other tests, other courses and sessions
• Sort questions by categories and use tags to recognize question types
• Custom Certificates: Create and auto-generate custom course completion certificates for each user. Add signatures, images, personalized tags, QR codes and public certification URLs, define certificates per course and export them in PDF format.
• 360-degree Videos: Allow users to upload and play 360-degree videos using the Chamilo player integration that also supports 3D lenses.

Allow learners to view their assessment scores. Source

Limitations

• Doesn’t offer a native mobile app for iOS devices.
• Doesn’t offer advanced gamification features.

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How We Choose Products

Our team of writers and analysts at SelectHub is committed to giving you the best recommendations based on our data. To make our list, products had to meet two criteria:

1. Closely match the topic
2. Earn a top-5 analyst score in our selection platform

Our analyst scores are based on an in-depth research process using primary and secondary sources. This includes SelectHub Analyst Briefings, direct communication with vendors, and reviewing materials such as user reviews, product brochures, specification sheets, case studies, user manuals, and technical documentation.

Our platform’s Scoring Engine processes the research and computes the analyst score. The score also factors in platform settings such as industry and company size.

Learn more about our research methodology and editorial standards

Other Options

If our top five picks aren’t quite the right choice for you, don’t worry — here are some more options you can consider.

EdApp

EdApp is a mobile training platform designed for teams of all sizes. Its suite of LMS tools includes a course builder and library, admin and learner portals, PowerPoint converter, reporting and analytics, and a template library.

Free Plan

Its free plan allows you to create unlimited lessons and store them in an editable course library.

It Includes:

• Unlimited courses and users
• 1,000+ editable courses
• Branding
• Unlimited video and audio upload
• Online support
• Built-in gamification tools

Sakai

Sakai is an open-source LMS that provides eLearning solutions to educational institutions. Its features include course creation and delivery, grading and assessments, third-party integrations, custom roles and permissions, and user management. The solution also provides collaboration tools like messaging, discussion forums, email and chat to enhance communication among users.

Free Plan

You can download the software for free and configure it according to your needs.

Schoology

Schoology is an online learning platform that caters to the learning needs of K-12 students. It aids in course creation, content curation, lesson design, personalized instruction, testing, assessment and more. Learners can use the software on PCs, mobile, tablets, iOS, Android or Kindle.

Free Plan
You can get in touch with the vendor’s sales team for pricing information.

Teachable

Teachable is a cloud-based, code-free learning and training solution designed for freelancers, L&D specialists and SMBs. It allows you to build interactive courses, provide virtual coaching, sell eLearning content online and do more on an all-in-one platform.

Free Plan

Its free plan features include:

• $1 + 10% transaction fee
• Code-free course builder and web pages
• Email support
• One admin & author seat

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Next Steps

While there are many commercial solutions available in the market, free LMSs are a solid tool for businesses that are still exploring their options, have limited users and data sets, or are looking to limit their expenses. With tools and functionalities close to the capabilities of paid versions, they give the most value for money since they don’t charge a penny!

Looking for more insight? Our free comparison report makes it easy to see how leading systems stack up side by side.

Have you used an LMS before? Which features do you think are must-haves for a free LMS? Let us know in the comments below!