PowerSchool Student Information System vs. Totango

PowerSchool is great for schools to keep track of student information, schedules, and grades. It integrates with other programs to make setting up classes easier and faster. PowerSchool gives teachers a singular place to find information or input students' grades. It also has an app for parents or guardians to use to check their student's grades which is very useful.

Incentivized

for a CSM it´s marvelous, you have in one window everything,the agenda for your day by day work, the workload you have in a day,all the customers database and call history added by tasks and toutch points, the to do thing in each customer you know what to do next, with renewal you hace an digital engadgement with customers inform they need to renew in order to keep using the app.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Totango easily integrates with other tools to pull information in one place.
• Totango is extremely easy to configure how you want, including adding new attributes that are important to you, creating segments relevant to your business, and automating processes through SuccessPlays and Campaigns.
• Totango Support is amazing! Very knowledgeable and prompt!
• Totango provides so many resources for users, including tutorials, a knowledge base, and the new creator campus. It's awesome.

Incentivized

• The user interface could be more intuitive. Because of the many features, it can sometimes be difficult for administrators to find what they are looking for.
• A recent upgrade allowing for more flexibility in the relationship between students and parents was long in coming and didn't go very smoothly. We are now dealing with a ton of clean-up after the upgrade. Even after we have cleaned everything up, there is still a ways to go before PowerSchool is on par with other SIS systems in that area. In their defense though, they are actively working on getting caught up.

Incentivized

• Editing templates can be slow and confusing.
• Building items across teams can be a challenge.
• Reports and segments seem to be the same thing and it's a challenge telling people to build a segment when they are looking to build a report.

Incentivized

The district is unlikely to change systems due to the cost of training and tech support to facilitate such a switch.

Incentivized

We like the tool enough to keep it in the long run. It does what we need it exactly to do, and I think there's still a lot for us to uncover in terms of its capabilities. There are a lot of functions we want to take the time to learn, but we've been strapped on resources so are just staying afloat.

Incentivized

Great features, but it can feel very cumbersome at times

Incentivized

It is easy to use and understand, and simple to follow day to day. Logging notes and tasks is one of the key areas this is utilised along with tracking reports and accessing key data points for conversations with customers which is helpful. Mobile app helps too to access information on the go.

Incentivized

Totango is available all the time . the only problem is that some times it takes time to load specially the records of the customers. The data loading inside the customer account is fast. It may be because of internet service but still it can i,prove a lot. i have seen other competitors software which is faster

Incentivized

At times the integration sync can be really slow when it comes to touchpoints. I can't say the same for customer health syncing, but I do tend to notice the lag from email syncing, and in those cases, I will need to refresh the Totango page a couple of times or wait a couple of extra seconds/minutes for it to show up.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I give Totango a support rating of 10 because I can always get support whenever needed. If its a technical issue, I know I can email their support team for help. If it's a more in depth question with respect to our instance of Totango, I can reach out to our CSM and always get help in a very reasonable amount of time. I always look to Totango as the standard when I think of how to best communicate and support our own customers.

Incentivized

Our CSM did a great job of conducting the training so we understand, at the very least, the functionality that is directly relevant to us. This also allowed us to train our own new team mates when onboarding based on the training flow that was first presented to us. This was also conducted as a interactive sessions, as training are notoriously known to be dry

Incentivized

Totango has been easy for our team to integrate most of our new features into, which is great considering we have to factor in the customers' usage of the new features into all of the health and usage metrics we have. It has taken a while to integrate our second product however, which is why I would rank this a 7.

Incentivized

Each software I used in my career had special features which were specifically unique for them. PowerSchool Student Information System was an impressive software that offered the ability to ease student registrations and admissions online using web forms where students and parents could submit and upload their information and necessary documents to the school/institute with just a few clicks. Even though this feature is available on a few other similar software, PowerSchool Student Information System was the only software that was specialized in this area.

Incentivized

I've implemented dozens of systems over the last 15 years and, I feel, Totango was by far the most challenging. I have a background in several areas, but the most applicable to Totango is my background in data management, systems administration, programming, web design, web dev. Totango was very challenging to set-up. Other systems have more intuitive UIs and onboarding. For anyone wanting to use Totango, don't. For those that are still not convinced, I would make sure you are game for a very long implementation and the ongoing maintenance of syncing/resyncing. If you are in charge of implementation, in my experience, this is a not a 'set it and forget it' type of platform. It does require someone who is highly technical to partner with your customer success team to make sure it is functioning properly.

Information keeps missing and changing in totango . Because of that there is are lot of problems with it. We need to manually keep the backup in an another file. More over if in case we take the backup its so hard to track since its all in numbers. Totango can be much better if the cloud storage is working fine. My company is planning to discontinue due to this factor

Incentivized

• Having one system within the school district is beneficial. Teachers are able to access a variety of information and also do input all within the same program.
• Communication with parents has been impacted greatly, as they always have information at their fingertips without teachers having to call or email them with a grade update. Parents are able to check student's grades at any time.

Incentivized

• Definitely enables to improve overall client retention, our target is 97%, we're at 96%.
• A significant contribution to our increasing client conversion from starter package to the subscribed client within the first 90 days or less.
• ROI continues to increase with every new release from Totango, and it will ultimately become our primary source of truth for all customer data.

Incentivized