Opigno vs Drupal LMS: Which Open-Source LMS for Hong Kong?
Opigno Community and Opigno Enterprise differ sharply from Drupal LMS. We compare the forks, the licensing, the module ecosystems and which one fits a Hong Kong enterprise or school.
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Notes on Hong Kong LMS, open source and e-Learning
Written for HR, IT and school administrators in Hong Kong who have to make a real decision about learning technology. No product pitches dressed as analysis.
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HK$0 licence is the headline. The real total cost of ownership sits in hosting, configuration, integration, content and administration. Broken down honestly.
ReadKey facts about this blog
- What we write about
- Hong Kong LMS, TMS and e-Learning decisions — platform selection, content standards, open-source economics and Drupal LMS engineering.
- Who writes it
- The OpenLMS team. We build on Drupal LMS and run Hong Kong deployments, so the analysis comes from delivery work, not from vendor marketing.
- What we do not do
- We do not publish sponsored comparisons or claim a competitor is bad. Where a commercial platform is the better economic choice, we say so.
- How often
- Fortnightly at most, and only when we have something specific to add.
- Subscribe
- RSS at /feed.xml, or the Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese equivalents.
Questions we get asked about Hong Kong open-source LMS
Is there really a free open-source LMS that a Hong Kong school can use?
Yes. Drupal LMS is a GPL-licensed learning management system for Drupal, maintained by Tag1 Consulting with development from the American Federation of Teachers, reporting 208 sites. It supports SCORM, xAPI, H5P and YAML content, runs on Drupal 10.3 or 11 with MariaDB and PHP, and carries no per-seat or annual licence fee.
Is Opigno the same as Drupal LMS?
No. Drupal LMS began as a fork of the Opigno distribution and has been rewritten from the ground up for Drupal 10.3+. They share an ancestor but have diverged substantially. Opigno also now offers a separate commercial Opigno Enterprise product, which is a different platform again.
How much does an open-source LMS cost in Hong Kong?
The licence is HK$0. What remains is hosting, configuration, integration, content development and administration. For a small organisation a commercial licence can still be cheaper in total; for larger organisations with existing technical capability, open source is usually substantially cheaper over three years.
Which content standards should a Hong Kong e-Learning team support?
SCORM 1.2 and 2004 for packaged and legacy content, H5P for browser-authored interactive activities with no authoring licence cost, and xAPI for recording learning that happens outside a course — workplace training, meetings or supervisor coaching.