What's the difference between edX and Open edX?

[Thieme Hennis]

Sorry if this is a duplicate, I could not find a clear answer in this forum (or online):

Is the latest Open edX version similar/same to the edx.org instance?

Or is edX the Gold Edition, with different features to the open source OpenEdx instance?

thanks!

[Shauna Gordon-McKeon]

Hi Thieme,

I'm still new to EdX, so apologies if this isn't exactly right.  Here's how I'd put it:  EdX is an organization, Open edX is a piece of software/platform.  EdX.org runs on Open edX.  We typically update EdX.org to the most recent version once a week.  This is different from most other groups that use Open edX, who have a less frequent update schedule, so you'll likely see new features on EdX.org before elsewhere, but everyone has access to the same code.

Hope this helps,

Shauna

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[cdodg...@gmail.com]

One other notable difference that many people will see is that edX.org as a website has a distinct Course Catalog/Marketing/Corporate site which is very edX specific. That is not made open source, for no other reason - I suppose - than because it is so specific to edX as an organization.  Open edX has it's own Course Catalog and Marketing pages inside of it which the community uses and customizes.

As a rough estimate, as an end-user you'll see edX's use of Open edX on the courses.edx.org and Studio/Insight (for course staff) domains, and the custom marketing site on www.edx.org and blog.edx.org.

Other things to note that some features that are in Open edX are turned off on edx.org. Also many (if not most) of the xBlocks in the ecosystem are not installed/running on edx.org.

So - in a certain way - Open edX is a superset of features than what is running on edx.org.

That's a rough approximation. Hope that's helpful.

- Chris

[Thieme Hennis]

hi guys, thanks very much for your elaborate answers. This was exactly the information I was looking for. Very clear. Thanks again, Thieme