And of course the other serious concern I have with Canvas is that they are likely using all the materials faculty upload to train their AI replacements. Many of my colleagues engage in dark humor about this but I haven't noticed much action.
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/instruct...
[2] https://www.pehub.com/kkr-and-dragoneer-complete-4-8bn-take-...
That calculus is about to shift.
I would guess these plugins are chosen so a majority of user won't want to live without them.
It also seems these plugins "link" to canvas-lms, so keeping the proprietary would be a GPL violation if anyone except Instructure holds part of the copyright to Canvas.
I'm not sure where your stereotype even comes from, because Canvas is not trivial software. You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code before criticizing it because any good engineer would do that.
A bright undergrad could build a superior replacement in a few months, even without AI.
> A bright undergrad could build a superior replacement in a few months, even without AI.
Is quite naive. Canvas is not at all just a crud app. You can view the code yourself as it's AGPL
But it’s rarely the case in practice.
In a sibling comment right here for example someone bemoaned the difficulty in Canvas of having two TAs simultaneously grade separate parts of the same assignment. That sounds like something that goes beyond CRUD.
But more importantly any workflow system, which an LMS will be full of, has to handle the always tricky problem of how changes to workflows affect the things that are currently in the workflow. Assignments posted in course X need to be approved by person Y; some assignments are submitted for approval; person Y goes on leave and now the approval needs to be person Z. Not a simple CRUD problem.
These are things that occur to me with only a moment’s consideration of what an LMS system might need to deal with. The actual domain probably has considerable more complexity that I can’t even imagine.
In reality, Canvas does not have workflow and does not prevent race conditions in grading. I can certainly imagine an LMS that does these things, but Canvas does not.
It would probably help if you had actually used Canvas before trying to convince us that it is non-CRUD.
It's a simple question. Since you claim to be an expert on Canvas, I'm sure that you can point me to the relevant features much faster than I can sort through thousands of lines of code, looking for the one line that says "def not_crud_function()". CRUD or not-CRUD is a judgement about the purpose of a program, not its implementation.
And If you can't be bothered to take 2 minutes to click through some pages on GitHub, I don't believe you'd take the time to even read that report. So no, I'm not doing your research for you.
Edit: I will do this for you though. Here's Gemini's opinion[1]. It's quite accurate as well, and goes into reasonable high-level detail (though doesn't get into specific modules). I especially loved this quote:
> At its absolute lowest level, almost all web software boils down to pushing state to and from a database. But calling Canvas LMS "just a CRUD app" is a bit like calling a commercial airliner "just a metal tube with wings."
https://github.com/instructure/canvas-lms/pull/2630/changes/...
It has to be simple enough for the average person to use (both on the learner side and the instruction side) and have enough complexity to allow for a lot of flexibility in setup because every organization is slightly different. They have to support 50 million file formats and everything has to be backwards compatible until the end of time and everything has to load properly and quickly on 50 million different device/OS/browser combinations. Yes, there's SCORM as a standard, but even that is rickety, and an LMS that doesn't support non SCORM files is dead in the water anyway.
They're simple(ish) in code, and a nightmare in requirements.
Canvas is decidedly, not fast, fails to display even trivial files (such as source code) as well as more complex files that should just be handled by the browser (such as video), and it has a non-intuitive, verbose, and tiresome interface that would have felt old-fashioned 20 years ago.
LMSes frankly run like shit. I don't work with Canvas right now, but every one I've used has run like shit.
However, there are reasons that the complex files aren't handled by the browser: tracking and persistence. It isn't enough to make a video file watchable, it then needs to be tracked in the same system as every other training/educational material and in the same way. If you don't care whether the students actually watch the video, then yeah, throw them a YouTube link or embed a video on a personal site or just have the LMS serve a basic embed. But being able to track video, make it mandatory, make it so that it can't be fast forwarded/people can't skip to the end etc. all matter when LMSes are used for topics that are required for compliance and regulatory purposes.
I don't disagree on the interface(s). Ours is a farce and I hate it.
It's likely that they're so bad precisely because of the simple tech and complex requirements. Simple tech doesn't mean 'easy' or 'not time consuming'. But it means you're looking for developers who have a decent level of technical proficiency (to handle the numerous edge cases and flexibility the systems demand: it's not hard but things like the data structures need to be well thought out and every single piece of the system is integrated with one another in most LMSes so you can't silo work as easily) and who want to work on problems that aren't hard and require dealing with a lot of unreasonable people (in the form of their requirements). You have to allow/design for a lot of stupid things because otherwise people will throw tantrums about it.
Then on top of that, you're developing something that doesn't directly generate profit, so nobody is going to pay for it or appreciate the work you put in.
Then on top of THAT, they're fairly insulated from the actual end users.
It's just a recipe for shitty software.
> You can see for yourself as it's AGPL and I assume you looked at the code
Can you look at any codebase and tell me it's written by some of the best engineers and it's not trivial?
I completely agree that it is not trivial software in the worst sense, it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid for how diverse the needs of different courses might be even inside a single faculty. And saying "It's AGPL, just self host and add your requirements to it" is not really useful, that would mean way more money and effort than what a university's overworked IT dept. is capable of.
> it is not trivial software in the worst sense, it tries to do too much, while not being particularly good at any one of those things, and is way too rigid
What I meant is they aren't capable of building AI capable of replacing professors. I still consider it a reasonable assumption, as it has nothing to do with how well engineered canvas is. It's a different competency than instructure would have, and I've heard from insiders instructure has been spinning their wheels on way more trivial AI challenges. I also understand well how hard it would be to create AI that replaces professors and how the current best AI from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI is orders of magnitude away from being able to do that.
An engineering culture can change a lot in 10 years, and a company's engineers' ability to do stuff depends both on the individual engineers abilities as well as the company systems and culture.