Blackbaud K-12 Solutions 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

We had an in depth investigation process to determine we needed to replace our School Management Platform and with a very friendly and helpful sales person at Blackbaud we were convinced they were the best option for the price. While not the best option purely on features and output, they beat the top choice by being 30% less expensive. By no means inexpensive, they seemed the affordable option. The Toyota Camry of cars for this if you will. Once we signed the papers, the on-boarding and implementation process was a highly templated meat grinder of a process. In some ways the deployment on rails process relieved a lot of stress in that it answered questions we didn't know we had and removed a lot of deliberation that would have slowed down our launch. However, in the areas that we knew there would be nuance to our situation, it also left a lot of frustration because of the inflexibility. Subject Matter Experts during the onboarding were also very niche. Two products might overlap and if we had questions about how one might impact the other, we would have a specialist in one and a specialist in the other but very hard for them to discuss the one that wasn't their or talk to each other. Once we slogged through an on-boarding and launch we had purposely taken slow to build our internal capability, it has been like an old car that has a reliable engine, but that doesn't look very impressive and takes a lot of elbow grease to keep running.

In 2016, we made the decision to move from our former database (Rediker) to Blackbaud Cloud hosted products: Core, OnRecord, OnCampus, OnBoard, Raiser's Edge NXT, Financial Edge NXT and Smart Tuition. We wanted a holistic database for all of our departments to pull from and for information to move seamlessly in realtime. We are in the middle of the first year and we are very pleased with the functionality, User friendliness and wide variety of reports that are available. Customer support is phenomenal. Every person, without exception, has been friendly, professional and competent. I really enjoy using the chat feature and appreciate case central's ticketing system. Our implementation experience has been horrible. Most of it seems to be attributed to the Whipple Hill acquisition along with a confusing model. Even though we paid thousands of dollars for implementation fee, I felt like we did 90% of the work. Our Project Manager only provided a confusing project mgmt. software and introduced us to our product specialists. The implementation comprised of a series of useless group sessions and one-on-one sessions implementation consultations which were really training sessions in disguise. The grading setup is incredibly complex and non-intuitive, however our specialist was instructed to only setup our Upper School and we would have to setup the lower and middle schools on our own. The whole process left us feeling confused, frustrated and behind schedule. We highly recommend Blackbaud Products, but here are a few pointers for anyone considering the program: 1. Give yourself a year. No matter the timeline Blackbaud gives you, double it. 2. Keep your former SIS one more year and work in tandem with the new OnProducts. We are halfway through the year and we're still importing information over from our prior system. 3. Historical Grade Data ' This can only be done for current students. They will not do it for previous students and Alumni. 4. LMS ' Blackbaud does not integrate with any other LMS. OnCampus is highly functional, but lacking in a few features we like in Haiku. 5. Smart Tuition - The Smart Tuition integration is new and still going through development. We've been working at this for several weeks and delayed re-enrollment contracts pending their resolution. If you're considering a transition, you should wait another few months for the bugs to work out.

Overall it has been a decent experience using K-12. No software is perfect, but this software gets the job done and is functional.

overall this is really good remote learning and presenting a solution and recommending for purchase.

The program is fairly "dossy, but they are upgrading to a new interface. We were provided a demo and it looks good, but it comes with a price - like times 10, almost. The old program we have will no longer be supported. We can't afford the new one. We have implemented a system and finally got to the point of our teachers not complaining about issues, and now we'll need to start the process again.

Blackbaud can be a great solution for a fully integrated solution for independent schools' business and educational needs; training and learning time will be needed.