Canvas vs. Insightly vs. Moodle

It is really well suited for school situations like knowing what [assignments] need to be done when, getting feedback, getting points, finding the slides that the teacher used for explaining an [assignment] or theory. I think It would be less suited in business situations because it's [primarily] made to be a [one-way] communication tool for schools. Businesses need more control on individual levels I think[.]

Incentivized

There are a lot of things Insightly is great with for Career Services but much of my job is updating things manually because Insightly doesn't have a way to help me manage the database the way we need to. We have multiple academic records per students but needed to have fields that are multiselect on our contacts. These are all manually updated which are very tedious and not the best for what we need it to be able to do

Incentivized

Moodle is great for any environment where a class or other learning activity needs to be completed in an asynchronous manner. It can be used to post information, create interactive threads for discussion, issue quiz and exam work with grading, track and grade progress, and keep track of attendance. It is an overall wonderful solution for managing asynchronous learning.

• Creativity options for teachers to create a virtual space that still has fun graphics and accessibility options.
• Canvas has versatility in viewing options for assignment due dates such as the calendar built in feature as well as the dashboard options to display upcoming and due assignments.
• Allowing teachers to create community with each other and collaborate in each-other's space.
• Discussion platforms within classrooms for students to communicate with each-other and with their teachers.
• Easy messaging portal within each virtual classroom.

Incentivized

• The ability to set up filters to generate lists based on just the categories I am interested in.
• It's integration with our sales data so we can see customer spending trends across multiple years and seasons.
• The ability to circle back to previous email correspondence to refresh on past conversations with individual clients.

Incentivized

• Moodle's grade book works well. Assignments are integrated so the grades are recorded automatically.
• Moodle is customizable by administrators, so our version only gives us the options we need. NO Clutter.
• The discussion board offers several options for instructors that help with grading. I use "sum of points", but there are other options as well.

Incentivized

• Their integration with Big Blue Button was a bust for distance learning. Would be great to see them collaborate with Zoom or Google Meets.
• Their "feature request" process is slow and cumbersome at times because it relies on user "up votes" to get ideas addressed by the developers.
• They seem to have a lot of turn-over with their staff. We get a new Customer Success Manager far more frequently than with other vendors.

Incentivized

• Once you are immersed in the platform, for all of its integration kudos, the platform became "intuitive" if that is the right word for it. There was some push back from staff on deployment.
• The service and support team at Insightly was very responsive, but it seemed as if they had fielded similar complaints, and slower learning curves than we expected.
• Unfortunately, while all has worked out nicely now and we are very happy with the platform, we had to have additional instruction time for all the staff during onboarding as workflows, dashboards, and pipelines were more time intensive than expected on the demo.

Incentivized

• The interface is not very intuitive. You must know what you are looking for in order to navigate effectively.
• Although installation of Moodle is easy, it is a little more difficult to configure it with your other Learning tools. As an example, LDAP synchronization is a little difficult.
• The interface is a little dated, even though new releases keep coming out (which is great!) none of them really add value to the appearance of the platform.

Incentivized

The other LMS tools have fallen behind. One reason is they are not able to update their systems, features, toolsets in a timely manner. While other LMS providers release bug fixes and new features several times a year, schools struggle to install and implement them in a timely manner. It is not uncommon for a school to take 6 months to a year to fully install and implement new releases on other LMS platforms. With Canvas, those features are released every 3 weeks, and there is nothing for a school to do other than choose to turn them on once released. This has allowed Instructure to innovate faster, and get new features and tools to customers quicker. Other factors include great pricing, customer support, and the innovative way in which LTI is implemented in the tool.

Incentivized

Insightly offers a great product; it's the right fit for our company at this time. We were, however, considering moving to Contactually due to their cost effective automation features. However, they lacked the project management capabilities of Insightly. As our company grows, we would love to stay with Insightly - and if they can nail the automation and add the ability to customize a little bit more, it would be the perfect solution for us. For a larger company with a more involved sales team, you might find the metrics/reporting to be a bit basic. Insightly offers great customer service even to free customers

We use it because it is what have committed to back in 2011. Perhaps Moodle will evolve and advance in a positive way that will alleviate most of our user-based gripes? Perhaps it will not appear to be as cost effective given the need for a certain level of engineering and support staff to maintain it at a future level of sustainability? It's hard to say. As an enterprise scale critical application, we like it, but don't love it. Our instructors don't particularly like it at all.

The functions in Canvas are well integrated and consistent across the application, and mostly intuitive. Overall navigation and setup is streamlined through integrated features and navigation. The feedback we've gotten from our program participants is that it is easy to learn to use. It also integrates well with third party software like Google Docs and Blackboard Collaborate web conferencing software

Incentivized

Anyone with any experience with a working knowledge of Facebook or using a Windows computer will be able to quickly adapt to Insightly and use it to suit their needs. It can become more difficult to use as a company might have custom workflows or Insightly customer service might need to customize the program to better suit a company's need. A slow introduction to the system is better than having to learn the program quickly. Parts and knowledge build on each other so it hard to grasp all at once. The learning curve for Insightly is 2-3 weeks while mastery comes with time and exposure to the program

Incentivized

Moodle can be used on a tablet, on a mobile phone, and on a PC. It is easy to navigate for learners and figure out for administrators. The learners can easily complete tasks and the administrators can easily track completion. The last thing about Moodle that one may not realize is that it somewhat resembles Facebook in its layout. This means that users are already familiar with the interface and therefore they are more comfortable using it.

Incentivized

The provider is 100% available, with no downtime, maintenance, or unexpected outages. We have been able to perform solid continuous services for 12 months without any interruptions. We have backups as well, unlike the in-house backup that they keep on their end. I believe they have a very good redundancy and backup infrastructure in case they get any outages.

Incentivized

Yes, Moodle is always available. We are self-hosted and Moodle is always up and available. The only time that it is not available is when we are upgrading it each semester. It is then down for just a few planned hours. That is in-between semesters and we let the faculty and students know. We do it on a Friday evening and it is back up within a few hours.

Incentivized

Pages normally load quickly, but every now and then, as entering updates to fields, it take a while to update. Sometimes even after refreshing the screen, we have to exit and go back in to get the fields or queries to update.

Incentivized

Moodle is an excellent LMS in relationship to any other one that I have seen or used. The pages load quickly and the reports complete in a reasonable time frame. Moodle has taken on Respondus, StudyMate, BigBlueButton, Turning Tech, Turnitin2, Certificates, Attendance, Tegrity, Questionnaire, Virtual Programming Lab, and Badges. All of these programs work right in with Moodle and do not cause any issues. Instructors may also use Camtasia and Snagit software as well as using webcams, downloading videos from the Internet, adding into books, or any of the many other areas within Moodle. Our instructors use the grade books without many problems and really don't ask questions much anymore. We upgrade Moodle every semester and are currently on 2.9+. Our instructors have basically learned to use most of the resources and activities.

Incentivized

I do not personally use Canvas support since we have a central office that helps us. However, our central office always has the answers we need and are always able to solve our issues - so I would assume that get great support from the Canvas team on their end. They also offer great training, which uses materials directly from Canvas

Incentivized

We have used Insightly for almost 2 years now. We have always been able to get in touch with support for a variety of reasons and they have never disappointed us. The support staff have always been very understanding. They have assisted with answers to our questions and have provided great tech support. We would highly recommend them.

Incentivized

Moodle is open source, and must be evaluated in that context, but one also has to provide a fair comparison to competing products with commercial backing. Support varies depending on the component of Moodle. Bug reports in Moodle Core that affect security or stability are dealt with promptly. Functionality requests or features not working smoothly may or may not be addressed, depending on whether the functionality desired matches the "vision" of Moodle HQ. The user community provides excellent support for initial installation and configuration, but more complex questions may go unanswered, unless they are noticed by someone who happens to know the answer. The support forum feature at the Moodle site (the same feature used within Moodle itself) does not provide granular subscription to topic discussions, apparently by design, and Moodle HQ seems resistant to changing this feature.

Incentivized

The training sessions were broken down into several days as well as different levels depending upon the knowledge of the user

Incentivized

Well, we didn’t get the chance to do this in-person training but rather one-on-one online training with HR in-house. There were PowerPoints to discuss as well as video instructions on how to use the app, so it was okay. We were able to play around with it during the training or onboarding session.

Incentivized

The online tutorials and videos are very clear and addressed the issues/questions that I had about using the system.

Incentivized

I've used Insightly's online training &/ or learned as I went. I've found the blogs and online written material helpful. I've also attended a few webinars, which can be useful if you use a J-I-T approach so as not to overwhelm you (or your staff) with functionality that you are using just yet. The fact that it's all available on their website and you can learn at your own pace is invaluable

Incentivized

I have used a few sites and they were adequate but my best learning experience was face to face and hands on.

Incentivized

Once you purchase and sign the contract there is nothing to install or hardware to buy. You can almost immediately start using it and have courses up and going within weeks. We signed in December and had pilot courses online ready to go for the start of school in January

Incentivized

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Incentivized

Find a partner who will work with you during the implementation process. Be sure to provide ample training for veteran users on the changes and for newbies on the overall product.

Incentivized

Canvas is more secure, has a cleaner design, and has more features. For the features, they have in common canvas still stacks up against [Smart school] by going for the extra mile. Besidfor e that, [the] canvas looks a lot more [professional] than [Smart school]. I didn't make the decision myself to get canvas instead of [Smart school] but I'm happy they did.

Insightly is significantly better than Zendesk. It is easy to use, pleasant to look at, and makes sense. However, I don't think Insightly is fair now compared to Salesforce. Insightly can do many of the same things as Salesforce, but I've only started on some of these features. Insightly has excellent potential, and its support team drives me to make it what I believe it can be. For the price, I believe Insightly is worth it.

Incentivized

Blackboard has clear advantages in rubric management, and offers a content management system of its own. The largest barrier is cost for smaller or financially-disadvantaged organizations. However, as in any IT project, adequate resources must be made for even "free" software.

Incentivized

I don’t have the exact answers for this, but our accounting or finance department negotiates this. They always handle this kind of stuff and negotiate yearly licenses. Usually, they purchase 10 licenses in bulk and ask for a discount in bulk. Other than that, if there are any issues encountered on the app, they account for that. If it’s broken, that’s also taken into consideration when renewing the contract.

Incentivized

(+) Being able to download my LinkedIn connections was a huge benefit. (+) I use the task function to stay on top of my follow-up activity which is another positive feature. (+) The sorting capabilities also help me pinpoint the contacts that I need to stay on top of. (-) When I add a new lead from an existing organization, I would like the organization's information to automatically populate the fields like address, website, description. I enter all that information manually. (-) My mass mailing experience has been tedious due to the email function being interrupted and crashing due to bad email addresses in some of my records. (-) Many of my leads do not have current email addresses. I wish Insightly offered a tool to help find email addresses. I spend too much time researching to find email addresses.

Incentivized

Well, I administer Moodle for a dozen of our divisions and there is a wide range of flexibility between offerings. I have course instructors who use every module i their course, chock full of videos, pictures, links to web tools for synchronous sessions within the asynchronous course. I also have others who are content with a syllabus, a few pdfs, links to podcast lectures and a few simple assignments. No matter if your organization is big or small, or if your requirements are strict for credentialing or non-existent (for internal know-how), Moodle can accommodate you.

Incentivized

Our Customer Success Manager was great. A real professional and knowledgeable about the features and how they worked with our requirements

Incentivized

• Canvas has helped us provide a more robust online component to our courses.
• Canvas has helped us better adapt to a rapidly changing educational landscape.
• Canvas has reduced the time that we have to spend training faculty on how to use our learning management system.

Incentivized

• Positive Impact>Visibility is critical when it comes to taking proactive measures within the organization. The Insightly Tool has helped use with that which minimizes costs when it comes to rework. We can proactively plan for upcoming growth and identify areas of improvement.

Incentivized

• While it certainly takes more time to develop an online training vs a face-to-face we can offer the same content over and over again and meet a larger audience. There's no way we could have offered these trainings face-to-face to the same size audience. Economically it's just not feasible. Moodle allows us to share multiple trainings on a variety of topics over extended periods of time in a cost effective way.
• The impact on early interventionists is still being evaluated, but we do know that early interventionist now have more ways to access professional development than in the past. The ability to customize the registration page has allowed us to track which agencies in Virginia are having their staff participate and we can see which topics are favored above others.
• Other LMS's were far too costly. Aside from the monthly hosting fees (less than $200 a year), and the time it took to do the initial install and setup, Moodle is free. Once it's setup the only elearning costs are related to the development and creation of each training and then the setup of training on Moodle. This allows us to devote more time and money to the development and creation of more courses vs. the management of the system.
• Minimal tech support for the users is required and most requests are limited to lost/userid passwords. The course designer is able to manage tech support needs for the users because so few requests are received.

Incentivized