ADL LRS
ADL's own open-source learning record store, now tracking xAPI 2.0
The facts
- Licence
- Apache-2.0 — OSI approved
- Pricing
- Open source
- Deployment
- Self-hosted
- Platforms
- Linux · Web
- Vendor
- Advanced Distributed Learning Initiative
- Headquarters
- United States
- Documentation
- github.com/adlnet/ADL_LRS/wiki — opens in a new tab
- Source code
- github.com/adlnet/ADL_LRS — opens in a new tab
Standards support
Every line says where the claim came from. We do not test conformance ourselves and we issue no badge of our own.
| Standard | Supported | Provenance | Checked | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SCORM 1.2 | No | editor-checked · 24 Aug 2026 | — | |
| SCORM 2004 | No | editor-checked · 24 Aug 2026 | — | |
| xAPI | Yes | editor-checked · 24 Aug 2026— source, opens in a new tab | settings.py declares XAPI_VERSION 2.0.0 and accepts 1.0.0 through 1.0.3 as well, negotiated by the X-Experience-API-Version header. xAPI 2.0 is IEEE 9274.1.1. | |
| cmi5 | No | editor-checked · 24 Aug 2026 | Statement storage only. There is no cmi5 launch handling in the codebase. | |
| AICC | Not stated | — | — | — |
| LTI | Not stated | — | — | — |
- Claimed
- — the vendor states it. We have not confirmed it.
- Checked
- — an editor confirmed it on the date shown.
- Verified
- — an official registry lists it, and we link to the entry.
Editor's notes
ADL wrote the Experience API, and this is their reference implementation of a learning record store: a Django application that accepts, validates and serves xAPI statements, with OAuth support and a Docker Compose installation path. It has been going since 2012 and was updated to xAPI 2.0 — that is, IEEE 9274.1.1 — which makes it one of the few implementations tracking the standard's move under IEEE stewardship.
Its value is as a reference rather than as infrastructure, and the project says so itself: stable, but intended to support a small number of users as a proof of concept. That is an unusually candid README, and it should be believed. If you are debugging whether your content's statements are well-formed, or arguing about how a particular part of the spec should behave, having ADL's own implementation to test against settles things quickly. If you need an LRS that will hold years of statements for thousands of learners, look at SQL LRS or a commercial product instead.
Maintenance reads as institutional rather than energetic. The last tagged release is v2.0.0 from June 2023, with commits continuing into November 2025 — attended to, not actively developed. For a reference implementation that is a reasonable state to be in; for a dependency it is a reason to look elsewhere.
Alternatives to ADL LRS
Chosen by hand because they solve the same problem, not because they share a keyword.
Listed on scorm-tools.com
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