Jenzabar ONE vs. Skyward Student Management System

Jenzabar ONE is strongly suited for an all-in one solution for higher ed. The modern web-based platform make it efficient for end users. An institution that wants a full communication platform to connect with students, Jenzabar is the right product for your school. As with any product, development with Jenzabar One continues which is a good thing but also may cause some schools to want more features more quickly.

Incentivized

Skyward SMS is well suited as a Student Management System for anyone who wants to drive their organization based on data. The capabilities of using the fields available as well as adding our own custom forms make data collection extremely easy. Reporting abilities take that data and allow us to make sense of what has been collected

Incentivized

• Advising
• Quicker processing
• Easy to use
• Great to see student full academic history

Incentivized

• It's a helpful way to hold and organize a large database of information. This is helpful when working at a school with a large number of students and when there is a need to pull up one specific student and see all of their information, past and present, in one place.
• Helpful way to organize and track student and staff meal purchases.
• Easy to track student grades and post comments about student performance.

Incentivized

• Almost every module requires extensive training and building to have it function for your institution.
• Some of the automated housing matchings is difficult to set up and must be changed each semester.

• I would love to see teachers have a more user-friendly dashboard for each student where there were icons/buttons that could be pushed to take you to that student's IEP, grades, etc. It's all on a sidebar now, but some thing you have to do a few click-thru's to get to. Overall I have very few critiques of Skyward.
• I would like something that communicates more with parents of how to maximize their use of Skyward. For the not-so digitally inclined parents, it can be a bit intimidating to navigate this database system.

Incentivized

Skyward is our core system, we are most likely going to be using it for some time

Incentivized

Used by more than 1500 staff users in my district. Also used by 30000 parents.

Incentivized

Overall great job, issues were taken care of. People in support do care.

Incentivized

Yes, I was part of the implementation team.

Incentivized

While I'm familiar with many other SIS in higher education, J1 is the only one currently in use

I think Skyward does really well compared to Infinite Campus. They both have the capability to see students’ information, behavior history, and academic history from the district. However, Infinite Campus has a slight edge on the grade book in the way that it can customize a grade book to meet our needs.

Incentivized

• We have not taken full advantage of all the modules that Jenzabar One provides yet. However, in news releases and product documents many improvements have been made.

• Skyward can be confusing for staff if they have never used it before as it is not intuitive therefore someone has to go over how to use it to new staff. Sometimes this can take weeks to a whole year to understand where to go.
• Skyward has increased issues with rostering for online services due to the fields not updating properly. This has caused weeks of headache for the technology department.
• Skyward does not have a Google integration so we have to buy a middle software to create users, groups, etc.

Incentivized