Moodle Pricing: Open Source vs. Cloud

Disclaimer: We source public information for Moodle’s pricing, including its own site. All pricing information within this resource is accurate at the time of publication.

Moodle is an open-source learning management platform designed to help schools educate their students. It allows trainers to build their curriculum with plug-ins for workflows and content. Moodle also has a cloud hosting option. In addition to schools, companies can use Moodle for their corporate training initiatives, especially its Moodle Workplace solution that allows them to customize the LMS to fit their unique needs.

In this post, we’ll discuss Moodle’s pricing in more detail.

How Much is Moodle?

Moodle is an open source solution, which means organizations can download it for free. However, there’s a cloud hosting option for schools or organizations that prefer not to host the software themselves.

Moodle Open Source Costs Considerations

While Moodle is free to download, hosting the solution comes with additional expenses separate from the product itself. These costs can quickly add up and are tough to estimate from the start.

The costs of implementing and hosting the solution on your own include:

  • The hardware costs of a server (an estimated $4,000 up front cost)
  • The pay for IT employees, including their overtime hours for the project and daily hours for maintaining a server
  • Any implementation, training or other ongoing services required through a third-party consultant or other contracted specialists
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MoodleCloud

MoodleCloud comes with five pricing tiers based on the number of users and the amount of storage. Each tier includes all of the features of Moodle, such as unlimited courses and activities, a mobile app, a personalized site name, session recording and web conferencing with BigBlueButton.

Users can participate in a 28-day free trial that includes 1,000 users and 5 GB of storage. Once the trial ends, they can choose from any of the five tiers. The tiers are:

  • Starter: $120 per year for 50 users and 250 MB of storage
  • Mini: $210 per year for 100 users and 500 MB of storage
  • Small: $390 per year for 200 users and 1 GB of storage
  • Medium: $900 per year for 500 users and 2.5 GB of storage
  • Standard: $1,700 per year for 1,000 users and 5 GB of storage

Premium and Enterprise Tiers

Moodle provides Premium and Enterprise hosting plans for organizations with over 1,000 users, with higher storage requirements or that want more customization and flexibility. Pricing for both plans isn’t available, so companies will need to contact Moodle for a quote.

The Premium plan accommodates up to 100,000 users and up to 100 TB of storage. In addition to unlimited courses and activities, it includes a support portal staffed by Moodle Experts, enhanced branding features, custom domains, a community plug-in library, multi-tenancy, integration with Student Information Systems (SIS) and Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS), control of scheduling for feature upgrades, SOC 2 compliance and choice of geographic hosting region.

The Enterprise hosting tier supports up to millions of users and has unlimited storage. It adds on designated success specialists, a course library, enhanced security profiles and custom service level agreements (SLA).

Moodle Workplace

Moodle Workplace is only available via Moodle’s Certified Service Providers network. Pricing can vary depending on the provider, and prospects will need to consider additional costs for services, such as software integration, implementation and support. Prospects can find a local service provider on Moodle’s site.

How to Reduce the Costs

Using an open source solution doesn’t always mean the organization is choosing the least expensive option.

When an organization first downloads Moodle, an in-house IT team must take charge. This IT team will use materials from Moodle’s website to get the solution running. They can request consultation from Moodle, but will likely be charged for any services.

Depending on the tech environment of the business, IT teams will either want to host Moodle on an existing on-premise server or a cloud server. Moodle’s pricing plan includes the costs of cloud storage, but businesses aren’t limited to cloud hosting with Moodle and can compare prices with third-party cloud hosting services as well.

The costs of these options differ. Some businesses may not have an existing server to use, so the upfront cost is much higher. Instead, Moodle’s premium accounts host the data for them in the cloud. This adds to the monthly charge, but also decreases the costs of buying and maintaining a server.

Bottom Line

Open source solutions allow businesses to download them for free, but they also require in-house specialists and the funds to maintain company data on a server.

MoodleCloud’s pricing plans are available to host client data in the cloud. Clients are also able to increase the amount of data storage and the number of users with each offering.

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