I have been looking for a real "user-friendly" LMS for LEARNERS as well as elearning producers & instructional designers, for a long time.

I was useing WebCT and Moodle for a while and what I thought for both were...

WebCT:

From the management or elearning producers' viewpoint, the quality is not bad compared with others, but if you think of the cost (which is actually expensive) to pay to Blackboard, the ROI (Return-on-Investment) of WebCT is NO good.

Of course they offer you customer support since it's a commercial LMS, unlike Moodle. So WebCT could be used for corporate use because of it. But if you were one of the management members to decide matters from the "management" (ROI) viewpoint, not just from the instructional viewpoint, you would think it's too expensive and you might want to look for other option.

From the learners' viewpoint, their user interface doesn't look attractive. The current instructional design/learning design is supposed to be something which let learners think that learning itself is fun and interesting.

In that sense, WebCT could work if the target users are high school or university students who are (kind of) forced to learn to get credits and if those organizations don't care much about ROI.

Moodle:

Well, from the management or elearning producers' viewpoint, the fact that it's totallly open source and free of charge is GOOD. ROI(Return/Investment) is not bad because the amount of "initial investment" is minimum.

But suppose you think of return, their user interface is actually so boring as WebCT. And the user-support is limited. Basically you need to rely on the forum members or if you need a reliable customer support you might have to ask some moodle consultant or resellers for the support at the end of the day.

Just to clarify, I'm not trying to deny moodle and WebCT. It's just that, for me, Moodle ans WebCT seems largely limited to academic use. From my business experience I would say both are difficult to be widely used as corporate use.

For example assume you are planning to do some BtoC online learning business, I doubt you can attract your potential customers with those.

If you are trying to start BtoB or BtoC online learning and serious about ROI, then JoomlaLMS could be an real option. What is great is that their LMS design is much more attractive than others. You can even use Joomla templates, which makes the design more flexible and exciting. You will need to pay for the annual license fee, but it's pretty much reasonable considering the quality they offer.

If you are an instructional designer, you will find that JoomlaLMS can do almost all things which moodle and WebCT can do. Also one of the characteristics which I feel is great is JoomlaLMS has web-conferencing, which is necessary for those who want to design 100% online blended learning program.

Of course I've also found some bugs and I know it's not a perfect system. They have still many to to be improved. But as a one year old product, I'd like to give them 5 star. Lastly so far I'm very satisfied with developer's quick response.