Compare · Checked September 1, 2026 · Scope for Canvas is ours
The best Canvas Chrome extensions for students in 2026 — by what you need
Scope for Canvas is our extension. It appears below for one job — search — and we say where the others beat it.
Short answer
Which Canvas extension for which job?
- Customize Canvas — dark mode, themes, dashboard cardsBetterCampus. The most complete set of looks-and-layout controls, and the biggest install base on this list.
- One to-do list across Canvas, Blackboard, and BrightspaceTasks for Canvas. Its listing names Blackboard and Brightspace as well as Canvas.
- Bulk-download or back up a courseCanvas Course Downloader & Exporter. Canvas Files Downloader if you only want one tab's attachments.
- Search every course and get answers with citationsScope for Canvas — ours, and the newest and smallest one on this list.
- Instructor and admin toolsCanvas LMS Mods (Basic). Reports, rubrics, grade export, and SpeedGrader helpers.
Looking for a deadline extension on an assignment? That is a request to your instructor, not a browser extension.
Side by side
What each listing said on September 1, 2026.
| BetterCampus | Tasks for Canvas | Canvas Course Downloader & Exporter | Canvas Files Downloader | Canvas LMS Mods (Basic) | Scope for Canvas (ours) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Customizing Canvas: dark mode, themes, dashboard, GPA calculator. | A to-do list with progress rings in the dashboard sidebar. | Backing up a whole course to folders. | Downloading the attachments in one tab. | Instructor and admin tools: reports, rubrics, grade export. | Searching every course; answers with citations. |
| Users (Chrome Web Store, September 1, 2026) | 2,000,000 | 1,000,000 | 8,000 | 3,000 | 5,000 | 94. Our own count, which adds Lectra Notes accounts, was 104 on August 27, 2026 (how we count). |
| Rating (September 1, 2026) | 4.7 from about 4,300 ratings | 4.6 from about 700 ratings | 4.8 from 12 ratings | 3.4 from 23 ratings | 5.0 from 12 ratings | 5.0 from 6 ratings |
| Last updated (as of September 1, 2026) | August 27, 2026 (version 9.8.6) | August 17, 2026 (version 1.6.3) | August 30, 2026 (version 2.10.2) | September 27, 2025 (version 1.3.0) | August 28, 2025 (version 7.5.1) | August 30, 2026 (version 11.0.5) |
| Price | Free, with in-app purchases. Pro was $19 a month or $119 a year on its help center on September 1, 2026; the listing does not show a price. | Free. | Free; open source. | Free. | Free. | Free. |
| Where your course data goes | Store disclosure: collects user activity; not sold to third parties. | Store disclosure: user activity. The listing says it does not collect or share user data and only talks to your school's Canvas. | The listing says it talks only to your Canvas site; not sold to third parties. | The developer states it will not collect or use your data. | The developer states it will not collect or use your data. | Search and indexing run entirely on your device. Store disclosure lists personal information, web history, user activity, and website content — the course content it reads to index; not sold to third parties. Details on the privacy page. |
| Brightspace support | Not on the listing, which describes it as an extension for Canvas; its help center says yes, along with Blackboard, Moodle, and Google Classroom. | Yes — Canvas, Blackboard, and D2L Brightspace. | No — Canvas only. | No — Canvas only. | No — Canvas only. | Yes — Canvas and Brightspace. |
BetterCampus — best for customizing Canvas
BetterCampus (formerly BetterCanvas) restyles Canvas: a dark mode you can schedule, a library of user-made themes, dashboard cards with your own colors and fonts, assignment previews from the dashboard, a GPA calculator, and a cleaner sidebar. On September 1, 2026 the Chrome Web Store listing showed 2,000,000 users, a 4.7 rating from about 4,300 ratings, version 9.8.6, last updated August 27, 2026.
Who it is for: Anyone who spends hours a day in Canvas and wants it to look and feel better while they do.
Watch out: It is free with in-app purchases. The listing does not show the price; its help center listed Pro at $19 a month or $119 a year on September 1, 2026, and we could not load BetterCampus's own site that day, so check before you rely on a feature. Its store disclosure says it collects user activity data, not sold to third parties. The listing describes it as an extension for Canvas; its help center also names Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle, and Google Classroom.
Where Scope does not compete: Scope does not change how Canvas looks — no dark mode, no themes, no dashboard editing. If that is the job, install BetterCampus. Most students can run both; the details are in Scope vs BetterCampus.
Tasks for Canvas — best to-do list across Canvas, Blackboard, and Brightspace
Tasks for Canvas turns the dashboard sidebar into a to-do list: every active assignment with its due date and points, a color-coded progress ring per course, announcements, custom tasks, week-by-week navigation, streaks, Gradescope assignments, and a dark mode. It is now published by BetterCampus and works on Canvas, Blackboard, and D2L Brightspace. On September 1, 2026 the listing showed 1,000,000 users, a 4.6 rating from about 700 ratings, version 1.6.3, last updated August 17, 2026. Free.
Who it is for: Students who want one list of what is due — especially if their classes are split across more than one learning platform.
Watch out: It lives in the dashboard sidebar, and the open-source project it grew from notes that the sidebar only appears in Canvas's Card View and Recent Activity layouts — check that it shows up on your school's dashboard. Its store disclosure lists user activity; the listing says it does not collect or share user data and only talks to your school's Canvas.
Where Scope does not compete: Scope has a planner that drafts study blocks from upcoming deadlines, but Tasks for Canvas is the better to-do list, and its listing covers Blackboard, which Scope does not. If tracking deadlines is the job, install Tasks for Canvas. See Scope vs Tasks for Canvas for whether to run both.
Canvas Course Downloader & Exporter — best for backing up a whole course
Canvas Course Downloader & Exporter saves a course into organized folders before it disappears at the end of term: files with their folder structure, pages, assignments, discussions, and announcements, the module structure and syllabus, and your grades as a spreadsheet. Teachers and TAs can pull submissions, gradebooks, and rosters. It has batch mode, ZIP bundling, incremental downloads, and a throttle, and it is open source. On September 1, 2026 the listing showed 8,000 users, a 4.8 rating from 12 ratings, version 2.10.2, last updated August 30, 2026. Free.
Who it is for: Anyone who wants a copy of a course they can keep — and instructors archiving their own.
Watch out: Twelve ratings is a small sample. It is Canvas only. Large downloads can trip your school's rate limits, which is what the throttle setting is for. Download what you are permitted to see; the materials are still your instructor's.
Where Scope does not compete: Scope makes your courses searchable; it does not export them or hand you a folder of files. For an archive, use a downloader.
Canvas Files Downloader — the simpler bulk download
Canvas Files Downloader does one thing: open a course's Modules, Pages, Assignments, or Wiki tab, select all or some of the attachments, and download them. On September 1, 2026 the listing showed 3,000 users, a 3.4 rating from 23 ratings, version 1.3.0, last updated September 27, 2025. Free; the developer states it will not collect or use your data.
Who it is for: Someone who wants the attachments from one tab of one course and nothing else.
Watch out: Not updated in nearly a year as of September 1, 2026, and the lowest rating on this list. It asks you to turn off Chrome's ask-where-to-save prompt so files land without a dialog. Canvas only. If you want more than attachments, the Course Downloader above is the better-maintained pick.
Where Scope does not compete: Same as above: Scope searches, it does not export. The two jobs combine well — download a course to keep it, search it with Scope while the term is on.
Canvas LMS Mods (Basic) — best for instructors and admins
Canvas LMS Mods (Basic) is a set of modifications aimed at the people running a course rather than taking it: admin navigation shortcuts, course search with filters and sorting, SpeedGrader comment tools, custom course reports (submission results, discussion replies, module progress, user access), rubric import, grade export, and a simple search across courses. Each feature can be switched on or off. On September 1, 2026 the listing showed 5,000 users, a 5.0 rating from 12 ratings, version 7.5.1, last updated August 28, 2025. Free; the developer states it will not collect or use your data.
Who it is for: Instructors, TAs, and Canvas administrators. Most of it does nothing on a student account.
Watch out: Not updated in a year as of September 1, 2026, twelve ratings, Canvas only. Despite the “Basic” in the name, the listing we read did not mention a paid edition.
Where Scope does not compete: Scope is built for students reading a course, not for staff running one. The two do not overlap.
Scope for Canvas — ours, for searching every course and getting cited answers
Scope for Canvas is a free, local-first Chrome extension that searches everything in your Canvas and Brightspace courses and answers questions with citations to your own course materials. Search and indexing run entirely on your device. Type a phrase and get the assignment, page, file, PDF page, or video it appears in, across every course at once — including text inside PDFs and scanned pages. Ask a question and the answer cites the course material it came from. AI answers try Chrome's on-device model first; when it is unavailable, an optional, clearly marked cloud fallback is used. Send a PDF from Canvas to your iPad in one tap with the Scope extension; finished files can come back into supported upload flows. On September 1, 2026 the Chrome Web Store listing showed 94 users, a 5.0 rating from 6 ratings, version 11.0.5, last updated August 30, 2026. Free. Our own count, which adds Lectra Notes accounts, was 104 on August 27, 2026 — here is how we count.
Who it is for: Students with several courses and a lot of PDFs — the ones who know the instructor said it somewhere and cannot find where.
Watch out: It is the newest and smallest extension here; 94 users and 6 ratings is not a track record. Its store disclosure lists personal information, web history, user activity, and website content, because the extension reads your course content in order to index it — the privacy page spells out what that means in practice. Scope answers questions from the materials your instructors posted and links every answer to its source. It does not take quizzes, write submissions, or interact with Canvas quiz logs.
Where the others win: Where the others win: BetterCampus for how Canvas looks, Tasks for Canvas for a to-do list and for Blackboard, a downloader for an archive, Canvas LMS Mods for staff tools. No app syncs with Canvas automatically, Scope included.
Not on this list
What we left out, and why.
We left out every extension whose purpose is answering quizzes for you or hiding what you do from your instructor — not because they are unpopular, but because a tool that exists to defeat your school's academic-integrity checks does not belong on a list of study tools.
That category includes anything marketed as a quiz solver, as a way to load answers from earlier attempts, or as “anti-detection” for quiz sessions. Some of them carry names that sound like ordinary Canvas utilities, so on the Chrome Web Store, judge an extension by what its description says it does, not by its name.
Generic extensions such as Dark Reader and Grammarly run on Canvas pages, but they are not Canvas extensions — they do the same thing on every site — so they belong on a different list. And if something you saw recommended elsewhere is missing, the likeliest reasons are that it was not on the Chrome Web Store when we checked on September 1, 2026, or that it falls into the category above.
Method
How we picked.
- Every user count, rating, version, update date, and data disclosure was read from the Chrome Web Store on September 1, 2026; BetterCampus's Pro price comes from its help center the same day. Feature descriptions come from each listing.
- We did not install and test every extension for this page. Nothing here is lab-tested unless the text says so.
- The list is sorted by job, not ranked one to six, because the extensions do different things and most people will want more than one.
- Quiz-answering and activity-hiding tools were excluded on principle, as explained above.
- This list is published by the maker of Scope for Canvas. Scope appears for one job, search, and every other section says where a competitor is the better install.
Questions
Canvas extensions, answered.
Are Canvas extensions allowed at my school?
Usually, for the kind on this list: they change how Canvas looks in your own browser or work with pages you can already see. Schools do prohibit tools that interfere with quizzes or proctoring, and some managed Chromebooks block extensions entirely. Your school's academic-integrity policy and IT pages are the authority. A useful test: if an extension changes what happens during a quiz, assume it is not allowed.
Are Canvas extensions safe?
A Canvas extension can read every page you open on your school's Canvas site, so the real question is where that data goes. Read the privacy-practices section of the listing, check that the developer has a contact, look at the last-updated date, and read the permissions prompt when you install. We wrote the full checklist in are Canvas extensions safe?. The table above records what each extension on this list declares, as of September 1, 2026.
Can I run BetterCampus and Scope together?
Nothing in either extension is designed to block the other: BetterCampus changes how Canvas looks, and Scope adds a search panel on top of it. We have not tested Scope against every BetterCampus theme, so if a theme hides part of Scope's panel, tell us and we will look at it.
Which extension searches inside PDFs?
Of the extensions on this list, Scope for Canvas is the one built for search: it indexes assignments, pages, files, PDFs — including scanned pages — and videos across your courses, on your device, and answers questions with citations back to the material. BetterCampus and Tasks for Canvas do not search course content. The downloaders let you save files so you can search them on your computer. Canvas LMS Mods adds search to some staff pages that lack it, which is a different job. The manual options are in how to search Canvas.
If search is the job, try Scope.
Scope for Canvas on the Chrome Web Store — free, version 11.0.5 as of September 1, 2026. If the job is how Canvas looks or what is due, BetterCampus and Tasks for Canvas are the better installs, and we said so above.