ACE Portfolios vs Mahara

ACE Portfolios is a web ePortfolio and assessment platform for NVQs, apprenticeships, and vocational qualifications. It is intended for training providers, colleges, and employers, and the maker says it was built by a working assessor and IQA. Assessors can review evidence beside assessment criteria, map evidence to criteria, and create reusable mapping templates for team use. A built-in recorder captures audio or video for professional discussions and observations, attaching recordings to candidate evidence. IQA sampling workflows and actions are included, along with read-only EQA access to claimed portfolios and EQA sessions. ACE lists unit structures for more than 130 qualifications from Highfield, ProQual, NOCN, ECITB, and City & Guilds, and says requested qualifications are added at no charge. Phone capture supports photos, video, and audio mapped to criteria. An optional employer portal shows selected progress in read-only form. Security features include MFA, AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS 1.3, tenant isolation, and Cloudflare edge protection. Pricing is on request, with listed one-time charges.

Mahara is a free ePortfolio system for learning communities. Students and staff can collect evidence, reflect on experiences, and relate work to competencies or registration requirements. Listed uses include study, professional development, work-integrated learning, assessment, presentation, and employability. Portfolios can be shared with an individual, group, or the public, with access limited by a time frame or assessment task. Users can comment, give feedback, build portfolios together in groups, and take part in group forums. Portfolios can be submitted to learning management systems through LTI for marking. Mahara is open source, under conditions that include providing source code with copies and using the same license for derivative works. It can be hosted on a Linux server; the manual also describes Docker setup for development and testing, and advises securing that environment before live use. The manual describes LTI 1.3 Advantage as experimental and tested only with Brightspace. The project links to community forums, a manual, a wiki, an issue tracker, and extended security support; Catalyst is named as maintainer.