The Moodle alternative for institutions without a systems team.
You are weighing a free licence against what your Moodle costs to keep standing: the hosting bill, the upgrade weekend, the plugins to re-test, the advisory that lands on a Friday. Here is the comparison as we would say it out loud, Moodle's wins included.
Should you move off Moodle?
Lurno is a hosted multi-tenant learning platform from Augmental Learning. Moodle is the most widely deployed open-source LMS in education — self-hostable and free, with a commercial Workplace tier for multi-tenancy. Move to Lurno if the real cost of your Moodle is a person's time: hosting, upgrades, plugin compatibility, security patching. Move if you need separate branded organisations for campuses, schools or client companies without standing up a second installation. Move if you want AI authoring, tutoring and grading assistance that behaves the same way everywhere, grounded in your own documents and logged. Stay on Moodle if you have an in-house systems team, want full control of the stack and value having no vendor dependency — that is real, and Lurno does not offer it, because Lurno is hosted with no self-hosted edition. On price: Moodle LMS is free and Moodle Workplace is commercial through certified partners; Lurno's published tiers start at $119 a month.
- Total cost of operation
- What a platform costs after the licence: servers and storage, backups tested by restoring them, major-version upgrades rehearsed, plugins checked against each version, advisories triaged and patched, and the staff hours all of it takes. A free licence sets that cost to zero on the invoice, not in the budget.
Lurno and Moodle on the points that decide it
| Capability | Lurno | Moodle |
|---|---|---|
| Licence cost | Published tiers from $119 a month, 15% off billed annually | Moodle LMS is free; Moodle Workplace is commercial, through certified partners |
| What it costs to run | Included — hosting, backups and availability are ours | Self-hosted: infrastructure and operations are yours to fund and staff |
| Version upgrades and plugin compatibility | One version, upgraded for everyone. Nothing to re-test | An internal responsibility — upgrades on your calendar, plugins checked against each version |
| Security patching | Applied by us, across every tenant | Yours to triage and apply, or your partner's under contract |
| Separate campuses or client organisations | Nested sub-organisations in the core product, each with its own branding and custom domain, plus a branch tree where a role cascades down the branch | Not in the core product — Workplace, a partner contract, or parallel installations |
| Tenant isolation | separation built into the platform itself, enforced in the database | Follows from the route you take to separate tenants |
| AI in the product | Native: authoring drafts, an in-course tutor, grading drafts, a copilot for your data | Arrives through third-party plugins rather than the core product |
| AI grounding, safety and audit | One policy for every call — grounded in your documents with citations, personal data redacted first, every draft in the audit log | Varies by plugin |
| Control of the stackThis row is why many institutions stay, and it is a good reason. | Hosted by Augmental. There is no self-hosted edition | Self-hostable, with the source and no vendor dependency |
| How you start | By invitation today; self-serve signup is in development | Install it yourself, or engage a certified partner |
Moodle pricing and Workplace positioning from Moodle's own Workplace page at moodle.com, checked 24 August 2026. Lurno's figures are on pricing.
What actually changes
Nobody schedules the upgrade weekend
Lurno runs one hosted version. No major-version window to plan around, no plugin set to re-test against it, no staging clone to keep in step. The work of keeping the LMS standing stops being work.
- Backups, patching and availability sit with us. Your on-call rota loses a service.
- New capabilities arrive with the product, not as a plugin someone must evaluate, install and own.
One tenant per school or client, from the core product
Sub-organisations nest inside your organisation, with an internal branch tree beneath them: a role granted at a branch cascades down it. Each carries its own branding and its own custom domain with automatic TLS, so a client company sees its academy, not yours. A corporate academy runs training for 15 client companies from one tenant. A K-12 publisher runs 114 schools on one platform.
- Separation is enforced underneath the platform, not by a filter a later change could forget.
- Partner sign-on (silent SSO) hands a learner from a tenant's own portal into their academy.
AI you can describe to a governance committee
Every AI call follows one policy, because there is one product rather than a set of plugins with different authors. Generation is grounded in documents your organisation uploaded and cites the document, version and page. Personal data is redacted before anything reaches a provider. Nothing the model writes enters a live programme, and no grade is released, until a person accepts it.
- The request, the accepted draft and the rejected draft are separate entries in an audit log that cannot be quietly edited.
- Pick the provider per organisation — OpenAI, Anthropic or Google — or connect your own key so calls bill to your account.
Where Moodle is the better choice.
Institutions with in-house systems teams who want full control of the stack and no vendor dependency. That is Moodle's genuine advantage, and it is not a small one. You hold the source. You choose the server, the country it sits in and the day you upgrade. You can write a plugin for the one workflow your registry insists on, and nobody can price you out of software you already run. Two decades of community work and a global partner network come with it.
If your Moodle already runs well — hosting that works, an upgrade routine people follow, a plugin set you trust — much of what you would pay Lurno for is work you have already done. Better to keep it than replace it out of restlessness.
Stay, too, if a conformant SCORM or LTI 1.3 runtime gates your rollout. Those standards are modelled in Lurno and the runtime is being built; if your catalogue is packaged content on day one, that is a fair reason to wait.
And stay if self-hosting is a requirement rather than a preference. Lurno is hosted, with no self-hosted edition — better said here than in week three of a procurement. If open source is the deciding factor and you want a lighter codebase to run yourself, LearnHouse is worth a look.
Included in the platform, not sourced from a plugin
Nested organisations and a branch tree
Sub-organisations for campuses, schools or client companies, each with an internal branch tree. Groups, custom roles and a permission catalogue you can read.
Your brand, your domain
Per-organisation branding, a custom domain with automatic TLS, configurable login backgrounds, renameable terminology, partner sign-on (silent SSO).
Assessment and grading depth
19 question types, 7 assessment types, rubric grading in analytic, holistic and single-point forms, peer review, portfolios, one grading queue, psychometrics with adaptive IRT/CAT.
Grounded AI with a person in the loop
Upload a PDF, DOCX or PPTX and generation cites the document, version and page it used. A check on our side stops the tutor giving answers away. The model drafts grades; it never releases one.
Evidence procurement asks for
A audit log that cannot be quietly edited, access reviews, GDPR consent, DSAR and erasure with a two-person rule, a FERPA addendum and a DPA. Aligned to ISO 27001 practices. multiple languages, right-to-left included, at WCAG 2.1 AA.
SCORM, xAPI and LTI 1.3
In developmentModelled in the product; the runtime is being built. Talk to us if standards conformance gates your rollout — the one place where the Moodle you already run may be the safer bet.
The rest of the shortlist
Before you put this to a committee
Bring your Moodle and we will be specific.
Show us a course, your organisation chart and the plugins you are afraid to upgrade. We will say what moves cleanly, what must be rebuilt, and where staying put is the better call.