What is Sakai used for?

Sakai is an open-source learning management and collaboration environment for teaching, learning and research, developed by a global community. It is a good fit for universities running their own learning environment, and research and course collaboration sites.

Is Sakai open source?

Yes. Sakai is open source under the ECL-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at sakaiproject/sakai and is written mainly in Java.

Yes. Sakai is open source, so the software itself is free to use.

Can I self-host Sakai?

Yes. Sakai can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.

What is Sakai an alternative to?

Sakai is an open-source alternative to D2L Brightspace, Google Classroom and Blackboard Learn. Other open-source alternatives to D2L Brightspace include Canvas LMS, Open edX and Moodle.

Is Sakai actively maintained?

Yes. The most recent commit to Sakai was on 2 October 2026. The project has 1.2k stars on GitHub.

Sakai: open-source alternative to D2L Brightspace

About Sakai

Sakai is a freely available suite for learning, teaching, research and collaboration, developed by a diverse and global adopter community. The repository contains the source for the Sakai Collaboration and Learning Environment, with the master branch tracking the most current development release, Sakai 24. It is written in Java and is an Apereo Foundation project.

Building from source needs Java 1.8 and Maven, or the included wrapper. Sakai runs on Apache Tomcat 9, and the README warns that it does not work with Tomcat installed from a distribution package manager, so it must be configured by hand following the wiki guide. After startup, which takes around thirty seconds, the portal is reachable on port 8080 of the local machine.

Sakai is licensed under the Educational Community License version 2.0. Bugs are filed in the project's Jira, the community runs nightly servers for testing the latest builds, and a developer mailing list is available. Branches other than master correspond to currently or previously supported releases, and the README describes the release plan and support schedule.

Key features

Learning management and collaboration suite
Runs on Apache Tomcat 9
Built with Java and Maven
Nightly test servers
Supported release branches with a published schedule

Good fit for

→Universities running their own learning environment
→Research and course collaboration sites

Built with: Java
Tags: lms; education; learning-management; java; tomcat; collaboration; apereo; sakai

Sakai: questions and answers

What is Sakai used for?: Sakai is an open-source learning management and collaboration environment for teaching, learning and research, developed by a global community. It is a good fit for universities running their own learning environment, and research and course collaboration sites.
Is Sakai open source?: Yes. Sakai is open source under the ECL-2.0 licence. Its source code is on GitHub at sakaiproject/sakai and is written mainly in Java.
Is Sakai free?: Yes. Sakai is open source, so the software itself is free to use.
Can I self-host Sakai?: Yes. Sakai can be self-hosted on your own server or infrastructure.
What is Sakai an alternative to?: Sakai is an open-source alternative to D2L Brightspace, Google Classroom and Blackboard Learn. Other open-source alternatives to D2L Brightspace include Canvas LMS, Open edX and Moodle.
Is Sakai actively maintained?: Yes. The most recent commit to Sakai was on 2 October 2026. The project has 1.2k stars on GitHub.