Which LMS Do U.S. Universities Actually Use? A Look at 3,400 Institutions

Canvas is the learning management system at more than half of U.S. higher education institutions surveyed. Out of 3,400 universities and colleges, 1,814 use Canvas, making it the clear market leader ahead of Blackboard, D2L Brightspace, and Moodle.

The Full Breakdown

Here is how the LMS market splits across the institutions in the dataset:

LMS	Number of Institutions	Share
Canvas	1,814	53.4%
Blackboard	534	15.7%
D2L Brightspace	451	13.3%
Moodle	428	12.6%
Other	104	3.1%
Schoology	38	1.1%
Sakai	25	0.7%
Google Classroom	6	0.2%

Canvas and Blackboard together account for close to 70% of the market. D2L Brightspace and Moodle each hold a meaningful double-digit share, while Schoology, Sakai, and Google Classroom appear mostly at smaller institutions or in specific regional clusters rather than as mainstream choices for four-year universities.

How We Gathered This Data

We started with Most-Recent-Cohorts-Institution.csv, a core file from the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, which gave us a starting list of 5,291 institutions with names and websites.

A subset of universities already had a confirmed Moodle installation from a separate, pre-verified list. Those were added directly, no search or classification needed for them.

For every other university, we ran an automatic web search, using either Tavily or Serper.dev, combining the school's name and website domain with the names of the major LMS platforms: Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Brightspace, Sakai, and Schoology. If a result contained a link whose subdomain matched a known LMS pattern, for example canvas.university.edu or mycourses.university.edu, that was treated as strong evidence on its own.

The search results were then passed to Gemini with strict instructions: only classify a university when the evidence directly names that specific school together with a specific LMS. A state-wide system mentioned without naming the university, a platform the school used in the past but has since switched from, or a result about a different, similarly named institution outside the US did not count as a match. When the evidence didn't clearly meet that bar, the classification came back as "unknown" instead of a guess, and that university was left out of the final total. Each classification also came with a confidence level, high, medium, or low, and a short reason.

Progress was saved after every single university, so if a search or Gemini quota ran out mid-run, no work was lost or repeated on the next pass.

This left 3,400 of the original 5,291 institutions confidently identified, about 64% of the starting list.

A Few Caveats

This is a snapshot, not a certified inventory. Universities switch LMS platforms, and a school running more than one system across departments will show up here as whichever one produced the clearest search evidence, not necessarily every system it uses.

"Other" is not a catch-all for uncertain cases. It's a specific label used only when a real, named platform outside the seven major systems was found, such as NEO, Populi, or Open LMS. Cases that were genuinely unclear were dropped as "unknown" instead, which is the main reason the final count is lower than the starting list of 5,291.

The confirmed Moodle universities came from an existing verified list rather than the search and classification process, so that portion of the total didn't depend on search results being publicly available.

Search-based classification also depends on what's publicly indexed. Larger institutions tend to have more visible documentation, like a dedicated IT help page or a distinct LMS subdomain, than smaller ones, which can make them slightly overrepresented among the confidently identified schools.

Get the Full Dataset

The numbers above are the summary. The full spreadsheet includes the LMS classification for each of the 3,400 individual institutions, along with the source evidence used to make that call.

Download the full institution-by-institution LMS spreadsheet