Blackboard Pricing: How Much Does It Cost?

For a pricing comparison of popular vendors, check out our LMS Pricing Guide.

Blackboard is among the most popular learning management systems (LMSs) for K-12 and higher ed organizations.

While Blackboard doesn’t publicly disclose the actual price of their product, we’ve gathered all the details available to help you estimate the costs.

How Much is Blackboard?

Blackboard is often purchased by larger educational institutions seeking an LMS solution out-of-the-box. Smaller institutions don’t need the same bells and whistles, but may want to estimate Blackboard’s costs to weigh all available options.

Blackboard has several packages that extend their offerings to government and business organizations as well. The pricing for military elearning will be vastly different from pricing for small business elearning.

With the help of some unconventional sources, here are two estimations:

• Blackboard By the Numbers –  Michael Feldstein, partner at MindWires Consulting, estimates the average cost of a customer license to cover a university or school district with the full Blackboard package is $160,000/year. His assessment is based on research from John Farmer, an analyst with Instructional Media + Magic (im+m). However, keep in mind, this article is from 2006.
• “Pricing for Blackboard and Others?” Forum – In 2012, a Moodle forum post asked for help pricing Blackboard with 300 learners. Many commenters chimed in to describe the benefits of Moodle, but the final reply claimed one school was quoted at $1,200/student/year for Blackboard, adding up to $36k for a class of 30 students.

Bottom Line: The only way to accurately estimate the cost of Blackboard is by contacting the vendor directly. Blackboard offers price quotes based on your number of learners. Searching online for pricing is helpful for many LMS solutions, but Blackboard is among the vendors that don’t release this information to the public.

Conclusion

Blackboard simply doesn’t offer pricing information to the public, but similar LMS vendors do. Depending on whether your school is willing to host an LMS solution on its own server, Moodle could be a likely second choice, and Edsby offers competitive pricing that appeal to schools of all sizes.

These are just a few top LMS options, and if you need to learn more about how to choose an LMS, check out The Definitive Guide to Learning Management Systems. It discusses all the features and benefits of LMS software, and has a buyer’s guide for identifying the right fit for your school.