TalentLMS, LearnWorlds, iSpring Learn and MoodleCloud all deliver employee training, assign courses and track completion. What separates their bills is not the feature list — it is the definition of a "user". One charges by tiered user brackets, one is flat with a monthly active-learner cap, one charges per person who logs in, and one counts every live account, teachers included. This guide works through that difference with real published prices.
Core plan, billed annually, for the 1–40 user bracket. Free plan covers up to 5 users and 10 courses.
Pro Trainer, billed annually — the first plan with SCORM. No per-user fee; monthly active-learner cap applies.
At the 100 active-user band, billed annually (now sold as iSpring LMS). You pay for people who log in that month.
Starter plan: 50 users, 1 GB storage, billed annually in AUD (USD shown). Hosted version of the open-source Moodle LMS.
| TalentLMS | LearnWorlds | iSpring Learn | MoodleCloud | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Small and mid-size companies standardising onboarding and compliance training | Training providers and companies that want rich interactive courses, including for client teams | Companies whose training material lives in PowerPoint and needs an authoring tool included | Small organisations that want full Moodle without running a server, at the lowest price |
| How a "user" is counted | Tiered brackets of users. On standard plans, users with active status count toward your bracket; the optional Flex setup on Pro and above bills by unique monthly logins instead | No per-user charge. Registrations are unlimited, but each plan caps active learners per month (1,000 on Starter, 2,000 above) | Per active user: someone who logs in at least once in a month. Registration itself is unlimited and free of charge | Live accounts that can log in — learners, teachers and admins all count. Suspended accounts do not count |
| Entry paid price | Core $119/mo billed annually ($149 monthly), 1–40 users | Starter $44/mo billed annually ($49 monthly) — but see the SCORM note below | $11.63 per active user/mo at 25 users, billed annually ($3,490/yr); rate falls as the band grows | Starter $160/yr for 50 users and 1 GB storage (billed in AUD) |
| Worked example: 50 staff, everyone trains | Core 41–70 bracket: $159/mo × 12 = $1,908/yr | Pro Trainer (first SCORM plan): $79/mo × 12 = $948/yr | 50-user band: $9.32 × 50 × 12 = $5,592/yr | Starter: $160/yr (Mini, $270/yr, if 1 GB storage is too tight) |
| SCORM | SCORM 1.2, xAPI and cmi5 listed across plans. Vendor help centres on SCORM 1.2 packages — confirm if you need SCORM 2004 | Not on Starter. Pro Trainer allows up to 20 SCORM packages; Learning Center is unlimited | Plays SCORM 1.2 and 2004, xAPI and cmi5; its own authoring tool publishes SCORM | SCORM is a standard Moodle activity, available on all plans; test your exact packages, as with any LMS |
| Course authoring | Built-in builder (text, video, files, quizzes) plus an AI course creator metered by credits | Full course builder and interactive video editor are core to the product | iSpring Suite — a full PowerPoint-based authoring tool — is bundled into the LMS price | Build with Moodle's built-in activities and H5P; you cannot install extra plugins on MoodleCloud |
| Free option | Free plan: up to 5 users, 10 courses, no time limit | No free plan — 30-day free trial | No free plan — 30-day free trial | No permanent free plan — 28-day trial (50 users, 1 GB) |
| Trade-off to know | Crossing a bracket boundary raises the whole bill; and feature gates (branches, learning paths) sit in higher plans, not just user counts | Built for course businesses first: the cheapest plan charges $5 per enrollment and blocks SCORM, so internal-training buyers should price Pro Trainer, not Starter | Highest worked-example cost here when everyone trains — the authoring bundle is in the price whether you use it or not, and the band is sized by your busiest month | Tight storage (1–50 GB by plan), a 750-user ceiling, no custom plugins, and prices billed in AUD |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors in November 2026; MoodleCloud bills in Australian dollars and its USD figures are the vendor's own conversions, so they move with exchange rates. The 50-staff row is our arithmetic on the published prices shown in each cell — the full workings, including what happens at 500 registered users, are in the next section. Plans change — always confirm the current price, the user definition and what's included on the vendor's site before you buy.
Run the same company through all four pricing models and the "cheapest LMS" changes depending on a question that has nothing to do with features: how many of your registered people actually log in in a given month, and what happens to the accounts of people who leave?
Case 1 — 50 staff, everyone trains twice a year. On annual billing: MoodleCloud Starter is $160 a year (if 1 GB of storage survives your video content — Mini at $270 is the realistic floor for many), LearnWorlds Pro Trainer is $948, TalentLMS is $1,908, and iSpring Learn is $5,592. Note the TalentLMS figure: 50 users fall out of Core's 1–40 bracket into its 41–70 bracket at $159/mo — which is still cheaper than "upgrading" to the Grow plan at $229/mo. On bracket pricing, raising the bracket inside your current plan often beats changing plans.
Case 2 — 500 people on the roster, only 50 train in a month. This is where the order flips. iSpring Learn still charges the 50-active-user band, because registrations don't count — only that month's logins do. LearnWorlds is unchanged too: registrations are unlimited and 50 monthly active learners sit far below its 2,000 cap. But the two account-based models swell: 500 live accounts push TalentLMS past Core's 100-user ceiling into higher-plan brackets, and put MoodleCloud on its 500-user Medium plan at $1,180/yr. The fix is housekeeping, not negotiation: on both platforms, accounts you mark inactive or suspend stop counting — while their training records stay on file. A leaver whose account nobody suspends keeps costing you money.
Case 3 — all 500 staff train in the same month. Annual compliance training is exactly this pattern, and per-active-user pricing is sized by the peak month: iSpring Learn's 500-user band is $23,790 a year, even if the other eleven months are quiet. The flat and account-cap models barely notice the same event — LearnWorlds stays $948 (500 is well under its monthly cap) and MoodleCloud's 500-user plan is $1,180, storage permitting. Per-login pricing is fairest when attendance is sparse and spiky across a large roster; it is the most expensive model when training is mandatory for everyone at once.
Two more practical details the headline prices hide. First, on MoodleCloud your teachers and admins consume the same user quota as learners, so size the plan for everyone who will log in, not just trainees. Second, none of these products discounts an annual plan because you only train twice a year — the band or bracket has to cover your busiest month, so forecast the peak, not the average.
TalentLMS is a cloud LMS aimed squarely at internal training: onboarding, compliance, product and partner training, with a built-in course builder, branches that give departments or locations their own portal, and completion reporting. Its pricing is the bracket model above: a free plan (5 users, 10 courses), then Core at $119/mo billed annually for 1–40 users (higher brackets of the same plan run to 100 users), Grow at $229/mo for 1–70, and Pro at $449/mo for 1–100, with Enterprise quoted from 1,000 users. SCORM 1.2, xAPI and cmi5 support and a custom domain are listed across plans; branches (1 / 3 / 15 by plan) and learning paths are the main feature gates. One definition to pin down before signing: vendor help material describes standard plans as counting users by active status, while its Flex option (Pro and above) counts unique monthly logins — summaries elsewhere often blur the two, and which one applies changes your bracket.
LearnWorlds was built as a course platform for training businesses, and it shows in the authoring side: an interactive video editor, assessments and a full site and course builder. For employee training its pricing model is the outlier here — no per-user fee at all. Plans are Starter $44/mo billed annually, Pro Trainer $79/mo and Learning Center $249/mo, plus a custom Corporate tier. The limits that replace per-user pricing are a monthly active-learner cap (1,000 on Starter, 2,000 above) and admin seats (1 / 5 / 25). Two gates matter for corporate buyers: Starter has no SCORM and charges $5 per enrollment, so the realistic entry for internal training is Pro Trainer (up to 20 SCORM packages), and full white-labelling, automations, SSO and unlimited SCORM wait for Learning Center, which also adds client groups for delivering training to customer or partner teams under separate branding.
iSpring Learn — renamed iSpring LMS in late 2025, with many pages still using the Learn name — pairs a corporate LMS with the vendor's iSpring Suite authoring tool, which converts PowerPoint presentations into interactive courses with quizzes and role-play scenarios. The bundle is the point: every LMS plan includes the authoring tool, so there is no separate per-author licence to buy. Pricing is per active user, billed annually: $11.63 per user/mo at a 25-user band, $9.32 at 50, $6.91 at 100 ($8,286/yr), $4.46 at 300 and $3.97 at 500, with Enterprise quoted above that. You can register unlimited users and only pay for the band covering the people who log in each month. It plays SCORM 1.2 and 2004, xAPI and cmi5 content.
MoodleCloud is Moodle HQ's own hosted version of the open-source Moodle LMS: unlimited courses and activities, quizzes, assignments, gradebook, H5P interactive content and the Moodle mobile app, with no server to run. Plans are annual and billed in Australian dollars: Starter $160/yr (50 users, 1 GB storage), Mini $270/yr (100 users, 2.5 GB), Small $490/yr (200, 5 GB), Medium $1,180/yr (500, 20 GB) and Standard about $2,070/yr (750, 50 GB). The user quota counts every live account that can log in — learners, teachers and admins — while suspended accounts don't count, so offboarding hygiene directly controls your tier. The constraints are equally clear: standard plans stop at 750 users, storage is modest, and you cannot install additional plugins, which rules out some integrations and custom activities that self-hosted Moodle would allow.
Write down three numbers: total roster, how many will log in during your busiest training month, and how many accounts must stay live all year (including teachers and admins). Those three numbers, priced against each model above, predict your bill better than any feature matrix.
If your courses exist as SCORM packages, the cheapest plan is not always a real option: LearnWorlds blocks SCORM below Pro Trainer, and TalentLMS documents mainly SCORM 1.2. Upload one real package during the trial or free plan and watch it report a completion before you pay anything.
Building in-house from slides → iSpring Learn's bundled authoring earns its higher per-user price. Buying finished courses or using simple built-in lessons → you may be paying for authoring you'll never open; TalentLMS, LearnWorlds or MoodleCloud price that more lightly.
Decide now who suspends or deactivates accounts when people leave — on account-based pricing that chore is a recurring saving, not admin trivia. Then pilot with one real course: TalentLMS's free plan, or the 28–30 day trials of the other three, with your peak-month group in mind.
Because it does. In this comparison alone: TalentLMS prices by tiered brackets of users (with an optional login-based Flex mode on higher plans), iSpring Learn charges per user who logs in at least once in a month, MoodleCloud caps the number of live accounts that can log in (suspended ones excluded), and LearnWorlds charges no per-user fee but caps active learners per month. Always ask a vendor which definition applies before comparing a headline rate.
Mostly the counting model and what's bundled, not the LMS basics — all four assign courses and track completion. MoodleCloud's Starter is a capped hosted plan ($160/yr for 50 users, 1 GB). iSpring Learn's $5,592 worked example is 50 active users at $9.32/user/mo, and every seat includes a full authoring tool. The worked examples above show the arithmetic for each platform so you can re-run them with your own headcount.
On account-based models, yes — until you act. A leaver's live account still counts toward MoodleCloud's user quota and toward a TalentLMS bracket if it stays active-status. Suspending (MoodleCloud) or deactivating (TalentLMS) removes them from the count while keeping their completion records. On iSpring Learn a leaver who never logs in simply isn't an active user that month, and on LearnWorlds registrations don't drive the fee at all.
All four platforms play SCORM, but the gates differ. LearnWorlds excludes SCORM on Starter — Pro Trainer (up to 20 packages) is the entry point, Learning Center is unlimited. TalentLMS lists SCORM 1.2 with xAPI and cmi5; its documentation centres on 1.2, so test 2004 packages. iSpring Learn and Moodle (via its standard SCORM activity) both handle 1.2 and 2004 content. Whatever you choose, test your own packages in the trial first — SCORM compatibility is package-specific in practice.
The Moodle software is free and open source — you can download and run it on your own server at no licence cost, though hosting and maintenance are then yours. MoodleCloud is Moodle HQ's paid hosted service: the charge is for the managed site, updates and support, within the user and storage quotas above. It has no permanent free plan, only a 28-day trial.
No, and be wary of any vendor page that implies otherwise. An LMS delivers courses, deadlines, reminders and completion records. Whether training changes behaviour or performance depends on course quality and management follow-through, which no platform in this comparison promises — and this guide makes no such claim either.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published specifications and pricing, not from hands-on testing. Where a judgment appears (for example, that per-login pricing is the most expensive model when everyone trains in one month), it is arithmetic on the published prices, shown next to it so you can check it yourself.