1. Home
  2. School Management Software
  3. Blackbaud Education Management Solutions Reviews
  4. User Review of Blackbaud Education Management Solutions
Blackbaud onSuite - Perfect? No. Best on the market? An unequivocal, Yes!
August 21, 2017

Blackbaud onSuite - Perfect? No. Best on the market? An unequivocal, Yes!

John Blandin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Blackbaud K-12 “ON” Solutions

The ethos of good and competent technical support came over from WhippleHill. We were customers of Blackbaud before WhippleHill, and while their tech support was competent, there were long wait times and limited support staff. The chat support platform works well or 70% of issues, and with phone support I can address more involved problems. Generally, people on chat support recognize when a call-back would be more effective than them trying to explain something via chat.
Our entire school uses four components of the ON Suite - onBoard, onRecord, OnCampus and onMessage. Prior to selecting WhippleHill, we were using about five different products - an SMS an LMS, a database for grades and transcripts a hand-coded website and various spreadsheets and databases dedicated to different tasks. Now all of those tasks can be done within the ON Suite. We still use FACTS for tuition management because our Diocesan school system requires it.
  • The LMS classroom is very teacher and student-friendly. We specifically selected WhippleHill over other products (including Blackbaud's competing product) because of the robustness of the class pages.
  • We just switched to onRecord last year, but our business manager has been especially pleased with School Forms, which she uses for student re-registration and the integration of financial aid and contracts.
  • As noted in an earlier question, we were looking for an integrated school management solution that would eliminate double or even triple data entry required by having multiple disconnected programs. The onSuite has provided that.
  • the integration of onMessage (our website) and onCampus (our team pages, secure parent/student portal) has allowed us to simultaneously post information on the public site and behind the login.
  • The school forms have two good features - drag/drop builder and the ability to easily track submissions. However, beyond that the user experience is really bad. It is hard to find/remove recipients, school forms cannot be used on the public website, there is no conditional logic in the builder. I have to pay for and use a third party product - FormSite for online payment forms.
  • Long overdue improvements were made to the gradebook this summer, but a lot more is needed to come up to the standards a lot of teachers are used to who have used stand-alone online gradebooks. An example is that the gradebook does not have a built-in translation table that would allow a teacher to enter a letter or a number for a grade.
  • The WYSIWYG text editor has impossibly small type font which cannot be enlarged. There are a lot of add-on editors that allow the user to adjust the font size.
  • At roughly $54000/year, I would have a hard time saying there is a positive real $ ROI. Part of the decision to spend the money was based on the user-experience that we felt we wanted to be able to provide our families. In addition, we felt we needed to do it to be competitive with private schools in our area, many of which use the same platform.
  • I think there is a positive non$ ROI in terms of employee satisfaction of having better tools to do their jobs.
Our decision was made the first year WhippleHill came out with the first of the "ON" products. We compared them to Silverlight, Blackbaud NetClassroom/Campus and Finalsite. At the time, none of the competitors offered a responsive design interface and website, had no LMS at all, or like the Blackbaud product at the time, had a really clunky version with few features. I was so unimpressed with what Blackbaud offered at the time that I actually told them the only way I thought they could ever get competitive was to buy WhippleHill.
The ON Suite is a very expensive product which means that a single school has to be able to commit significant resources. A school our size or larger with a stable student base can just afford it. Smaller schools would need to be well-financed to afford the product. Schools within a small private system - like our Catholic Diocese) could benefit from the ON Suite, but it is far too expensive on a per school basis. Our Diocese recently partnered with RenWeb to provide an SMS and Parent Portal to each of its 29 schools. While it is a far inferior product - on most fronts - at ~$7000/year, it is relatively affordable.