Best School Management Software of 2026

What is school management software?

School management software is a tool that helps educational institutions efficiently manage their administrative tasks and day-to-day activities, including attendance tracking, grading systems, scheduling classes and exams, facilitating student-teacher communication, and monitoring students' progress.

The school administration management system offers features to guide the admission processing and fee collection. Parent portals in the system allow guardians to access their child's academic performance, including grades, assessments, behavior and conduct, and a report of overall growth. With school management software, educational institutions can significantly reduce paperwork, saving time and effort to enhance school operations.

What are the core features of school management software?

• Class scheduling: Facilitate the creation, modification, and visualization of timetables for classes. The feature allows admins to efficiently allocate rooms or resources based on specific requirements such as class size or subject matter. It ensures smooth operations by avoiding scheduling conflicts, including overlapping sessions or double-booked classrooms.

• Student information/records: Maintain and manage student data including attendance, grades, behavior reports, and health records. The student information system provides centralized access to student data for administrative decision-making or parent-teacher communication purposes. It ensures the confidentiality of sensitive details about student progress reports and overall well-being.

• Faculty/staff management: Manage faculty and staff details with each member's qualifications, certifications, contact information, schedules, and payslips. The feature assists in scheduling classes or duties effectively while tracking attendance and performance metrics regularly to ensure adherence to educational regulations.

What are the benefits of using school management software?

• Enhances parent-teacher communication: School administration management software provides a centralized platform where teachers can share updates, grades, and important notifications. Parents have immediate access to this information, which eliminates the need for physical meetings or phone calls. This promotes transparency, improves understanding of student performance, and fosters greater parental involvement in their child's education.

• Automates scheduling and timetabling: The tool assigns classes, manages schedule changes, and automatically allocates teachers according to availability. It also helps handle timetable clashes. This significantly reduces administrative workloads while ensuring efficient use of resources and smooth operations within educational institutions.

• Facilitates student data management: School management system software simplifies student data management by centralizing all information in one place. It keeps track of students' enrollment, grades, attendance, and other essential details, making it easy to access and update. This avoids manual errors associated with paper-based systems or multiple databases, enhancing the efficiency of administrative tasks related to student management.

What are the potential issues with school management software?

• Data privacy issues: School management software handles sensitive student information, grades, and financial records. Data privacy issues can arise if the system lacks robust security measures or fails to comply with regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). If the system lacks robust security measures, it can lead to unauthorized access or breaches, risking exposure of confidential details, which can have severe legal and ethical implications for schools.

• Inadequate reporting tools: Inadequate reporting tools in school management software can result in a lack of valuable insights into student performance, staff efficiency, resource allocation, and other school operations. This can hinder strategic planning and decision-making processes within educational institutions. Accurate data analysis is crucial for continuous improvement, as it might directly impact the quality of education provided by the institution.

• Integration issues: Poor integration capabilities in school management software can cause difficulties by limiting data flow between systems such as grading, scheduling, or communication. If the software cannot integrate with other platforms used in a school setting, it may imply additional manual work for staff members. This could slow administrative tasks and disrupt smooth operations within an educational institution.

How much does school management software cost?

Most school management software products are priced on “per month” basis, and their entry-level pricing plan ranges from $39 to $199+*. An enterprise product priced higher may include additional features such as private lessons, business intelligence and analytics, course bundles, gamification, and an integrated website. 

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of Feb. 12, 2024.

What is school management software used for?

A school management system centralizes all student information for transparency in communication between teachers and parents on the child’s academic progress. However, the software can have multiple use cases based on the data fed into the system and the tool's features leveraged. Some of them are:

• Student attendance monitoring: School management software offer a centralized platform for tracking student attendance. Teachers can mark student attendance electronically through fingerprint or facial recognition scans, QR codes, or a mobile app. This school software feature maintains accurate records of student engagement and participation throughout the school day. It also frees up valuable instructional time that teachers can spend on classroom management and student interactions.

• Parent-teacher interaction: The tool allows parents to stay informed about their child's academic performance, schedule, and activities, saving time, reducing errors, and enhancing relationships. In addition, it aids in administrative tasks such as tuition payment reminders and group messaging, improving overall communication within the school community.

• Financial management: A school management system handles all the financial transactions within a school, including fee collection, expense tracking, income statements, and financial reporting. This assists in budgeting and forecasting revenues for better resource allocation. Parents can see payment history or pending dues through the self-service portals, enhancing transparency in communication and avoiding late fee payments.

Which software tools integrate with school management software?

A school management tool integrates with various solutions for data export and import. We looked across thousands of reviews from the software users to identify the products that the users frequently mentioned they integrated with their tools:

• Google Classroom virtual classroom software integrates with a school management system to manage both in-person and virtual classes within the same systems, promoting efficiency and reducing the need to switch between applications. Teachers can leverage interactive features, such as polls, breakout sessions, and whiteboards to foster collaboration and active student engagement.

• Stripe is a payment processing software that integrates with school management software to eliminate the need for manually managing paper cheques and cash, saving administrative time and resources. Parents can make online payments through the preferred payment modes and generate invoices for future reference. The integrated system allows tracking of individual student accounts, payment history, and outstanding balances. 

• Tuition Express daycare software integrates with a school management tool to access a single platform for both daycare and school updates, simplifying communication. Teachers and parents can track student development across daycare and school environments, providing a holistic view of their growth. The integrated systems facilitate the sharing of student information, such as emergency contacts, medical history, allergies, and dietary restrictions. 

• Google Docs, a document management software, integrates with a school management tool to store, access, share, and manage all school documents, such as student records, transcripts, staff contracts, and financial information, in one centralized location. The integrated systems automate document processing such as student enrollment, permission slips, and leave requests to minimize manual tasks and improve turnaround times. 

• Google Calendar scheduling software integration with school management software allows accessing complete school schedules, including classes, meetings, events, and staff assignments. The integration allows for generating reports and analyzing scheduling data to identify trends, optimize resource allocation, and inform future scheduling decisions.

We identified these integrations mentioned most often in verified reviews of school management software published on Software Advice within the past two years. (as of Feb. 12, 2024).

Key considerations when purchasing school management software

• Consider the software's grading and attendance tracking system. Grading and attendance tracking are vital components of school management software. These features simplify teachers' administrative tasks by automating them and providing a centralized system for recording student performance and class presence. This data aids in monitoring academic progress and detecting absentee trends early on, improving overall educational outcomes.

• Check the communication features for parents and teachers. Communication features of school management software facilitate efficient and timely interaction between parents and teachers. This enhances transparency, allowing parents to track their child's progress, attendance, or issues in real time while improving parent-teacher relationships that positively impact student performance.

• Examine options to customize user permissions. Customizing user permissions in school management software keeps sensitive data accessible to authorized individuals only. This role-based access control system helps maintain the confidentiality of student and staff information, enhancing operational efficiency while ensuring security compliance.

Sources

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Software Advice’s school management software directory. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in Software Advice's directory that offer them. 

Disclaimer

This school management software buyers guide was authored by Software Advice’s content team. We develop our guides using the author's expertise, insights from 2M+ unique user reviews, and our proprietary data science algorithms to identify trends in user sentiment, preferences, and priorities. Some text was generated with assistance from artificial intelligence tools.