Moodle

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Introduction

NEO is a world class, award winning LMS for use by schools and universities. The platform is

known for its easy-to-use and beautiful user interface, comprehensive set of innovative features,

and pricing that provides great value for money. With NEO it’s easy to create great classes that

students will enjoy anytime, everywhere.

NEO is a product of CYPHER LEARNING, which also provides a similar LMS for use by

businesses called MATRIX. Both NEO and MATRIX are used by over 20,000 organizations,

support 40+ languages, and have millions of users.

Moodle is an open source LMS with a comprehensive feature set. You can download the source

code and host it on your own servers, or pay a business such as Moodlerooms to host and

support it for you.

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Moodle

User interface

The NEO interface is a modern, responsive design that looks sharp and automatically adjusts

based on the type of device. It provides attractive tile-based dashboards for students, teachers

and administrators, a graphical class catalog, as well as simple pop-out navigation. Many

features can be enabled or disabled to suit young children through to college students. It

provides rich content authoring as well as a visually attractive way to create and organize lesson

material.

The Moodle interface is somewhat old-fashioned and clunky compared with what is expected of

modern web applications. Although the Moodle UI can be customized, most Moodle sites tend

to be dry and uninspiring. The Moodle UI is even harder to use from a mobile phone, and doesn’t

seem to use modern UI practices to adjust well to smaller devices.

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Moodle

Ease of use

NEO is very intuitive and easy to use. In addition, it includes an online help center, with videos,

getting started guides, and searchable help content. NEO also has a rapid response support

forum where staff members typically respond to questions within 15-30 minutes during

business hours.

Moodle has a reputation of being fairly hard to understand and use, and many sites that use

Moodle have to run training courses for their staff so that they are able to use it effectively.

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Moodle

Features

NEO provides the range of functionality you’d expect in a modern LMS, such as support for

classes (instructor led, blended, and self-paced), twelve kinds of assignments, full-featured

gradebook, content authoring, beautiful lesson layouts, gamification, rules engine, learning

paths, drip content, curricula and proficiencies (including US common core standards and Next

Generation Science Standards), question banks, class templates, rubrics, chat rooms, resources

catalog, blogs, wikis, a customizable portal, e-portfolios, and more.

NEO supports many important industry standards such as SCORM, Common Cartridge Format,

LTI, QTI and LDAP. We also integrate with a wide variety of systems, including Calendars (iCal),

Google Drive, G Suite, Single sign-on with Office 365, OneDrive, PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net,

Turnitin, Zapier, GoToMeeting, Zoom, WebEx, SIS, Equella, and SMTP/POP3.

A complete list of the features in the free and premium NEO plans is here:

https://www.neolms.com/info/plans

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Moodle

Features

Moodle provides a similar feature set, with the main difference being that the features are typically

harder to configure and use. Moodle is missing some key features that NEO provides such as:

• beautiful customizable portal;

• graphical dashboards for students, teachers, admins, and parents;

• graphical class catalog with categories, cross-listings, and more;

• powerful content synchronization;

• prerequisite certificates;

• customizable welcome pages;

• built-in student help desk;

• optional integration with your own email server;

• support for 40+ languages;

• automatic language translation for messages and forums;

• rules engine;

• drip content.

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Moodle

Cost

NEO has a free plan and costs about $6 per student per year for its Small school plan and $7 per

student per year for its Enterprise plan. There are no setup fees, cancellation fees, storage fees,

bandwidth fees, support fees, or other hidden costs.

Moodle can be downloaded and self-hosted, or hosted and supported using a company such as

Moodlerooms. Here is an analysis of the cost of each option:

You can run a few hundred students on a single server and single database, as long as you don’t

mind the possibility of outages if the server fails or occurs outside of normal school hours. A

small-school configuration can often be installed and administered by an IT enthusiast, so the

cost is based on the price of the server, backups, and the IT person’s hours.

The self-hosted option for small schools clearly costs more than the NEO free plan, and usually

costs more than the NEO Small school plan, which is $50/month for a school of 100 students.

Self-hosted for small schools

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Moodle

Cost

To run Moodle reliably (99.9% uptime) for a lot of students, you need a more sophisticated setup

than just a single server. Specifically, we recommend:

It also requires an IT specialist with knowledge of how to setup, configure, and maintain a

complex cluster environment who is available 24/7 to deal with performance issues and

outages. This self-hosted Moodle option usually costs more than the NEO Enterprise plan, which

is $600/month for a school of 1,000 students.

• 1 hardware load balancer;

• 2 servers or more, depending on the number of students;

• 2 copies of your SQL database in a master/slave setup with failover;

• 2 memcached servers for fault-tolerant caching;

• 1 high capacity RAID disk system for file storage and backups;

• 1 search engine;

• professional monitoring software.

Self-hosted for large schools

The cost of a commercially hosted Moodle will vary by vendor. We have heard anecdotally that

Moodlerooms is about twice the price of the NEO Enterprise plan.

Commercially hosted

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Moodle

This comparison was written in October 2016 based on publicly available documentation on both

vendor's sites. It was prepared as a guide and is not intended to be exhaustive. The comparison

information does not constitute any contractual representation, warranty or obligation on our part.

Liability for errors, omissions or consequential loss is expressly disclaimed. If you find any information

in this comparison guide to be inaccurate, please contact us and we will correct the information.

Summary

www.neolms.com

NEO is a more attractive, easier-to-use LMS than Moodle, at a lower cost for both small and large

schools.

Schools that don’t need LMS “power” features can choose the NEO free plan, which is beautiful,

easy-to-use, and includes most of the functionality of Moodle with several features that Moodle

does not support.

Schools that want LMS “power” features can upgrade from the NEO free plan to a NEO premium

plan at any time, which include a similar set of features to Moodle at a significantly lower cost.

This paper presented a comparison of the most important features of NEO and Moodle. If you

require additional information on NEO, please visit our website at www.neolms.com or contact

us at sales@cypherlearning.com.

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Moodle