A cloud LMS costs between $0 and roughly $700 a month for a company of 100 people, and the range is that wide because vendors price on five different bases. Self-hosted Moodle is free under an open-source licence. TalentLMS charges $219 a month at 100 users. iSpring charges $690.50. Docebo publishes no price at all, and steers anyone training fewer than 250 learners away. Every figure here is printed on those vendors’ own pages.
Every other answer to this question gives you a range. We think a range is the least useful possible answer to “how much does an LMS cost”, because the spread inside it is 100x and the thing that decides where you land is not your size, it is which pricing model the vendor chose.
So this guide does something different. It takes the price each of 20 vendors actually publishes, works out the monthly bill at 25, 100 and 250 users, and records the entry floor below which each vendor will not sell. Then it adds the costs that never appear on a pricing page, and what buyers report actually paying, which is a different number again.
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The Short Answer, By Company Size
| Your size | Realistic monthly range | What sits at each end |
|---|---|---|
| Under 10 people | $0 to $30 | Free tiers are real at this size (Connecteam, Mitti, TalentLMS) or self-hosted Moodle |
| 10 to 50 people | $29 to $200 | Connecteam $29, TalentLMS $119, 360Learning $200 at 25 users |
| 50 to 100 people | $23 to $800 | MoodleCloud $23, TalentLMS $219, iSpring $690, 360Learning $800 |
| 100 to 250 people | $625 to $2,400 | Tovuti $625 flat, iSpring $690, Mitti $2,400 at $24 a seat |
| 250+ people | Mostly unpublished | This is where quote-only vendors start; enterprise contracts move into five and six figures a year |
The jump between the third and fourth rows is where most buyers get surprised, and it is not caused by needing more features. It is caused by crossing a seat floor.
What 20 Platforms Actually Charge
Every figure below comes from the vendor’s own pricing page. Prices and plan details were checked in August 2026. Where a vendor publishes nothing, the row says so rather than guessing.
| Platform | Published price | Billing basis | Entry floor | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Moodle (self-hosted) | $0 licence | Open source, GPLv3 | None | Yes, forever |
| Connecteam | $29/mo first 30 users, then $0.50 each | Flat block + increment | None | Yes, up to 10 users |
| MoodleCloud | $170/yr (50 users) to $2,160/yr (750) | Seat bands, annual | None | No |
| TalentLMS | Core $119/mo (1-40 users) to $219 (71-100); Grow $229 (1-70); Pro $449 (1-100) | Plan plus registered-user band | None | Yes, 5 users / 10 courses |
| Mitti (was SafetyCulture) | $24/seat/mo annual, $29 monthly | Per seat | None | Yes, up to 10 seats |
| 360Learning | $8/user/mo | Per user, monthly billing | None, but capped at 100 users | No, 30-day trial |
| Mini Course Generator | Published on our pricing page | Learner volume | None | No, 14-day trial |
| iSpring LMS | $6.91/user/mo at 100 users ($8,286/yr) | Per active user, seat bands | 100 users | No, 30-day trial |
| Tovuti | From $7,500/yr (100 annual learners) | Flat, by annual learners | $7,500/yr | No |
| Coassemble | $2,500/yr entry, from $5,000, from $20,000 | Flat platform fee | $2,500/yr, 12-month term | No, gated sandbox |
| Docebo | No price published | Active users (MAU, YAU or RAU) | Stated fit bar: 250+ learners | No |
| Trainual | None published | Not disclosed | $1,000 implementation fee | No |
| LearnUpon | None published | Not disclosed | From 100 users (employees) | No |
| Absorb | None published | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | No |
| Litmos | None published (“Contact for Pricing”) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | No, 14-day trial |
| Mindtickle | None published | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | No |
| Seismic Learning | None published | Not disclosed | Reported 25-seat minimum | No |
| Highspot by Seismic | None published | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | No |
| Allego | None published (the vendor says “per user per month” but gives no rate) | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | No |
| Second Nature | None published | Not disclosed | Not disclosed | No |
Count the bold entries. Nine of these twenty platforms will not tell you what they cost. That is the single most important fact about LMS pricing in 2026, and it only shows up when you put twenty pricing pages side by side rather than describing pricing models in the abstract.
(A note on our own row: we do not restate Mini Course Generator’s prices in editorial content, because prices change and a blog post is a bad place to learn them. They are published in full on the pricing page, which is the only version we keep current.)
What It Costs at 25, 100 and 250 Users
Same platforms, with the arithmetic shown. “Not sold” means the vendor’s published floor is above that headcount.
| Platform | 25 users | 100 users | 250 users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moodle self-hosted | $0 licence + hosting | $0 licence + hosting | $0 licence + hosting |
| MoodleCloud | ~$14/mo (Starter, 50 users) | ~$23/mo (Mini) | ~$102/mo (Medium, 500) |
| Connecteam | $29/mo | ~$64/mo | ~$139/mo |
| TalentLMS | $119/mo | $219/mo | Pro band + $6/user over 100 |
| 360Learning | $200/mo | $800/mo | Not sold (Team Plan caps at 100) |
| Mitti | $600/mo | $2,400/mo | $6,000/mo |
| iSpring LMS | Not sold | $690.50/mo | ~$1,340/mo (300-user band) |
| Tovuti | $625/mo (paying for 100) | $625/mo | Quote |
| Docebo | Not sold | Not sold | No price published |
| Coassemble | ~$208/mo | ~$208/mo | ~$417/mo (Scale) |
Two patterns fall out of this table, and they matter more than any feature comparison.
Per-user pricing looks cheap and gets expensive. 360Learning at $8 a user is the friendliest number on the page at 25 people and the second most expensive at 100. Mitti at $24 a seat is reasonable for a 10-person crew and $6,000 a month at 250.
Flat pricing looks expensive and gets cheap. Tovuti’s $7,500 a year is absurd for 25 people and competitive at 100. Coassemble’s flat platform fee does not move with headcount at all. Moodle self-hosted does not move with anything.
Which means the honest answer to “how much does an LMS cost” is: it depends far less on the software than on whether the vendor’s pricing model happens to point the same direction your company is growing.
The Five Pricing Models, and Who Each One Punishes
1. Per registered user
You pay for every account in the system, whether or not the person logs in. TalentLMS works this way, and it is one of the three models Docebo offers. It is the most common model and the most predictable, and it punishes organisations with large dormant populations – seasonal staff, alumni, a customer base you onboarded once. Partner rosters are the extreme case, and we compared what each vendor in that market actually counts in our guide to the best partner training software.
2. Per active user
You pay only for people who used the system in the billing period. iSpring prices this way and says so prominently. This is the fairest model if your headcount is much larger than your monthly learner count, and the least predictable if your usage is spiky, because a compliance deadline that pulls everyone in at once produces a bill nobody budgeted.
3. Seat bands
You buy a range – 1 to 40 users, 41 to 70, 71 to 100 – and the price steps rather than slides. TalentLMS, MoodleCloud and iSpring all use bands. The trap is the step: hiring one person can move you a whole band. TalentLMS’s Core plan costs $119 a month for up to 40 users and $219 for 71 to 100, so the seat that crosses a band line costs far more than one seat.
4. Flat platform fee
One price, unlimited or generously capped users. Tovuti, Coassemble and several smaller vendors price this way, and a vendor in one practitioner discussion put the argument plainly: per-seat pricing “punishes success”. Flat fees are the best model for growing organisations and the worst for small ones, because the floor is the whole price.
5. Open source
No licence at all. You pay in hosting, administration and your own time. Moodle is the dominant example and the cost transfer is real rather than theoretical, which is the point the next section makes with a number.
The Costs That Never Appear on a Pricing Page
The licence is the part you can look up. These are the parts that decide your actual bill.
Implementation fees. Trainual states a one-time $1,000 implementation fee in its own FAQ, with implementation marked “required” on every tier including entry. At the enterprise end, one practitioner pricing a 12,000-person deployment in 2019 reported an implementation charge of roughly $200,000 as a separate line from a ~$250,000 annual licence. Implementation is where the difference between a $119 platform and an enterprise platform actually lives.
Add-ons that were implied to be included. Tovuti markets “no feature gaps”, and that is true of the LMS – but its WayPoints AI authoring tool is a separate purchase starting at $999 a year for one creator and from $4,000 for teams. Docebo’s roleplay module is usage-based on top of the per-user fee. Always ask which of the things demoed to you are in the price you were quoted.
Custom domains and branding. MoodleCloud does not include a custom domain until the Medium plan, and then as a paid add-on. TalentLMS removes its own branding at the Pro tier, three steps up. These are small numbers that arrive after you have committed.
The seat floor. Not a fee, but the most expensive line in this article. Docebo’s own FAQ sets its fit bar at 250+ learners, so a 20-person team is buying into a band sized for an organisation twelve times larger. A 25-person company buying Tovuti pays for 100 learners. You are not overpaying for features; you are paying for headcount you do not have. If a floor like that is what rules Docebo out for you, our Docebo alternatives comparison covers where a team your size can look instead.
Content libraries. Off-the-shelf course subscriptions are usually quoted alongside the platform and are a separate recurring cost. They are also, in most small deployments, the least-completed content on the system.
Your own time. The open-source path moves cost from the invoice to the payroll. One nonprofit in a practitioner thread reported running Moodle for close to 50,000 total users on a virtual server for about $15 a month plus $5 for backups, with a one-time $150 theme – a genuinely remarkable number, and one that only works because someone there can run a server. Another practitioner’s advice in the same thread is the right frame: separate the software licence from the people cost, because “we pay $X” usually hides an assumption about staff.
Integration work. Connecting an LMS to your HRIS or CRM is rarely included and rarely trivial; our LMS integration guide covers what actually has to be built. If portability matters to you later, the SCORM and xAPI question decides whether your content can leave.
What Buyers Say They Actually Pay
List prices tell you what a vendor asks. These are figures buyers have stated publicly, and they are useful precisely because they include the parts vendors do not publish. Treat every one as self-reported and dated: none is audited, some are years old, and one comes from a vendor who disclosed the interest.
- ~$10,000 a year for up to 1,200 active users, reported by a corporate buyer.
- $50,000 for a single academy with unlimited users, or roughly $30,000 buying users in buckets, reported for WorkRamp – with $80,000 for 700 internal users on their employee product.
- ~$250,000 a year for 12,000 employees, plus a separate ~$200,000 implementation, reported for an enterprise deployment priced in 2019. The same buyer said SuccessFactors and Cornerstone quoted higher.
- ~$25 per user per year for Canvas in higher education, recalled from a few years ago, with 24/7 phone support priced separately.
- $750 a month flat, or $687.50 paid annually, published by a small vendor in the same thread who disclosed being an LMS provider.
- ~$20 a month total for a nonprofit self-hosting Moodle for tens of thousands of users.
Put those beside the published prices and the shape of the market is clear: the published range is $0 to $700 a month, and the unpublished range runs to six figures a year. The vendors that publish prices are, almost without exception, the ones at the affordable end. That is not a coincidence, and it is worth remembering when you read a pricing page that has no prices on it.
So Is There a Free LMS?
Yes, and the word “free” covers four different things.
Genuinely free forever, open source. Self-hosted Moodle is free under GPLv3 with no user limit at any scale. You pay for hosting and administration.
Genuinely free forever, capped. Connecteam gives every hub and feature to teams of up to 10. Mitti’s free tier covers up to 10 seats with basic training. TalentLMS’s free plan is 5 users and 10 courses with no expiry. These are real, and they stop being real the day you hire past the cap.
Free trials wearing the word free. 14 to 30 days, then a bill. Most of this list.
Free-tier-as-sandbox. An evaluation environment with usage limits, which cannot run a real programme. Coassemble’s free sandbox is explicitly this.
The distinction matters because a capped free plan is only free if your team fits inside the cap, and the price you should actually be comparing is the one on the next line up. Our best free LMS guide takes every permanent free plan and states exactly where it ends.
How to Budget for an LMS Without Being Surprised
Five questions, in this order. They will get you closer to a real number than any list price, including the ones above.
1. What does the bill look like at 1.5x our headcount? Not today’s price. Seat bands step, per-user pricing slides, flat pricing does neither. Ask for the number at your realistic size in 18 months.
2. Is there a floor, and where is it? Ask directly: what is the smallest contract you will sell? If the answer is 250 seats and you have 20 people, the conversation is over and you have saved a fortnight.
3. What is the implementation charge, and is it optional? Get the figure and the word “required” or “optional” in writing.
4. Which demoed features are add-ons? Walk back through the demo and ask, feature by feature, whether it is in the quoted price.
5. What does leaving cost? Content export, learner data export, and what happens to certificates you have issued. This is cheap insurance in a market where two of the twenty platforms above renamed or merged within the past year. Teams that expect to change platforms later should understand how a headless setup separates content from player before committing everything to one vendor’s format.
If the answer to question two rules out most of the market at your size, the segment guides, which price each market the same way, will be faster than a demo cycle: small business, sales teams, call centres, automotive and customer education.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average cost of an LMS?
There is no meaningful average, and quoting one misleads more than it helps. Among the 20 platforms priced above, the published cost for a 100-person company ranged from $0 (self-hosted Moodle) to $2,400 a month (Mitti at $24 a seat), with the most common figure landing between $200 and $700 a month. Nine of the twenty published no price at all, and enterprise contracts reported publicly by buyers run into six figures a year. The median of a distribution that wide is not a useful planning number; your seat count and the vendor’s pricing model are.
How much is the LMS fee per user?
Published per-user rates in 2026 run from $8 a user a month (360Learning) to $24 (Mitti). Docebo publishes no rate at all. Per-active-user pricing lands lower on paper: iSpring’s published rate is $6.91 at 100 users, falling to $3.97 at 500. Band-priced platforms work out cheaper per head as you fill the band – TalentLMS at 100 users is about $2.19 per person per month, the lowest effective per-user cost in this comparison.
Does an LMS cost money if I only have a few users?
Not necessarily. Under 10 people, three platforms here will cost you nothing permanently: Connecteam (all features, up to 10 users), Mitti (10 seats, basic training) and TalentLMS (5 users, 10 courses). Self-hosted Moodle is free at any size if you can run a server. Above about 10 people you are into paid plans, and $29 to $119 a month covers most of the market for a small team.
Why do so many LMS vendors hide their pricing?
Because their pricing is negotiated rather than listed, which is a consequence of selling to large organisations with implementation projects, procurement processes and variable requirements. It is not necessarily a red flag. It is, however, a reliable signal about who a vendor sells to: in our sample, every platform with a published self-serve price was buyable by a company of 25 people, and almost every platform without one was not.
Is an LMS cheaper than building one?
Almost always, and the gap is wider than people expect once you count maintenance rather than just the initial build. The full arithmetic is in our guide to building your own LMS, but the summary is that a build competes with a $119-a-month subscription on features and with a permanent engineering commitment on cost.
Do nonprofits get LMS discounts?
Frequently, though it is rarely on the pricing page. Several vendors run nonprofit or NGO discount programmes on application, and Mini Course Generator is among them – our nonprofit page covers what that includes, and our best LMS for nonprofits guide compares what the rest of the market offers the sector. If you are a nonprofit, ask before you accept a list price, and check whether the vendor is listed on nonprofit software marketplaces as well.
What should I actually budget for a 50-person company?
Between $100 and $400 a month for the platform, if you choose from the vendors that publish prices. Add implementation only if the vendor charges it, add integration work if you are connecting to an HRIS or CRM, and add administration time, which is the cost nobody quotes and everybody pays. If the driver is new-hire ramp rather than company-wide training, an onboarding LMS view of the same budget is usually smaller. Anything materially above that range at 50 people means you are buying an enterprise platform, and the question to ask is which specific capability justifies the step.
The One-Sentence Version
An LMS costs whatever your seat count multiplied by the vendor’s pricing model says it costs, and the vendors that publish that arithmetic are the ones you can afford.
Nine of the twenty platforms above keep it behind a form. Four of them will not sell to a company under 100 people. One will not sell below 250. None of that is visible in a features comparison, and all of it decides your shortlist before you evaluate a single course builder.
If you want the fastest possible read on whether a platform fits your budget, start with the ones that publish a price and work down from there. Mini Course Generator’s plans are published in full, and if you would rather see the whole segment priced side by side, the small business guide prices ten platforms the same way, with a screenshot of every pricing page.
Sources
- Vendor pricing pages for all 20 platforms. Where a vendor publishes no figure, this guide says so rather than estimating.
- Training magazine, 2025 Training Industry Report, November 2025 – training spend per learner by company size, for context on what organisations spend overall.
- Practitioner-reported contract figures from an r/instructionaldesign discussion on LMS pricing. These are self-reported, undated in some cases, and one contributor disclosed being an LMS vendor. They are included because they cover the enterprise end of the market, which no vendor publishes, and they are labelled throughout rather than presented as research.
- iSpring’s published figures were displayed under a summer promotion running to 31 August 2026; anyone reading after that date should re-check the page.
