Item: Sakai
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sakai is currently the Learning Management System (LMS) across campus. It is used for all learning management needs and is the hub for third-party plugins.

Pros and Cons

Open-source community.
Flexible.
As customizable as you can afford.

No mobile app.
Confusing and unintuitive layout and buried settings.
Lacking full 3rd-party integrations.

Return on Investment

Sakai continues to serve the university, and faculty and students are mostly satisfied with it.
The cost to support has been good in the past.
As the market share slows, it's often the last to be developed by popular third-party integrations.

Sakai will check most of the same boxes as Canvas as far as features. Students can receive feedback, emails, comments, grade and submit assignments, etc. However, everything is going to be a bit more difficult with Sakai. Finding something will take more clicks. Sakai is more flexible since it's open-source. If there's a feature you really need, you can develop it yourself (at your own risk). Integrations with third parties are much easier and faster with Canvas than Sakai.

Support Rating

Since Sakai is open-source their documentation is often lacking and support is absolutely needed onsite. Internal documentation is more important with Sakai than other services. The Sakai community is fun, passionate, engaged, and absolutely doing their best, but it's an uphill battle against the current market and trends.

Key Insights

Do you think Sakai delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Sakai's feature set?

Did Sakai live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Sakai go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Sakai again?

Likelihood to Recommend

Sakai is great if you need a less expensive LMS. You will likely need to have internal developers or pay developers to keep it running, but this might be cheaper than the alternatives, like Blackboard, Canvas, D2L etc.
Adopting Sakai now would be a very risky proposition, as their user base continues to be eaten by Canvas. Open source is great when there is a thriving and growing community to support it, but the largest public institutions that used and developed for Sakai have been leaving in droves, causing development to stagnate.

Sakai -- The Mighty Have Fallen

Overall Satisfaction with Sakai