# Moodle

10 Hacker News commenters recommended Moodle and 6 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 5 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** Free open-source learning management system that large schools use and that can be customized, though people find its default look confusing and it takes sysadmin work to run.

## Why people recommend it

- Scales to large schools (3 comments): "Moodle also scales to pretty large schools, I work on an instance that is over 27k students." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061839)) "Moodle exists and is completely open source. Lots of large institutions use it." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48060398)) "Moodle exists and is used by a lot of large schools." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057384))
- Useful for documenting projects (2 comments): "I used to run a moodle on my desktop/laptop just to store project documentation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46880487)) "I found Moodle really great for documenting projects." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615898))
- Flexible for many uses (2 comments): "quite a good software to take exams" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695138)) "Moodle can to all kinds of things." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47882673))

## What people warn about

- Confusing, unintuitive interface (2 comments): "Moodle out of the box is pretty confusing and ugly, but I've seen some heavily customized instances that look a lot better" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48057425)) "its ui is not that great and it is not intuitive when searching courses" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445475))
- Hard to deploy and maintain (2 comments): "But you do then have to have a sysadmin capable of managing an enterprise grade LAMP stack." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061459)) "Moodle is complex to deploy and maintain (often requires outsourcing)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45849979))
- Widely called terrible or garbage (3 comments): "They transitioned because Moodle sucked. Profs hated it, students hated it more." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48061983)) "Moodle is also pretty garbage-y if I may say so." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445369)) "The problem with Moodle is that it's terrible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48286079))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Canvas by Instructure](https://hackerapproved.com/p/canvas-lms.md): 16 recommend
- [PrairieLearn](https://hackerapproved.com/p/prairielearn.md): 6 recommend
- [Google Classroom](https://hackerapproved.com/p/google-classroom.md): 6 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Moodle", https://hackerapproved.com/p/moodle/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).