Claroline

Open source French-language learning platform, now developed as Claroline Connect

As of 31 August 2026, Claroline is free to use. Claroline started at a Belgian university in 2001 and the original codebase stopped at 13. Softwr lists it under LMS. Claroline is made by Claroline community, commercial distribution by Sinfony Digital, available on Web, Linux.

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Overview

What Claroline does

Claroline is an open source learning platform originally built at the Université catholique de Louvain in Belgium and released under GPL. The original PHP application reached version 13.1.3 in December 2021 and is no longer developed. The maintained product is Claroline Connect, a rewrite on Symfony with a React front end, currently on the 15.0 line with point releases through 2026, developed openly on GitHub and offered commercially as a hosted service by a small French operator. The distinguishing point is not a feature, it is which Claroline you are looking at. Two codebases share a name, and the older one has more search results, more third-party tutorials and more third-party download mirrors than the maintained one. Institutions that install what a search engine returns end up on an abandoned 2021 PHP application with unpatched dependencies. Claroline Connect is structured less as a course-container LMS and more as a workspace and resource platform, which suits training organisations assembling paths from reusable resources better than it suits a university running a fixed module catalogue. The realistic buyer is a French-speaking training organisation, a Belgian or French educational institution, or a public body with a francophone user base and a preference for European-hosted open source. Everyone else should note that the interface, documentation and community are French-first, English coverage is partial, and the installed base is small compared with Moodle. That is the trade-off: a genuinely maintained, European, GPL platform with a community too small to guarantee the plugin or support depth a large deployment needs.

What people use it for

A French or Belgian training organisation that needs a francophone platform where the interface and support are French-first rather than translated.
A public body required to keep learner data on European infrastructure under an open licence it can audit.
A training provider assembling learning paths from a shared library of reusable resources across many client workspaces rather than duplicating courses.
An institution already running the abandoned Claroline 13 line that needs to plan a migration onto the maintained Connect codebase before its dependencies become unsupportable.

Where it falls short

Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Claroline.

Two products share the name and the abandoned original, last released in December 2021, dominates search results, so institutions regularly install unmaintained software believing it is current.
The community is small compared with Moodle, so plugin choice, third-party integrations and the pool of people who can administer it in production are all thin.
Documentation and community discussion are French-first and English coverage is partial and inconsistent, which raises the effort for any non-francophone team.
The commercial hosting is offered by a small operator rather than a large partner network, so an institution depending on paid support has concentrated supplier risk.
The workspace and resource model is different enough from a conventional course-based LMS that staff moving from Moodle or Canvas have to relearn how content is organised, and migrations do not map cleanly.

Cross-shopped

What people choose instead of Claroline

Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.

Clarolinevs
Moodle
Moodle: If you want open source with a large plugin ecosystem, multilingual documentation and a broad commercial partner network.
Clarolinevs
Sakai
Sakai: If you need an open source platform for higher education with foundation governance and stronger assessment tooling.
Clarolinevs
Docebo
Docebo: If you would rather buy a commercial hosted platform for corporate training and not run infrastructure at all.

Pricing

What Claroline costs

Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.

Claroline Connect

Free

GPL licence, no fee
Full source on GitHub
You provide Symfony and PHP hosting and operations
Community support only

Hosted distribution

On request

Managed hosting, maintenance and updates
Support from the commercial operator
Quoted by user count
European hosting

Capabilities

Features

Workspaces
Configurable spaces holding resources, activities and members rather than a fixed course template
Resource model
Documents, files, paths, quizzes and forums treated as reusable objects that can be shared between workspaces
Learning paths
Sequenced routes through resources with conditions and progress tracking
Quizzes and evaluation
Question banks, varied question types and per-attempt scoring
Competency framework
Mapping of activities to skills and competency progression records
Planning and events
Agenda and scheduled activity management across workspaces
Self-hosting
Full source under GPL, deployable on institution infrastructure in Europe
SaaS option
Hosted distribution with maintenance and updates from the commercial operator

Answered, with sources

Questions people ask

Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Which Claroline should I install?

Claroline Connect, the Symfony and React codebase currently on version 15. The original PHP Claroline stopped at 13.1.3 in December 2021 and should not be deployed.

Is it still maintained?

Yes. Point releases in the 15.0 line continued into 2026 with active commits on GitHub.

Is it free?

The software is GPL and free. Hosted distribution with maintenance and support is a paid service from the commercial operator.

Does it work in English?

The interface has English, but documentation and community support are French-first, so a non-francophone team will hit gaps.

How big is the ecosystem compared to Moodle?

Much smaller. If you need a wide plugin market or an easy administrator hiring pool, Moodle is the safer open source choice.

Keep looking

Where to go from Claroline

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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Claroline, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.

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