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Three of the six platforms here publish what they charge. Three will not sell to a small team without a call. Two of the six are open source, so owning the software outright is not the rare part. What is rare is a course structure built around the work people actually do, with one company answerable for it afterwards.
Where to start
Most businesses shopping for an LMS already know what is not working. Onboarding runs off a folder of slides somebody updates when they remember, or the compliance record is a spreadsheet nobody would want to show an auditor. Those are structure problems rather than licence problems, and if the answer is a platform you own and somebody else runs, what managed Frappe Learning actually covers is set out in full.
1
Docebo, LearnUpon and Litmos each publish a feature grid and a Contact Sales button where the number should be. Three of the six print a figure on the page. TalentLMS starts at one hundred and nineteen a month for forty users, 360Learning at eight dollars per user a month up to a hundred, and MoodleCloud at a hundred and seventy dollars a year for fifty. That is normal for this category and it is not sinister, but it does mean with the other three the first honest comparison is a demo call away. Ask early what the number is at the learner count you expect in two years.
2
A subscription hands you an empty platform and a login. Somebody still has to build the course structure, the batches, the quizzes, the certification rules and the assignment flow, and on every platform here that somebody is you or a contractor you hire separately. It is the work that decides whether anybody finishes a course, and it is the work nobody quotes for. The same gap runs through every comparison on this site.
3
Standing a learning platform up is the easy half, and every platform here manages it. What changes afterwards is the meter. Docebo counts active learners monthly, yearly or by registered licence depending on which contract you signed, and bills the overage when you pass the band. Ask what a year of ordinary growth does to the figure before you sign, because in this category the terms run long.
Six platforms, three private price lists, and no two of them counting a learner the same way. One will not say how it counts at all.
VS
Free Plan Up To Five Users
Priced In Published User Bands
Course Library Is An Add On
TalentLMS is a platform a small team can start on without talking to anybody, and the free tier covers five users properly rather than as a trap. Above that the plans run Core, Grow, Pro and Enterprise, priced in plain user bands rather than on who logs in. Core is one hundred and nineteen a month to forty users, Grow two hundred and twenty nine to seventy, Pro four hundred and forty nine to a hundred with six dollars a head above that and brackets running to a thousand. Every published figure is billed yearly. The ready made course catalogue is a separate purchase on every plan and every bracket.
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VS
Best Suited To Two Fifty Plus
Most Contracts Run Three Years
Analytics Is An Add On
Docebo is the heavyweight here and it is genuinely built for scale, with skills inference, hundreds of integration options and thirty million learners behind it. Their own pricing FAQ says the platform suits organisations training at least two hundred and fifty learners, so a team of thirty is not the customer they are looking for. There are two tiers, Elevate and Enterprise, and neither carries a published figure. Most customers sign three to five years, the minimum term is one, and advanced analytics, ecommerce, communities, gamification and the branded mobile app all sit outside the plan as paid add ons.
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VS
One Hundred User Floor
No Published Price At All
Implementation Is Included
LearnUpon is refreshingly direct about who it is not for, and that is worth more than a price list. Their pricing FAQ states plainly that the product will not suit anyone under one hundred users, anyone wanting it on their own hardware, or anyone needing HIPAA compliance. The three products start at one hundred users for employee training, one hundred and fifty for associations and three hundred for customer education, and none of them shows a figure. What every plan does include is an implementation consultant, a customer success contact and technical support around the clock, which is a real answer to the configuration problem rather than a feature tick.
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VS
Three Plans, No Prices
Deep Compliance Tooling
Its Pricing Page Redirects
Litmos has been selling into regulated industries for a long time and the feature grid shows it, with electronic signatures, escalations, enrolment approvals, equivalencies and continuing education all in the box. If your training exists because a regulator asks for evidence, that maturity is worth paying for. The three plans are Foundation, Platinum and Platinum AI, and all three read Contact for Pricing. Their pricing URL now redirects to a plans page listing features and no numbers, which is a fair summary of how this whole category sells.
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VS
Eight Dollars Per User
Team Plan Caps At One Hundred
Built For Peer Authoring
360Learning is the second platform here that will show you a number, and the only one you can buy by the month with no commitment behind it. Team is eight dollars per user a month up to a hundred users, with a thirty day trial and no minimum user count. Above a hundred you are on Business or Enterprise and both of those read Request a Demo. What you are really buying is collaborative authoring, where the people who know the work write the courses and their colleagues review the drafts, which is a genuinely different bet from buying a ready made library.
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VS
The Software Is Free
Cloud Plans Are Published
Seven Fifty User Ceiling
Moodle is the other open source platform on this hub and the cheapest thing here by a distance. The software is a free download, and MoodleCloud publishes five plans running from a hundred and seventy dollars a year for fifty users to two thousand one hundred and fifty for seven hundred and fifty, every one of them billed annually and charged in Australian dollars. Plugins cannot be installed on any of those plans, support is a knowledge base and a ticket queue rather than a person, and past seven hundred and fifty users their own site sends you to a Certified Partner for a quote. What you are comparing here is not the licence. It is who does the configuration.
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About the service
Managed Frappe Learning is not a subscription with our name on the invoice. Your business owns the instance, the course content and the source code, the batches, quizzes and certification rules are built around the training you already deliver, and one company is answerable for the configuration, the Frappe Cloud hosting and the support afterwards. If you want something switched on this week and nothing custom about it, our managed Zoho Learn service is usually the better place to start.
Five of these six tie the price to the size of your audience in some published form, and the sixth will not say either way, which means the comparison changes shape as the audience grows. Training forty staff and training four thousand customers are different purchases even on the same product. Work the numbers at the audience you expect in three years, and be honest about which audiences you will end up serving, because customer education and partner training arrive later than anybody plans for and they are usually the expensive ones.
The other thing worth noticing is that several of them sell ready made course libraries and we do not, while 360Learning bets on your own people writing them and Moodle leaves it to a community that gives its material away. Frappe Learning ships an empty catalogue, so if what you need is four hundred compliance modules on the shelf by next quarter, buy them from somebody who already has them. That is a real limit and it is stated here rather than buried. For a fair number of businesses the honest answer is a content library from one of them and the platform from us.
Underneath all of it is a question about who owns the structure. On a subscription platform the vendor decides what a course can be and the answer changes when they ship. On an open source system, and two of the six here are open source, you decide, which is more work and more control. Whether that trade is worth making depends on how ordinary your training actually is, and most of it is more ordinary than people expect.
A learning platform switched on changes nothing on its own. Course and batch structure, the four user roles, quiz rules, assignment review, certification criteria and live class scheduling decide whether anybody finishes anything, and every one of those is a decision rather than a setting. We read the training you already deliver before any of it gets configured.
Not one of these six will put in writing that the bill stops moving when the audience grows, so growth and the bill are the same event. Six hundred a month covers configuration, content migration, course structure, admin training, Frappe Cloud hosting and the support queue, and enrolling another five hundred people does not touch it. At thirty learners that is more than a small subscription here. At three thousand it is not.
A certification rule that has quietly stopped matching the policy does not announce itself. Courses still complete, certificates still look like certificates, and the gap turns up when somebody asks for the evidence in a format the regulator will accept. Watching the configuration is part of the fee rather than something bought separately afterwards.
What is the best LMS for a small business?
There is no answer that survives contact with your own learner count. What separates these six is who they will sell to. TalentLMS will sell to five people for nothing and to a thousand on a self serve plan. 360Learning has no minimum at all and publishes eight dollars a head to a hundred users. MoodleCloud starts at a hundred and seventy dollars a year for fifty users and stops at seven hundred and fifty. Docebo says its own floor is around two hundred and fifty learners. LearnUpon says one hundred, in writing. Litmos will talk to anybody but names no figure until you fill in the form. Frappe Learning is open source, so the software costs nothing and what you pay for is the work.
How does an LMS decision go wrong?
Rarely on the software. It goes wrong on the content and the structure, which nobody quotes for. The platform gets bought, a login arrives, and three months later there are two courses in it because nobody had a spare week to build the rest. The subscription bills the whole time. Ask who is doing that work before you ask what the plan costs.
Who owns the platform if you implement it for us?
You do, and on Frappe Learning that is a property of the software rather than a clause we agreed to. The instance is yours, the courses and the completion records are yours, the source code is open, and every rule we configure stays with you. Stop paying us and the platform keeps running. On a subscription the data is exportable, but the software itself stops.
Is it cheaper to just subscribe to one of these instead?
For a small internal training programme, almost certainly yes, and we would rather say so here than argue around it. TalentLMS hosts five users for nothing, and MoodleCloud runs fifty for a hundred and seventy dollars a year. If you have thirty staff, one onboarding course, no compliance obligation and somebody willing to administer it, use one of those and spend the difference elsewhere. What none of those figures covers is somebody building the courses and keeping the structure right, which on their side is either your operations lead giving up evenings or a contractor billed separately.
Which of these platforms will actually show you a price?
Three of them will. TalentLMS prints Core at one hundred and nineteen a month, Grow at two hundred and twenty nine and Pro at four hundred and forty nine, each billed yearly against a band of users, with six dollars a month for every user above the band. 360Learning prints eight dollars per user a month on its Team plan to a hundred users, billed monthly, and nothing at all above that. MoodleCloud prints five annual plans from a hundred and seventy dollars to two thousand one hundred and fifty, in Australian dollars, and publishes nothing for the partner work above seven hundred and fifty users. Docebo lists Elevate and Enterprise with a Get Your Pricing button where the number belongs. LearnUpon lists three products and a starting user count for each. Litmos lists Foundation, Platinum and Platinum AI, all three reading Contact for Pricing. We publish six hundred and twelve hundred, which is not a virtue so much as a different sales model.
What happens when something breaks after the first cohort?
On a subscription the software is supported and the configuration is not, and almost everything that goes wrong is configuration. A quiz that passes people it should not is not a bug their support desk can fix. Here it is one company and one number, fixes sit inside the fee rather than being quoted for, and when an upstream Frappe Learning release changes something that affects you, that is our problem before it is yours.
Do we have to move every course at once?
No, and most people should not. Onboarding usually goes first, because it runs to a fixed schedule and the improvement shows up inside a month. Compliance refreshers, product training and anything customer facing follow once somebody has decided what each course is actually for. Running new starters through the new platform while an old library sits where it is for a quarter is normal rather than a compromise.
Can you take over a Frappe Learning instance somebody else set up?
Often, and it is real work rather than a tidy up. We read the course structure, the batch setup, the role assignments, the quiz and certification rules and every customization somebody added, then say plainly what is worth keeping. Occasionally the honest answer is a clean instance with the courses and completion history migrated across.
How long before the first cohort starts a course in it?
Two to five weeks for most teams, and longer where an existing library has to be converted rather than uploaded. Configuration starts the week we begin, not after a discovery phase that bills separately. What people notice first is rarely the software. It is that nobody is chasing anybody for a completion certificate any more.
We have someone technical in house. What is left for you to do?
Standing the software up is a morning of work and Frappe Cloud will host it for a modest monthly fee, so if that were the job you would not need us. The time goes into course and batch structure, role permissions, quiz design and certification rules, and into the awkward cases nobody thinks about first. Somebody joining a batch halfway through. A course that has to be retaken every year. Evidence a regulator will accept.
When should you not hire us for this at all?
Two cases, and both are common. If you have one onboarding course and eight new starters a year, a shared folder and a checklist are genuinely fine and we will say so. If what you actually need is a catalogue of several hundred ready made compliance modules by next quarter, Litmos and Docebo both sell one and Frappe Learning ships none, so buy theirs.
What if the software is not the real problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and the fit review costs nothing. A platform built around training nobody wanted only records the disengagement more precisely. A fair number of these conversations end with three courses being deleted, one being rewritten, and no new software at all.
What does this actually cost if we go through you?
Two flat monthly tiers, both listed on the managed Frappe Learning page. Standard at six hundred a month covers configuration, content migration, course and batch structure, admin training, Frappe Cloud hosting and ongoing support. Priority at twelve hundred adds two concurrent requests, faster turnaround and a quarterly review of roles, course structure and completion reporting. Neither tier counts learners.
What happens if we want to leave later?
Thirty days notice ends it and nothing is stranded. The instance, the courses and the completion records were always yours, so there is no migration and nothing to hand back. What stops is us. That is a harder offer for a subscription platform to make, because there the software is the thing that stops.
What do you need from us before we start?
Whatever the current training material lives in, the list of who has to complete what, and an hour with the person who chases people for completions today. The walk through takes a few days and costs nothing, and it ends with a plain answer about whether Frappe Learning suits the business.
