Moodle radar: where Moodle is used in 2026, by the numbers

Moodle’s public counter lists 144,995 registered sites in 235 countries, with about 513 million user accounts between them. Spain has more registered sites than the United States. Latin America and the European Union together hold more than half of them. And 43% of registered sites report a Moodle version that no longer gets security fixes.

This is the first post in a series we call Moodle radar. Each edition reads the same public sources and says what changed. This one sets the baseline. Every figure below was checked on 29 October 2026, and each table says what it counts and what it doesn’t.

How many Moodle sites are there?

The best public number is the counter at stats.moodle.org.¹1 Moodle HQ, Moodle statistics, checked 29 October 2026. It counts sites whose administrators chose to register with Moodle HQ.

Three things limit this number:

1. Registration is optional. Moodle’s own documentation says so: “Registration is optional, but we wouldn’t want you to miss out on any important security issues.”²2 Moodle Docs, Site registration, checked 29 October 2026. Plenty of sites never register, especially internal company sites and installs nobody maintains. So the real count is higher, and nobody knows by how much.
2. “Users” means accounts, not people. A student at two universities is two users. A site that never deletes old accounts keeps counting them. Half a billion accounts is not half a billion learners.
3. The counter goes down as well as up. The page says Moodle HQ runs “regular bulk checking of sites to make sure they still exist, so occasionally you may see reductions in the count.”

Moodle’s own About page shows rounder, larger figures: “500000000+ Users worldwide” and “153997+ Moodle sites”.³3 Moodle, About Moodle, checked 29 October 2026. Those are marketing numbers that don’t match the live counter. When the two disagree, we use the counter.

The page does not give a date for its figures or publish a history, so a single reading can’t tell you whether Moodle is growing. That is the point of this series. The next edition reads the same pages and compares.

How does Moodle compare with other LMSs on the public web?

W3Techs scans public websites and records the software it can detect. On 29 October 2026 it reported that Moodle runs on 0.1% of all websites, and holds a 51.0% share of the e-learning systems it detects.⁴4 W3Techs, Usage statistics of e-learning systems, checked 29 October 2026.

By site ranking, W3Techs puts Moodle on 0.9% of the top 1 million sites, 1.1% of the top 100,000, 0.4% of the top 10,000 and 0% of the top 1,000.⁵5 W3Techs, Moodle usage by site ranking, checked 29 October 2026.

What this can’t tell you: W3Techs only sees what is public and detectable. A Moodle behind a company VPN or a university single sign-on page may not show up. Canvas, Blackboard and D2L are not in its e-learning list at all, so this is not a market share table for universities. It does show that among systems you can spot from the outside, Moodle is still the most common by a wide margin, and that it is mostly used by mid-sized sites rather than the biggest brands on the web.

Which countries use Moodle most?

These are registered sites per country from stats.moodle.org, checked 29 October 2026. The country list adds up to 144,063, slightly less than the headline counter, so percentages in this section use 144,063 as the base.

Spain at number one is not a typo, and it is the most useful fact in the table. Moodle is strongest where schools and universities run their own servers on open source software, and the Spanish-speaking world does that at scale. Spain plus the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America account for 42,558 registered sites, about 30% of the total.

What this can’t tell you: a country with one national platform serving millions of students shows up as one site. A country where every school runs its own Moodle shows up as thousands. Site counts measure how many separate installs exist, not how many people use them.

Where does Moodle stand in each region?

We grouped the country list into regions. Same source, same date, same caveats.

Some single countries for comparison: India 3,754, Indonesia 5,373, Japan 1,317, South Africa 2,173, Kenya 728, Nigeria 683, Pakistan 454, China 400.

Europe is where Moodle started and still its largest base. It is also where governments build on it directly. France’s education ministry runs Éléa, which its documentation describes as “Un Moodle pour les enseignants et leurs élèves”, a learning platform for primary and secondary schools offered by the ministry’s digital education directorate (DNE).⁶6 Ministère de l’Éducation nationale (DNE), Éléa documentation, checked 29 October 2026. Andorra built a country-wide virtual campus on Moodle; Moodle reported 14,000 users in 2020, and we found no newer figure.⁷7 Moodle, Moodle powers eLearning in Andorra with a country-wide virtual campus (16 November 2020).

Latin America is the other half of Moodle’s map. Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Chile and Ecuador each have more than 2,800 registered sites. MoodleMoot México 2026 runs on 11-12 November in Naucalpan de Juárez.⁸8 Moodle, Events, checked 29 October 2026.

The Arab world and North Africa look small in this table. Here is the detail:

We think the region is undercounted more than most. University e-learning platforms across North Africa commonly run on Moodle, and registration is an easy step to skip. That is our reading, not a number. The registered counts above are the only figures we can verify.

India has 3,754 registered sites, 13th in the world, which is small for its size. Indonesia has 5,373, more than France.

Which Moodle versions are sites running?

stats.moodle.org also publishes the version each registered site reports. This is the most useful part of the page if you care about security. The branch counts add up to 144,984, and the percentages below use that base.

Support dates from Moodle’s release table.⁹9 Moodle HQ, Releases and support dates, checked 29 October 2026.

Add up the four supported branches (4.5, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3) and you get 83,037 sites, 57%. The other 61,947 registered sites, 43%, report a branch that gets no security fixes at all. 11,759 report Moodle 3.9, 3.10 or 3.11, branches that stopped getting fixes in 2022 and 2023.

Two good signs. Moodle 5.3 came out on 5 October 2026 and 12,672 registered sites already report it. And 4.5 LTS is the single most common branch, which means a lot of organisations did move to a supported long-term release.

What this can’t tell you: the versions are what each site last reported. 23,695 sites report exactly 4.5.0 and 16,454 report 5.2.0, which almost certainly includes sites that patched later and never sent a fresh report. So don’t read this as “23,695 sites are unpatched”. Read it at branch level, and remember that the sites that never registered at all are the least likely to be kept up to date.

How big are most Moodle sites?

The same page groups registered sites by user count.

We merged some of the page’s bands. About 80% of registered sites have fewer than 1,000 user accounts. Moodle’s typical install is a school, a training department or a small company, not a giant university. Those are also the sites least likely to have someone whose job is upgrading Moodle.

Who supports Moodle around the world?

Moodle’s partner directory showed 126 Moodle Certified Partners on 29 October 2026.¹⁰10 Moodle, Moodle Certified Partners, checked 29 October 2026. Its country filter lists 69 countries, though that doesn’t mean each has a partner. We could not find a public figure for how many sites MoodleCloud, Moodle HQ’s own hosting, runs; its product page gives no count.

MoodleMoots, the community conferences, still run on several continents. The upcoming ones listed by Moodle on 29 October 2026:⁸

What do the numbers say?

Our reading, from one snapshot:

• Moodle still leads where it can be seen. It holds half of the detectable e-learning systems on the public web, and three weeks after 5.3 came out, more than 12,000 registered sites already ran it.
• Europe and Latin America are the base. Together they hold more than half of all registered sites, and Spanish-speaking countries alone hold about 30%.
• The Arab world, India and Africa are underrepresented in the counter, and we think undercounted. They are where most of the next growth would show up, and where registration is least common.
• The old version tail is the real story. More than 60,000 registered sites report a branch with no security fixes, and the unregistered sites are probably worse.

What this means if you run Moodle

Check your branch in Site administration, under Notifications, and compare it with the support table above. If you are on 5.0, your security fixes ended on 5 October 2026. If you are on 4.1 or anything in the 3.x line, you are on code that missed every Moodle fix since it ended, and probably on an old PHP too. Our post on outdated PHP under Moodle covers that half of the problem, and what breaks in a Moodle upgrade covers the other half. If you are planning the move to 5.x, read Moodle 5 requirements and changes first.

When an upgrade is stuck, a custom plugin is often the reason: it depends on an API the new version removed. DevLMS builds and updates Moodle plugins so they run on the versions you are moving to.