Chamilo

Chamilo is an open-source learning management system (LMS) released under the GNU GPL and maintained by the non-profit Chamilo Association since 2010. Written in PHP, it provides everything needed to run online education: course authoring, quizzes and grading, progress tracking, certificates and communication tools — with a deliberate focus on being easy for teachers and learners who are not technical.

How Chamilo works

Work in Chamilo is organised around courses. Inside each course, a trainer assembles learning paths from building blocks: documents and multimedia, SCORM-compliant lesson packages, exercises with multiple question types and automatic scoring, assignments, forums, surveys, wikis and a gradebook. The platform tracks each learner's progress and time spent, issues completion certificates, and separates permissions across administrator, teacher, tutor and learner roles. Modern releases add responsive mobile-friendly theming, videoconferencing through the BigBlueButton integration, and single sign-on via LDAP or OAuth.

Under the hood it is a classic LAMP-stack application: PHP, a MySQL/MariaDB database and Apache or Nginx. Installation runs through a browser-based wizard, and the system's light footprint is one of its selling points — a small academy runs comfortably on inexpensive shared hosting, while installations with thousands of concurrent learners scale up on a VPS or dedicated server.

Practical use cases

Typical deployments include schools and universities delivering blended or fully remote classes, training companies selling courses online, HR departments running onboarding and compliance training, and NGOs that need capable e-learning without licence fees. Self-hosting is a recurring motive: organisations keep full control over learner data on their own infrastructure, which simplifies GDPR compliance compared with sending records to a third-party SaaS.

Chamilo's most common point of comparison is Moodle: Moodle offers a far larger plugin ecosystem and deeper configurability, while Chamilo wins on setup speed, interface clarity and administration overhead. For small and mid-sized training projects that trade-off frequently favours Chamilo.