Announcing the Top Rated Student Management Systems for 2019

We are excited to announce the Top Rated Student Management Systems for 2019! Top Rated awards showcase today’s top-of-the-line product in Student Management based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. These awards make the voice of the market the primary decider into the industry’s best products.

Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are never influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer.

Here are the winners:

Blackbaud Education Management Solutions (formerly Blackbaud K–12 ON Solutions)

Blackbaud’s Education Management Solutions (formerly the “On” series of products for K-12) provide schools with a complete integrated suite for student and learning management. Blackbaud’s learning suite provides tools for managing student attendance, grades, registration and scheduling. Forms are easily built, customized, and shared in Blackbaud, using its form builders, checklists, and sharing tools. Blackbaud’s education suite includes an in-built learning management system (LMS) featuring automated grading and collaboration tools, and a content management system (CMS) for a school website.

On TrustRadius, reviewers come from a mix of public schools, private schools, religious schools, and preparatory schools. Users of Blackbaud’s Education Management solutions appreciate saving time on grading and attendance taking with its purpose built forms, and enjoying how easy to communicate and share data through Blackbaud’s resource center, and its easy to understand interface for constituents.

“Our entire school uses Blackbaud Education Management. It has helped improve our paperless environment with student records, directories, storing information and uploading files. It is our website and we were able to launch a new and improved website. Our school forms are much better. It is a great communication tool.It has improved our enrollment and admissions process.”

Verified User | Manager | Education Management Company

Hero

Schoolmint’s Hero is a student management system emphasizing tracking and improving student behavior. Hero provides a workflow for tardiness management, office referrals, and other intervention type actions to stop disruptive or rule-breaking behavior. The system also supports parent access via email or push notifications, and keeps parents aware of how their child is behaving, and how they might assist with intervention. On TrustRadius, Hero is used by teachers and administration in K-12 schools, primarily across large (42%) and midsize (42%) entities. Recent reviewers greatly praise Hero’s capacity for rewarding well-behaved students, as well as enjoying a measurable decrease in tardiness and disruptive behaviors from using the system.

“Hero is an amazing, positive reinforcement program used amongst educators within my working environment. Those of us who use Hero strive to foster a sense of responsibility and accountability within our students through the reinforcement of appropriate behaviors. Through Hero, tardiness and general off task behavior have continued to decrease alongside an increase in student morale and confidence… Hero is well suited for school environments of all kinds, but particularly for those where tardiness and off task behaviors continue to negatively impact instruction.”

Catherine Burke | 8th Grade Language Arts Teacher | Education Management

Skyward Student Management System

Skyward Student Management System provides a student information management system as well as school ERP functionality, combining administrative functionality for student and parent services along with HR, payroll and financial data management. On the student side, Skyward provides a curriculum builder, customized enrollment forms and application workflow, gradebook and report card, schedule, and a fully customizable, branded report generator with drag-and-drop editor. When combined with its school ERP, Skyward is designed to present an end-to-end paperless administrative solution.

On TrustRadius, Skyward is used at public and private schools, religious learning institutions and technical schools of all sizes. Users strongly praise Skyward’s extreme flexibility and its ability to track and store data of all kinds, providing easy but secure access to admin, students and parents, and the convenience of having business side data accessed and stored under the same intuitive system as well.

“We use it as a database for all of the kids in the county. It provides a standard way for all teachers and administrators to access student schedules, grades, discipline records, referrals, and contact information in a central location. We are able to see where students are at and records can be connected for siblings. It is an extremely effective and useful tool at the teacher level, school level, and district level. We have been very pleased with its implementation in our school district and constantly get positive feedback about its effectiveness.”

Lindsay Riessen | Art Teacher | Primary/Secondary School

PowerSchool Student Information System

The PowerSchool Student Information System is a K-12 SIS solution providing an administrative data platform covering scheduling, registration and attendance, as well as providing faculty data management, as well as event data (e.g. a health emergency). PowerSchool provides additional functionality via its related Unified Classroom suite, which includes a digital gradebook, PowerSchool for special education programs, learning management, and an assessment tool. PowerSchool SIS also boasts compliance reporting, and communication channels including PowerSchool Mobile, as well as student and parent portals.

PowerSchool SIS is primarily reviewed by users from midsize entities (61%) at public schools and districts, as well as private and religious schools. Users of PowerSchool SIS describe its powerful organization and tracking any student data, and its broad extensibility via PowerSchool’s Unified Classroom apps, as well as its compatibility with near any other app a school may use for grading, assessments, or LMS.

“We are a K-12 public school district currently using PowerSchool as our primary Student Information System. It houses all student and parent contact information, grades and transcript information, discipline information, and attendance information. We also have it connected to other products which extend the capabilities of PowerSchool… PowerSchool is a great option for tracking student information. It is the most widely used student information system, so there are some great communities out there for support, and when you are looking to add on, there are plenty of existing customers to talk to.”

David Murphy | Student Information Technology Specialist | School District

Congratulations to the winners of the Top Rated Student Management Systems Award!

What is Student Management?

Student Management Systems include SIMs (student information management systems) which store student demographic data, as well as integratable classroom management tools. Examples of the latter include a digital gradebook, student assessment tools, an attendance logging app, office referral forms, etc. These digital tools build towards the goal of a paperless school administrative experience. Beyond these two areas of general functionality, student management systems may integrate or include learning management functionality, and extend to provide school-specific ERP capability including HR, payroll, and faculty data management. Various classroom management tools and apps may provide behavior modification incenting, tardy logging and management, or referral generation (e.g. for a trip to the principal). 

An important feature of SIMs and classroom management tools is that they are easily accessed and used by non-technical users including potentially school staff and clientele. Dominant vendors providing student management systems generally provide an extensive suite of tools via modules and apps. A few vendors specialize in one thing; for example, student discipline and behavioral change. In either case, a strong parent portal and a positive student experience is essential for creating academic or behavioral program buy-in, and ensuring the student management system achieves its goal of creating a better classroom learning experience, whether the goal be reducing tardiness and disruptive behaviors, or by simply making grades and student progress measures available. The strongest Student Management systems make it easy to mark and retrieve data.

Top Rated Criteria

Products included in the 2019 Top Rated Student Management Systems list must have been in the top tier of their category TrustMap as of July 1st, 2019. To qualify for the Student Management Systems Top Rated Award, products must have at least 10 reviews written within the past year, a TRScore of at least 7.5 out of 10, and must receive at least 1.5% of the traffic in their category.  Every reviewer is verified and every review is vetted before publication. Products are plotted on the TrustMap based on end-user data, including users’ likelihood to recommend scores as well as buyer research patterns. To learn more about TrustMaps and Top Rated methodology, check out this page.