Canvas LMS
Fewer than 5 people recommend it so far, so there's no written verdict. Here is what commenters said.
3recommend
16warn against
Nov 7, 2025first mention
Sep 14, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“you can self-host Canvas”
“Canvas is mostly FOSS”
Show 1 more
“it was hands down superior”
switched from Blackboardon “Canvas (Instructure) LMS Down in Ongoing Ransomware …”
Caveats and dissent
“the hackers may have extracted session tokens using XSS in a support ticket”
“Canvas is effectively an monopoly”
Show 2 more
“I couldn't even get a development environment setup because of their storage space requirements.”
“One minute I was able to run my code, the next I couldn't.”
software developer, affected by the outageon “Canvas (Instructure) LMS Down in Ongoing Ransomware …”
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- Canvas (Instructure) LMS Down in Ongoing Ransomware Attack 17 mentions
- ShinyHunters claims data theft from 8,800 schools (Instructure/Canvas) 9 mentions
- Instructure Pays Ransom to Canvas Hackers 2 mentions
- Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026) 1 mention
- Hister – private, self hosted search engine 1 mention
- Canvas hack: company pays criminals to delete students' stolen data 1 mention
Also written as Canvas. Data: canvas-lms.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 33
“I use Canvas (the LMS) a LOT for the classes I teach”
“indexing URLs / browser tabs with[0]”
“Canvas itself is also open source”
“the hackers may have extracted session tokens using XSS in a support ticket”
“Canvas is effectively an monopoly”
I remember my university switched to Moodle around that time. I wonder if they're still popular.
“I couldn't even get a development environment setup because of their storage space requirements.”
“Canvas is actually also open source and can be self-hosted”
“One minute I was able to run my code, the next I couldn't.”
“Here I saved you a google search: https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms”
“The alternative could be to self host.”
“A bunch of plugins running on canvas.instructure.com are proprietary”
“the fact that it (back when I used to be a TA) would break if two TAs tried concurrently grading”
“it's some of the worst written software I've ever used”
“you can self-host Canvas”
Schools don't have competent IT teams. Here in the Netherlands a data center's power source (not even the machines) burnt down, data center is offline and University of Utrecht, one of the biggest universities here, is closed. Access passes don't work, work from home environment doesn't work, student information system is down, system for grading doesn't work. No failover for any of them (or maybe it was in the same
“Canvas is mostly FOSS”
“it was hands down superior”
“I loved those far more than I loved "Canvas" or whatever the ugly LMS we used was”
“they haven't merged a PR since 2017”
> they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements Instructure (Canvas's developer) partnered with OpenAI last year [1], about a year after KKR and Dragoneer (PE firms) acquired it [2]. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/rayravaglia/2025/07/23/instructure-and-openai-harness-the-power-of-ai-to-transform-learning/ [2] https://www.pehub.com/kkr-and-dragoneer-complete-4-8bn-take-private
“It worked Ok.”
“Once we hit 8h 45m SLA has been broken.”
“I saw this happen to my Canvas account today.”
“But it turns out that MIT used to have their own homegrown system, and recently switched to Canvas. Bet they're regretting that now.”
I believe Canvas was also sold to private equity pretty recently too. https://www.instructure.com/press-release/instructure-to-be-acquired-by-KKR
“When we switched to canvas we kept the home brew running for five years past its expiration date”
“Back when I worked for Instructure ~10 years ago, Canvas was effectively”
“our canvas instance is down. this is really, really bad.”
“We already bond over how awful the Canvas UX is”
“The Canvas instance at the nearby university is now down”
“despite having the Canvas app”
“Canvas is expensive ($50K+/year)”