FormaLMS
Hosting

forma.lms is one of those tools you only run into if you've worked in corporate training or compliance, and most general web hosts have never heard of it. I came across it about ten years ago when a client in the financial services training space needed a SCORM-compliant LMS that wouldn't cost them a five-figure annual fee, and forma.lms was the answer.

It's a fork of Docebo from before Docebo went commercial and SaaS-only, which means it inherits a serious feature set: proper SCORM 1.2 and 2004 support, xAPI for modern content, certifications with expiry dates, classroom training records for blended learning, branded admin areas for multi-tenant setups, and the kind of detailed reporting that compliance auditors actually want to see.

"Compliance training is one of those domains where you can't fake the platform. Auditors want to see who took the course, when, what score they got, and a tamper-evident record. forma.lms produces those reports in a format that holds up. I've watched it pass several FCA-related audits on client sites without a quibble."

Mark McNeece, Founder, 365i Hosting

What I like about it is that it's grown-up software. It isn't trying to be a beautiful modern SaaS. The admin is dense and feature-heavy, the reporting tools are detailed rather than friendly, and the documentation assumes you know what SCORM is. If you're already in the training world, that's a feature, not a bug. If you're new to LMS work, the learning curve is real and you should plan a couple of weeks to get comfortable before rolling it out to learners.

On the hosting side, forma.lms runs fine on our standard stack. PHP 8.0 or 8.1 is the safest target, and recent community-patched releases work on PHP 8.3 with some testing. MySQL 8 is fine. SCORM packages can be large (some are several hundred MB if they include video), so I'd budget storage accordingly. Our £5.99 shared plan handles small training departments comfortably (say up to 200 active learners with a normal catalogue), but for anything bigger I'd suggest moving to our cloud servers from £9.99 a month for the extra headroom.

One technical thing to know. forma.lms's installer is fussier than something like WordPress. The directory permissions, PHP memory limits and database collation matter, and getting them slightly wrong leads to silent failures during course uploads. We've installed it for several clients and we're happy to do the install for you as part of the migration or initial setup, which usually saves a couple of hours of head-scratching.

For UK organisations running compliance training, certification courses or internal staff development, forma.lms is a serious option. It isn't pretty, it isn't trendy, and it isn't going to win design awards. But it does the job, the data stays in your database, and the cost over five years is a tiny fraction of any commercial LMS. For the right use case, that's a powerful combination.