Which is the Most Reliable LMS?

LMS systems, they’re part of how schools work, many will be quite similar in their capabilities, but some are more reliable than others.

A study on LMS reliability by Statusgator analyzed incident and outage reports from the official status pages for Seesaw, Blackboard, Canvas by Instructure, PowerSchool, Nearpod, and Google Classroom over a one-year period.

StatusGator aggregates data from the status pages of 2,700+ cloud services and presents it clearly as a single status page so status information for cloud services such as LMS platforms can be viewed in a single place.

The most reliable LMS for Schools and K-12 are Seesaw, PowerSchool, and Canvas, and out of the three Canvas is the most used in Australia but still was one of the LMS systems that reported the most frequent outages.

Seesaw the lowest number of outages and the lowest outage duration with 12 outages and a total duration of 68 hours and 43 minutes.

Canvas by Instructure had the highest number of outages at 80, but not the highest total outage duration (149 hours and 43 minutes).

The longest duration of outages was observed with Blackboard, a total of 656 hours and 31 minutes in 2022, but only 40 outages were recorded. Two outages in particular accounted for 29% (200 hours) of the total duration.

PowerSchool saw 68 outages with a total duration of 126 hours and 11 minutes. 

Nearpod and Google Classroom lack transparency about their status history the researchers say, finding that one outage was deleted from Nearpod’s official status page, and Google Classroom did not register all the issues that its users had in 2022.

Blackboard, Canvas by Instructure, and PowerSchool are highly transparent in communicating the status of their services. Their status pages contain all the information regarding outages in 2022.

In regard to outage history, June and September were the two worst months. In June, three outages were observed in relation to issues with message migrations and email notifications. All of these issues were resolved within 3 hours.

September saw a major outage regarding an inappropriate message being shared from an “outside actor”. It was a sensitive issue, but it was handled within 22 hours, and Seesaw’s CEO issued a statement showing a good level of transparency. This issue was damaging, but it’s reassuring that Seesaw handled it well.

Seesaw provides detailed breakdowns of incidents. The company updates its users on partial and major outages and current and historical uptime.   

Based on Seesaw’s response to a sensitive issue, the informative status page, and outage statistics, Seesaw is a reliable LMS. 

The total outage duration of PowerSchool was lower than that of Blackboard, even though Blackboard had fewer outages. The researchers consider duration to be more significant than outage frequency. 

PowerSchool’s official status page is informative providing detailed breakdowns of incidents and updates.

PowerSchool also distinguishes between partial and major outages, maintenance, and degraded performance. They display the current status of all its components. 

You can see the full study: https://statusgator.com/blog/most-reliable-educational-platform-in-2023/