Canvas vs Moodle: An In-Depth Comparison [July 2025]

Canvas and Moodle are leading LMS platforms, designed to deliver online courses and manage student learning. But while both offer similar core features—course creation, grading, assessments, and integrations—their strengths lie in different places.

Canvas is a user-friendly, ready-to-go LMS built for speed and simplicity. It’s great for institutions that want quick setup, built-in assessments, and smooth integrations without a steep learning curve.

Moodle, by contrast, gives tech-savvy instructors complete control. With its deep customization, flexible grading, and advanced analytics, it’s ideal if you’re willing to handle a more hands-on setup experience.

To help you better understand how both platforms are different, we compared Canvas vs Moodle on the following criteria:

• Setup experience 
• Course creation tools
• Assessment and engagement tools
• Grading and performance monitoring tools
• Integration capabilities

We also give you a quick summary of their pricing in the comparison table below.

Canvas vs Moodle: Comparison Summary

What is Canvas?

Canvas is a learning management system launched in 2011, but originally envisioned in 2009 by Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley to rethink how edtech could serve students and educators. Today, it supports over 20 million users worldwide across K–12, higher education, and professional learning environments.

But rather than functioning as just an LMS, it serves as the central hub of Instructure’s ecosystem, supporting the full spectrum of institutional needs across teaching, learning, and administration.  

Its key features include out-of-the-box course creation tools instructors can use to design lessons, assignments, and discussions; a course page that serves as the central hub for announcements, reminders, and class activities; a Gradebook to help educators organize and manage grades; a SpeedGrader for a more granular grading experience; a robust analytics tool to track participation; 500+ partner integrations with popular tools like Google docs and Wooclap, and lots more. 

Overall, Canvas LMS is ideal for organizations seeking a structured, guided platform with comprehensive out-of-the-box features and an intuitive user experience to enhance their teaching experience.

What is Moodle?

Moodle is an open-source LMS launched in 2002 by Martin Dougiamas. It was born from a desire to give educators a flexible platform for creating quality online education experiences. Today, Moodle powers learning for over 444 million users across K-12 schools, universities, nonprofits, and enterprises.

Designed for scalability and customization, Moodle provides the tools institutions need to create rich, personalized learning environments that align with their unique goals and teaching styles. 

Its core platform includes modular course creation tools for building interactive lessons; a customizable dashboard that gives students and instructors a clear view of deadlines, announcements, and progress; a powerful gradebook with custom grading scales; a flexible question bank with granular controls for reusing and organizing assessments; detailed analytics and reporting tools to track learner’s progress; extensive plugin directory to connect with popular tools like Zoom and Wooclap, and lots more. 

Overall, Moodle serves organizations that want to customize everything their way, host on their own terms, and access powerful analytics — perfect for those who prefer building their ideal learning environment from the ground up rather than using a pre-packaged solution.

Canvas organizes users in a fixed, top-down hierarchy where each role comes with its own set of permissions. 

Canvas is a cloud-based platform hosted by Instructure. You can get started by scheduling a demo, then working with the support team to install a Canvas instance based on your institution’s requirements. 

After installation, you’ll need to choose a theme and organize your account’s structure to accommodate multiple users with different permission levels. Canvas allows you to organize your account into a hierarchical structure divided into three primary levels:

1. The Root Account - a top-level structure for managing your entire institution, helps oversee all users' activities across the system.
2. Sub-Accounts - for dividing your institution into smaller units like departments or faculties. 
3. Courses and Sections - courses are the virtual classrooms where your content resides, while sections house students enrolled in specific courses. 

After structuring your account, you can manually add users to your Canvas instance and assign them different roles via an invitation email. Each role comes with its own set of permission levels. The available roles include: 

• Admin role - responsible for managing a Canvas sub-account within an institution.
• Designer role - responsible for course creation and management.
• Teacher role - responsible for course creation, instruction, and management
• Teacher assistant role - folks who work with and support a teacher in a course.
• Student role - those participating in a course for course credit.
• Observer role - parents, mentors, and guests who want to participate in a course.

Moodle uses a flexible, context-based system to assign roles and permissions across different levels.

Unlike Canvas, Moodle supports manual self-hosting for institutions that want to manage small projects or cloud-based deployment for institutions with millions of users.

Regardless of the deployment option you choose, after installation, Moodle allows you to plug in a theme and hierarchically organize and assign roles to users based on contexts. That’s unlike Canvas, which supports fixed hierarchies (top-to-bottom structure), Moodle offers more freedom and flexibility with context types.

For example, a user who has a teacher role in the course they teach, but is a student in another course where they are studying for a diploma, can be assigned a dual context type — a teacher and student role. 

However, like Canvas, you can manually add users to your module site by sending an invitation email or using a CSV file. The default role new users can take up on your Moodle instance includes: 

• Manager - users who can access and modify a course, but don’t participate.
• Course creators - users who create new courses. 
• Teacher - users who can do anything within a course, including changing the activities and grading students.
• Non-editing teacher - users who can teach in a course and grade students, but may not alter activities. 
• Student - users who participate in a course. 
• Guest - parents/mentors/tutors with permission to view specific information within a course. 
• Authenticated users - every user within your Moodle site. 
• Authenticated user on site home - all logged-in users on your Moodle site.

Canvas balances simplicity and speed in course creation with an easy-to-use dashboard, structured course page, and diverse learning activities.

The dashboard is the first thing you will see as an admin, instructor, or student when you log into Canvas. It provides an at-a-glance overview of everything happening in all your current courses — if you have any. 

As an admin, you can customize the dashboard's color palette for instructors and other users, pin favorite courses, explore To-Dos, and choose between a Card View and a recent activity view. You can also decide who can create a new course or make changes. 

To create a new course, you’ll need to use the “Start a new course” button at the bottom right corner of the dashboard, select the sub-account where you want the course to be organized, input the course name, and choose the enrollment term. Note that only students enrolled in the “Enrollment term” will be able to access the course.

As an instructor, you will find the tools to import content, design course pages, and add learning activities like syllabus, quizzes, assignments, grades, outcomes, modules, discussions, etc. But among the many activities you can choose from, you will find the quizzes tool especially useful for course development.

The tool allows you to create practice quizzes, graded quizzes, surveys, and online submissions around various question types. However, keep in mind that its quizzes are designed for formal assessment and take-home evaluation. Not for live classes or real-time interactivity.

💡Top Tip: If you want to make your live classes and real-time interactions more engaging, you can integrate Wooclap with Canvas!

An LTI integration of Wooclap with Canvas provides instructors with a flexible, discussion-driven interface they can use to build interactive presentations, evaluate learners' experiences, and smoothly run interactive sessions — all in real time. 

And by interactive sessions, we are not just talking polls or multiple-choice questions.

Wooclaps extends Canvas’s live engagement capabilities with 21 question types, including frameworks for assessing learners' decision-making skills and the tools to manage cohesive learning experiences like SWOT analysis or McKinsey's 7S, where concepts narratively build upon each other.

Finally, Canvas offers a Rich content editor to customize the pages within your course; to format and add content to specific quiz questions, embed Google Docs and slides, add images, and optimize your content for visually impaired students. There’s also the Canvas studio add-on for creating and delivering video content in all major formats. 

Moodle combines granular control and modularity in course creation with advanced elements like drag-and-drop blocks, flexible categories, and a dedicated question bank.

Like Canvas, Moodle welcomes users with a dashboard providing an at-a-glance overview of major course activities and offers a customizable course page for course management. 

But unlike Canvas, whose Dashboard customization options are limited to favorite courses and To-dos, Moodle provides instructors with drag-and-drop block elements to track student progress, add course summaries, check online status, search forums, and lots more.

To add a new course to Moodle, you must have Administrator, Course Creator, or Manager rights. By default, a teacher can't create a new course on Moodle.

And unlike Canvas, which allows you to create a new course and organize it into sub-accounts, Moodle’s courses are segmented into categories. So, access is not limited to those enrolled in a specific term, and students can enroll themselves.

In terms of course content, Moodle provides instructors with a course page housing learning activities like assignments, quizzes, lessons, SCORM, workshops, Book, Glossary, H5P, etc., And like with Canvas, its Quiz activity houses the plethora of question types you’ll need to formally assess students with getting started.

However, Moodle makes planning and creating courses easier by offering a more flexible Question bank with granular controls, where different quizzes can be kept and reused. Just keep in mind that the quiz activity is also designed for post-quiz grading & reflection, not for real-time engagement or live lectures. 

💡Top Tip: If you’d like to use AI to get more from Moodle’s question banks and boost engagement during live sessions, install the Wooclap plugin.

Installing Wooclap’s Moodle Plugin on your Moodle instance grants you in-app access to Wooclap’s AI. You can use the AI to sort through your question bank and craft captivating questions in seconds.

Simply grant Wooclap access to your existing course materials or suggest a new topic, and the AI will generate relevant multiple-choice, open-ended, fill-in-the-blank, matching, and brainstorming question types. 

The Wooclap AI is included with the Pro plan ($14.99/user/month), so you can also link Wooclap’s 21+ collaborative question types to your Moodle course for more interactive learning sessions. 

You can sign up for a free plan and test Wooclap AI for 14 days!

Your security and confidentiality are our priority! We guarantee that your data will not be used to train any AI model. You can learn more about our privacy policy here. 

Meanwhile, like Canvas, Moodle also offers a rich text editor similar to Microsoft Word and other word processors, ensuring course creators can easily design interactive courses and embed documents.

However, regarding video creation tools, Moodle’s offering is not as “native” or “centralized” as the Canvas studio add-on. Instead, it uses a mix of plugins and integrations that offer comparable capabilities. 

Canvas pulls student performance data from quizzes, assignments, and discussions to automate learning paths, award digital badges, and populate ePortfolios while offering multiple collaboration features to properly engage students. 

In addition to the basic assessment tools for creating assignments and quizzes, instructors on Canvas have a plethora of other options for assessing students' performance. 

There’s the Canvas mastery path that allows you to create conditional learning journeys based on student performance in an assignment, quiz, or graded discussion. 

For example, if students in a biology course take a quiz about cell structure, the Canvas mastery path automatically assigns tailored learning modules based on their performance: remediation for those who struggled, practice for those who did okay, or enrichment for those who scored high. 

Next is the Canvas Student Pathways, which instructors can use to create guided, personalized learning paths for students. These paths show students where they are, what they’ve completed, and what steps lie ahead. You can also use them to automatically award digital badges to students and build ePortfolios containing their educational projects, submissions, and experiences.

Then there’s the Canvas Catalog - a marketplace where students can browse, enroll, and pay for courses while instructors manage registrations, track enrollment trends, and create progress reports. And finally, the Canvas Commons — a learning object repository that enables educators to find, import, and share resources. 

Moving to Canvas course engagement tools, how you can start a chat, create local discussion boards, or integrate feedback activity into a course, you’ll find two-way collaborative features like: 

• Announcements - to manually broadcast important messages.  
• Chat - to help students and teachers interact in real time.
• Course Activity Stream - to show recent activities from a single course.
• Calendar - to create appointment groups within a course.
• Discussions - to start known or anonymous discussions in your Canvas course or to add a podcast feed to conversations.  
• Collaborations - to allow multiple users to work on the same course document, e.g., Google Docs, Google Assignments, Google Drive files. Etc.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking to create live presentations or online lessons within a course, there’s the BigBlueButton conferencing tool on Canvas. It allows you to set up polls, engage students in virtual classrooms, and record conferences. But it's pretty limited in terms of the feedback and two-way collaborative features it offers. 

💡Top Tip: If you’d like to start two-way conversations with learners and get real-time feedback during live conferences, integrate Wooclap with Canvas! 

Integrating Wooclap with Canvas not only gives you more live quiz options but also provides the possibility for instructor/student partnership in real time. 

Wooclap offers a Message Wall feature you can use to gather your audience's questions, comments, and thoughts during a presentation without disrupting the classroom with pings or emojis. 

It allows participants to leave likes on questions or answers, while tutors can display each question on the live screen and address them as a group. Wooclap also offers an “I’m confused” button to allow students to raise their hands digitally when they feel lost following the lesson.

Moodle provides flexible but technical assessment options that require manual setup, third-party integrations, or a license from a certified Moodle partner. However, you’ll find various built-in collaboration features to boost students’ engagement. 

Unlike Canvas, Moodle LMS doesn’t have as many custom-built tools with guardrails for assessing and engaging students. So while it’s still as flexible—and even more customizable—it requires more manual setup and developer help.

For instance, instructors who need the sequential learning experience associated with Canvas Mastery Paths need the technical know-how to set up Conditional activities, while tutors who need a centralized resource sharing center like Canvas Commons or ePortfolio tools like Canvas Student Pathways would have to rely on integrations. 

But keep in mind that there’s the Moodle Workplace, an enterprise-grade platform built on the LMS, and optimized to provide an easier way out. 

Moodle’s workplace enhances its LMS capabilities with extensive customization options such as custom-built learning paths, marketplace tools, multi-tenancy, full certification life-cycle features, and centralized repositories. However, it requires a custom license via a certified Moodle partner to install. 

Moving to Moodle’s course engagement and collaboration tools, the LMS stands out with its custom-built Wiki—a flexible tool for collaborative editing that instructors can use to build a course knowledge base, FAQ repository, or study guides. It offers more advanced options than the regular Google Docs. 

Some other notable engagement tools you will find on Moodle include: 

• Feedback- to create and conduct surveys.
• Announcements forum - a special forum for general news and announcements.
• Forums - where students and teachers can exchange ideas by posting comments as part of a thread.
• Choice- for setting up radio buttons, which learners can click to make a selection from several possible responses.
• Calendar - displays site, course, group, user, category events, and assignment and quiz deadlines. 

Finally, like Canvas, Moodle also offers BigBlueButton as its in-built web conferencing tool (which is quite limited in the interactive activities it offers instructors to manage live lectures), and allows users to integrate plugins from third-party conferencing tools like Zoom or Teams.  

💡Top Tip : If you’d like to get a smoother multi-tool teaching experience when hosting live lectures on third-party tools like Zoom, install the Wooclap Moodle plugin. 

Installing the Wooclap Moodle plugin allows you to structure an interactive, multimedia course using all three tools. Moodle manages the course, scheduling, user access, and assessments; Zoom handles the live video sessions, while Wooclap enables live or asynchronous interactive activities (polls, quizzes, word clouds, etc.).

If you prefer to host students outside your Moodle instance, you can simply integrate your Wooclap account with Zoom and prepare your Wooclap event directly from the Zoom application without opening a new tab.

Canvas offers a customizable Gradebook and a collaborative SpeedGrader that supports inline comments, rubrics, annotations, and media responses. It also offers a New Analytics hub for tracking student performance and a custom hub for insight on Canvas usage. 

Grading assignments and quizzes on Canvas is pretty straightforward. It offers a Gradebook that lets instructors view, edit, and track student grades. You can filter tracked grades by assignments or students' names, create weighted assignment groups, switch between gradebook view options, and display grades as points, percentages, GPAs, or letter grades. 

But Gradebook is not the only tool for assessing students’ performance on Canvas. There’s the SpeedGrader feature, which relies on the Gradebook settings to provide instructors with a more versatile, instructor-friendly grading workflow.

Instructors can use the Speedgrader to get a single-page, submission-centric view of students' assignments, leave inline feedback, and jump between students' files easily. The core grading features you will find within the Speedgrader include:  

• Comment Library - to save and reuse commonly used text feedback. 
• Rubrics - to set a pre-determined outline of how an assignment is graded.
• Annotation tool - to highlight text, draw on the document, and create area annotations. 
• Peer review - enables students to anonymously provide feedback on another student's submission. 
• Video comments - for instructors to record their screen and upload media files for more in-depth feedback.

Moving to analytics and reports, Canvas provides a New analytics hub with interactive graphs and tables instructors can use to track student grades, submission status, weekly course activity, individual student participation, and online attendance.

The New analytics hub also allows students to view and download data about their course grades, weekly online activity, and Inbox communication. Admins, on the other hand, are provided with a custom analytics hub with an overview, course, and student dashboards offering in-depth insight into overall Canvas usage.

💡Top Tip: You can also get detailed analytics of each student’s  performance in your live classes by integrating Wooclap with Canvas. 

In addition to all the engagement tools Wooclap offers to promote an active learning experience during live lectures, instructors also get a personalized report hub to gauge students' performance.

Wooclap’s customizable Analytics hub showcases in-depth insight and personalized reports of each student’s performance and offers built-in features to automatically send these reports to students.

Moodle provides a flexible Gradebook with powerful formula-based grade calculations, rubric-based scoring, and video feedback support. It also offers course/activity-level reports and predictive learning analytics to identify teaching gaps and students at risk of dropping out. 

Just like Canvas, Moodle offers a dedicated Gradebook. The Gradebook reports all the items being graded and assessed within a Moodle course. It allows you to view and change them, sort them out into categories, and calculate totals in various ways.

But unlike Canvas, Moodle doesn’t offer a Speedgrader for a collaborative grading workflow. However, you still get activities like Workshops for peer review, Rubrics to grade students based on predetermined criteria, annotation tools to highlight text, a video option to leave feedback on graded assignments, and a marking guide to score students using a customizable checklist.

But where Moodle really shines is in its grade calculation formula feature. This feature allows instructors to write custom math logic and compute a student's grade using their own rules, rather than relying solely on Moodle’s built-in aggregation methods. It’s powerful for cases where default aggregation methods like Canvas weighted groups aren’t enough.

💡Top Tip: You can extend Moodle’s gradebook functionality to sync grades from live learning activities by integrating with Wooclap! 

The Wooclap Moodle plugin allows Moodle to treat Wooclap activities (MCQs, polls with correct answers, etc.) like regular graded assignments and record student scores automatically.

So, you can expect (1) results, participation, and attendance from events accumulated on Wooclap’s report sheets to register in your grade book.

In terms of analytics and reports, like Canvas, Moodle provides reports for instructors, administrators, and learners. But at its core, you’ll find two major report types:

• Course completion reports - great for overall course analytics.
• Activity reports -crucial for individual progress or engagement.

Instructors get an overview of students' overall grades, enrolled users, and course completion status; students can explore course activity logs and grades, while admins get updates on course progress, configuration changes, and automated backups. 

Moodle also offers a learning analytics platform with a machine learning algorithm that admins can use to predict or detect unknown aspects of the learning process, such as when a student is at risk of dropping out or a tutor fails to teach.

Canvas partners and natively integrates with some of the most popular edtech tools available. 

As a Canvas admin, you can integrate multiple third-party tools for content authoring, engagement, interactive learning, and video conferencing into your Canvas instance. You can pick from over 500 partner listings or opt for custom vendor integration via LTI. 

Some of the popular higher ed and K12 tools you can integrate with Canvas include Flip, Dropbox, Canva, Zoom, Turnitin, EdPuzzle, Vimeo, Accredible, Wooclap, Nearpod, Credly, Anthology, Study Mate, and Google Docs.

💡How to integrate Wooclap with Canvas or Moodle!

Integrating Wooclap with Canvas works like any other LMS integration. It integrates as a native tool, syncing with your gradebook and modules. For more information, check out our detailed LTI integration guide.

On the other hand, integrating Wooclap with Moodle is a little different. Wooclap provides a dedicated Moodle plugin that wraps around an LTI integration, which lets it sync as a native activity in your course editor and gradebook.

Moodle's extensive plugin directory makes adding your everyday tools to the platform easy. 

Like Canvas, Moodle offers multiple integration options, including partner listings and LTI. Some of Moodle’s core partners include Gamoteca, BigBlueButton, Intelliboard, Levitate, Myydleware, ReadSpeaker, Zatuk, Tiny, Nolej, etc. - not the most popular tools in the market.

However, Moodle comes with the added advantage of an accessible plugins directory with tools that can advance the learning experience or compensate for the lack of some features. 

So while Moodle doesn’t support seamless integrations with Google Docs like Canvas does (though you can embed it into your courses), its wide variety of plug-and-play plugins with tools like Wooclap, Zoom, Turnitin, Microsoft teams, etc., makes it a more versatile platform, with more integration options.

Canvas vs Moodle: Pros & Cons

Final Verdict: Canvas vs Moodle

If you’ve made it to the end of this comparison, you’ll have noticed one thing:

Canvas and Moodle are both robust learning management systems, but they’re fundamentally built for different types of educators and institutions.

Canvas LMS delivers a seamless, out-of-the-box experience ideal for institutions seeking a structured, guided platform. Everything is designed to work intuitively and scale easily from user roles to grading to analytics. Meanwhile, Moodle is the go-to LMS for institutions that want deep customization, flexible control, and advanced analytics—at the cost of additional support and a steeper learning curve.

Use Canvas if:

• You need a turnkey LMS solution with enterprise-grade features
• You need a learning platform that faculties can adopt quickly without extensive training
• You need a marketplace where students can browse, enroll, and pay for courses while you manage registration

Click here to get started with Canvas!

Use Moodle if:

• Your grading needs require custom formulas or unique evaluation logic.
• You want to self-host your LMS or tailor roles and permissions more granularly
• You’re a tech-savvy educator or admin who values an open-source platform that promotes deep customization

Click here to get started with Moodle!