PowerSchool Student Information System vs. Salesforce Sales Cloud

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
PowerSchool SIS
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
The PowerSchool Student Information System covers administrative needs, such as scheduling, attendance, reporting, data management, faculty management, emergency/medical and health management, registration, and more for K-12 schools and districts. It is easy to use and boasts an industry-leading gradebook, PowerTeacher Pro. Users enjoy a fully web-based SIS that is flexible, configurable, and scalable with real-time updates on any operating system, browser or device.N/A
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell efficiently. Salesforce Sales Cloud is used for, and supports: Buyer Engagement Sales Engagement Enablement Sales AI Sales Analytics Team…
$25
per month
Pricing
PowerSchool Student Information SystemSalesforce Sales Cloud
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter
$25.00
Per User/Per Month
Professional
$80.00
Per User/Per Month
Enterprise
$165.00
Per User/Per Month
Unlimited
$330.00
Per user/Per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PowerSchool SISSalesforce Sales Cloud
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PowerSchool Student Information SystemSalesforce Sales Cloud
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
PowerSchool Student Information SystemSalesforce Sales Cloud
Student and Faculty Administration
Comparison of Student and Faculty Administration features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
8.5
3 Ratings
3% above category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
-
Ratings
Integrations with 3rd-Party Education Technology9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Online Registration Management10.02 Ratings00 Ratings
District Communications, such as messaging and alerting8.12 Ratings00 Ratings
Roster Management9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform Customization7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Teacher Self-Service9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Student Data Security9.43 Ratings00 Ratings
Community Support7.43 Ratings00 Ratings
Class Scheduling9.43 Ratings00 Ratings
State and National-level Reporting7.12 Ratings00 Ratings
Compliance Support7.62 Ratings00 Ratings
Teacher and Parent Mobile Application8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Sales Force Automation
Comparison of Sales Force Automation features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.2
262 Ratings
6% above category average
Customer data management / contact management00 Ratings9.0262 Ratings
Workflow management00 Ratings8.2253 Ratings
Territory management00 Ratings7.7205 Ratings
Opportunity management00 Ratings8.7254 Ratings
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)00 Ratings8.1239 Ratings
Contract management00 Ratings7.7210 Ratings
Quote & order management00 Ratings7.8193 Ratings
Interaction tracking00 Ratings8.2224 Ratings
Channel / partner relationship management00 Ratings8.0185 Ratings
Customer Service & Support
Comparison of Customer Service & Support features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.8
100 Ratings
3% above category average
Case management00 Ratings8.198 Ratings
Call center management00 Ratings7.779 Ratings
Help desk management00 Ratings7.683 Ratings
Marketing Automation
Comparison of Marketing Automation features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.2
240 Ratings
8% above category average
Lead management00 Ratings8.5235 Ratings
Email marketing00 Ratings8.0202 Ratings
CRM Project Management
Comparison of CRM Project Management features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.0
243 Ratings
5% above category average
Task management00 Ratings8.1232 Ratings
Billing and invoicing management00 Ratings7.575 Ratings
Reporting00 Ratings8.3196 Ratings
CRM Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of CRM Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.2
256 Ratings
9% above category average
Forecasting00 Ratings7.9224 Ratings
Pipeline visualization00 Ratings8.1243 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings8.5253 Ratings
Customization
Comparison of Customization features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.6
247 Ratings
13% above category average
Custom fields00 Ratings8.8245 Ratings
Custom objects00 Ratings8.7234 Ratings
Scripting environment00 Ratings8.5174 Ratings
API for custom integration00 Ratings8.5204 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.9
248 Ratings
7% above category average
Single sign-on capability00 Ratings9.0216 Ratings
Role-based user permissions00 Ratings8.9220 Ratings
Social CRM
Comparison of Social CRM features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.3
157 Ratings
13% above category average
Social data00 Ratings8.4155 Ratings
Social engagement00 Ratings8.2153 Ratings
Integrations with 3rd-party Software
Comparison of Integrations with 3rd-party Software features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.2
213 Ratings
12% above category average
Marketing automation00 Ratings8.2209 Ratings
Compensation management00 Ratings8.1143 Ratings
Platform
Comparison of Platform features of Product A and Product B
PowerSchool Student Information System
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.5
228 Ratings
1% above category average
Mobile access00 Ratings7.5228 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PowerSchool Student Information SystemSalesforce Sales Cloud
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

Salesmate
Salesmate
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Jenzabar ONE
Jenzabar ONE
Score 9.0 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
Schoolmint Hero
Schoolmint Hero
Score 9.7 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PowerSchool Student Information SystemSalesforce Sales Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(32 ratings)
8.7
(393 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(2 ratings)
9.8
(58 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(1 ratings)
8.1
(121 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.8
(27 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(18 ratings)
Support Rating
8.5
(12 ratings)
8.0
(92 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(11 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(1 ratings)
1.3
(18 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(53 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(8 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PowerSchool Student Information SystemSalesforce Sales Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
PowerSchool Group LLC
PowerSchool Student Information System is a cool software that can be highly recommended to anyone who is living in the educational management space. It is proven that this software can reduce your manual workload massively if you use it right. Plus it is really worth the price you pay. Especially if you are in the administrative field, this software will help you to minimize manual efforts put into student registrations, staffing recruitment, and main resource management processes.
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Salesforce
Salesforce Sales Cloud is an intuitive and easy-to-use platform. It is easy to customize this platform to meet the ever-changing business needs and requirements. It is easy to integrate with other platforms and offers incredible features that help businesses generate leads, automate their marketing processes, and collaborate effectively.
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Pros
PowerSchool Group LLC
  • PowerSchool houses student or staff information that can be easily accessed by those teachers and administrators who need the information. This allows everyone to go to one place to access information.
  • Parents can view their child's grades at any time with their protected login on a parent portal. This allows teachers to keep parents informed and involved in their child's progress at school. When everyone works together it increases our students' chance for success.
  • PowerSchool offers videos to train new users. When we have new employees, the videos can be accessed at any time the employee needs as opposed to them waiting for someone to help them.
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Salesforce
  • Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
  • Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
  • API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
  • Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.
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Cons
PowerSchool Group LLC
  • Does not consistently communicate with related software such as Illuminate for Special Education Students.
  • Drop down menus frequently refresh as data is entered which slows down the user's ability to enter information.
  • Icons are sometimes unclear and not easily understandable. Word labels for some items might be more effective.
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Salesforce
  • Sometimes setting up the interface can be overly complex.
  • Depending on what level of salesforce you are paying for, the SLA for their service team to respond can take a decent amount of time.
  • Wish there was more connection between the salesforce apps like service and sales.
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Likelihood to Renew
PowerSchool Group LLC
We would be starting over at square one if we did not continue our PowerSchool subscription. We do not have a program in a place that would take its place.
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Salesforce
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
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Usability
PowerSchool Group LLC
Great features, but it can feel very cumbersome at times
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Salesforce
Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.
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Reliability and Availability
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
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Performance
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
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Support Rating
PowerSchool Group LLC
Overall, I have not had to use support for PowerSchool Student Information System because our school district gives us training in each area in which we will be utilizing PowerSchool Student Information System. In terms of in-user support, I feel that there is mild to moderate user support that is built into PowerSchool SIS.
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Salesforce
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
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In-Person Training
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
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Online Training
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
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Implementation Rating
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
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Alternatives Considered
PowerSchool Group LLC
I have heard good things for Infinite Campus and Skyward. I would [evaluate] each of them and see what fits your needs. Each has their strengths and weaknesses and so picking the right one for your needs is important. PowerSchool [Student Information System] does have some great features, but lacks some fundamental reports and functions to make it top notch.
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Salesforce
At our company, we use Salesforce and HubSpot. I personally like both for different reasons. Salesforce makes it easy to generate reports, keep track of dealer and customer information, tie customers to dealers, and is easy to use. However, I like HubSpot for the marketing features. I think HubSpot has easier-to-use workflows and email creations.
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Contract Terms and Pricing Model
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
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Scalability
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce Sales Cloud is highly scalable and designed to accommodate the needs of businesses of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. It offers flexible subscription models and can easily scale up or down based on the organization's requirements. Whether a company is expanding its sales team, increasing its customer base, or adding new features and functionalities, Sales Cloud can adapt to support growth without sacrificing performance or reliability. Additionally, Salesforce's cloud-based architecture ensures that users have access to resources and capabilities as needed, making it a highly scalable solution for organizations looking to automate customer relationship management at scale.
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Professional Services
PowerSchool Group LLC
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
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Return on Investment
PowerSchool Group LLC
  • It has created shortcuts for all staff members, saving us time.
  • In creating shortcuts and combining many different systems into one, it is saving our school money.
  • It has created a safety net for teachers because grades and student information is stored electronically, which means teachers not having to worry about losing or misplacing their grade books.
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Salesforce
  • The inbox feature allows me to see when the customer opens my email, and hence a timely follow-up could result in a higher response rate.
  • The mobile app allows users to gain access to leads and customer contacts on the go, which increases sales team productivity and enhances customer conversations.
  • The reports of the notes on the account level are not working, which is causing manual work in the weekly report to leadership.
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ScreenShots

PowerSchool SIS Screenshots

Screenshot of Student attendanceScreenshot of Standards-based gradingScreenshot of At-risk dashboardScreenshot of Parent view of student schedule

Salesforce Sales Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of