Edsby vs. Sakai

Sakai

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
Edsby	Score 8.0 out of 10	Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)	Edsby is a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) for K-12 school districts that uses web and mobile technologies to connect teachers, students, parents and administrators in new ways. This LMS allows students and parents to check grades, attendance, homework and more from a browser, tablet or mobile phone. The vendor says what sets this LMS apart from others is that Edsby is designed specifically for the special requirements and needs of K-12. To make district-wide…	$5 per user/per year
Sakai	Score 8.7 out of 10	N/A	Sakai is an open source learning management system provided by the Apero Foundation. The LMS provides what it calls Core and Expanded Features. The Core Features encompass an integrated tool set that is tested by the Sakai community members and is then included with each new release. The tool set can be configured by: instructors, students, research investigators and project leaders. The other set of tools, known as “Contrib Tools” are specific to Sakai tools and innovations that are developed…	N/A

Pricing

Edsby

Sakai

Editions & Modules

Edsby: 5+
per user/per year

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
Edsby	Sakai
Free Trial
No	No
Free/Freemium Version
No	Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

Required

No setup fee

Additional Details

Edsby charges an up-front fee for initial integration. There are also annual costs, variable with the number of students. Parent, teacher and administrator accounts are free. Certain other features are charged for annually. Special pricing applies for private schools. Contact Edsby for details.

Must contact vendor for pricing information.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	Edsby	Sakai
Considered Both Products	Edsby NF Nicholas Forsyth Database Management Specialist Chose Edsby Edsby is a more sophisticated and useful tool. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Edsby Far superior, more tailored to the needs of the classroom Incentivized Helpful? CV Christopher Virtue Educational Consoltant Chose Edsby Edsby and Google Classroom are two entirely different services, yet they can be used together with increased learning effectiveness as the result. When used in tandem, they combine the best features of both platforms and blend them together to get the best learning platform … Incentivized Helpful? SM Susan McGuire Secondary English Teacher Chose Edsby EDSBY was piloted at the school last semester, and I found it made my job easier, which is a boon since time is fleeting and I could get more done with less effort with Edsby. After the pilot the entire school district was signed up to use Edsby. I like it very much. I did use … Incentivized Helpful? Celia Stone Marketing & Admissions Manager Chose Edsby Edsby is far more intuitive to use so it provides a better user experience. Incentivized Helpful?	Sakai Sarah Daggett Lecturer, Department of Communication & Theatre Chose Sakai Before using Sakai, we used Blackboard. Ultimately, I think moving to Sakai was a financial decision (it was cheaper), but I believe it ended up being better accepted by faculty and students as well. At the time (this was several years ago), Blackboard's UI wasn't as … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Sakai Sakai will check most of the same boxes as Canvas as far as features. Students can receive feedback, emails, comments, grade and submit assignments, etc. However, everything is going to be a bit more difficult with Sakai. Finding something will take more clicks. Sakai is more … Incentivized Helpful? Chani Loeb Administrative Assistant Chose Sakai Courses are organized into tabs. Teachers use the program to list assignments with due dates for students in each course. Students use the program to upload assignments before they are due. Teachers upload syllabi along which the students can follow the progress of the … Incentivized Helpful? Dave Eveland Instructional Designer/Technologist Chose Sakai When considering an LMS there are multiple factors to consider, and typically those factors are not co-equal amongst all stakeholders. Some institutions select an LMS based on C-Level directive; others narrow the field based on feedback from the largest constituent user base or … Incentivized Helpful? Keira Dooley E-Learning Developer Chose Sakai Sakai and Moodle seem to be neck and neck. I much prefer a proper LMS over a WordPress LMS Plugin. Sakai was much more robust than a simple plugin solution. Incentivized Helpful? Terry Golightly Assistant Director Online Instructional Design & Technology Chose Sakai We were for a year or two on WebCT, which has been acquired by Blackboard. It was hard to learn and difficult to administer. Changing to Sakai not only meant a great deal of financial savings, but it was easier to use and more responsive to institutional and consortial needs. … Incentivized Helpful? Jason Smith, DPA Instructional Technologist Chose Sakai Every few years we evaluate LMSs. Each time Sakai comes out ahead due to cost, customizations, and the Sakai community. We like to keep things in house because it allows us an extra amount of reliability and control that you will have to give up when running most other … Incentivized Helpful? Andi Sciacca Faculty Member Chose Sakai I was not part of the selection committee, but I believe the ability to white label Sakai was very significant to the choice being made. In another institution I taught (not the one in which I used Sakai) the decision was made to go with MoodleRooms due to the need for support … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Sakai We selected Sakai for our purposes (copyright/IP education) because students were familiar with the interface and the assessments worked just as desired. Though Canvas could serve as an ideal alternative and is used robustly here at UD, we have chosen Sakai for its familiarity … Incentivized Helpful? Raymond J. Uzwyshyn Director, Library Digital & Collection Services Chose Sakai Sakai is a fair competitor to other online learning systems (i.e. Blackboard, Canvas, Desire-to-Learn). Essentially, Sakai is simply a different flavor of similar models for online learning management systems. It is more different from Moodle and Moodle's social networking … Incentivized Helpful? Samantha J. Blevins Instructor Chose Sakai I did not personally select Sakai. However, it is fairly easy to use and customize. That being said, this product is being abandoned by developers/universities and should not be adopted by an organization. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Sakai As an adjunct professor, I didn't pick Sakai for the university. I have experience with Moodle, Blackboard, eCollege, iBoard and now Sakai. I would have to say that Sakai is one of my all time favorite LMSs to use as it is very easy to navigate. Incentivized Helpful? Becky Roehrs Distance Learning Coordinator/Learning Technologies Specialist Chose Sakai Our faculty found Moodle difficult to use-we tried at least two different releases of it with different vendors. It may have changed greatly since we worked with it in 2010-2012, but that was our experience. Blackboard was what we were familiar with, but some of its tools were … Incentivized Helpful?

Features

Edsby

Sakai

Learning Management

Comparison of Learning Management features of Product A and Product B
	Edsby 9.0 Ratings 9% above category average	Sakai 7.9 Ratings 4% below category average
Player/Portal	10.00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Mobile friendly	9.00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Progress tracking & certifications	7.00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Assignments	9.00 Ratings	10.00 Ratings
Learning administration	10.00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Social learning	9.00 Ratings	9.00 Ratings
Course authoring	00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Course catalog or library	00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Learning content	00 Ratings	8.00 Ratings
Compliance management	00 Ratings	7.00 Ratings
Learning reporting & analytics	00 Ratings	6.00 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	Edsby	Sakai
Small Businesses	iSpring Learn Score 9.6 out of 10	iSpring Learn Score 9.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Schoology Learning Score 9.7 out of 10	Schoology Learning Score 9.7 out of 10
Enterprises	Schoology Learning Score 9.7 out of 10	Schoology Learning Score 9.7 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	Edsby	Sakai
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	9.0 (0 ratings)	7.4 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	8.1 (0 ratings)
Implementation Rating	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	Edsby	Sakai
Likelihood to Recommend	I use only Edsby - I have no use for a google classroom as well as an Edsby page. I try to convince and how teachers how easy it is to use only one system Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Sakai is well suited for any size institution or training organization looking to use an extremely flexible, well-supported and extensible LMS that doesn't sacrifice budget for useless options and extra features. The community that is Sakai (by way of students, instructors, teachers, administrators, information technology professionals, instructional designers and developers) all make Sakai what it is. Sakai can be paired with multiple LTI tools, streaming services, conferencing and plagiarism detection platforms and student information systems to ultimately help students meet with success. As we have a very limited IT staff Sakai is hosted off-site, but are still able to provide support to our faculty with very little extra effort. While Sakai is not as well-known as platforms like Blackboard or Canvas, because we're one of just a few clients, requests to our host for second or third tier assistance are resolved pretty quickly. We recently had an instance where all of our users were unable to login; this turned out to be an issue with host configuration rather than Sakai itself. Sakai is not perfect: "Auto-saved draft" text disappears sometimes, question pools are difficult to share among faculty, the forums interface could be modernized and progress analytics surfaced more easily to students. Dave Eveland Instructional Designer/Technologist Read full review
Pros	Intuitive - Parents find it simple to use. Email - because Esdby links to our SIS producing class lists and broadcast emails are a snap. Celia Stone Marketing & Admissions Manager Read full review	User friendly, easy to navigate Interactive friendly. You can link other resources to help students learn the course concepts better. Stable platform. There are a few updates from time to time but it has never gone down in my years of using the LMS. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Edsby could make the sorting and collecting of information such as attendance easier. Enhancements to the messaging system are needed - sorting into folders, searching, etc. David Lee Vice Principal Read full review	While the check box to send an email when you send a message is helpful, there have been times that teachers forgot to check that box, so students didn't get important assignments/announcements. Discussion forums can be fun, but it's annoying to read other people's comments since you have to click into each person's comment, & it always marks the comments as new, even if you've read them. I think it would be helpful if Sakai warned you before submitting an assignment how many submissions or when the assignment is due, before hitting submit. Incentivized Chani Loeb Administrative Assistant Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	No answers on this topic	Sakai is a good general learning management system - it is not leading edge but rather a stable system with standard learning management system features. It can be fairly easily customized and is fairly easy to learn from both student learning and faculty administrative vantage points. New paradigms for online learning though are emergent so the current field should also be investigated with competitors. Incentivized Raymond J. Uzwyshyn Director, Library Digital & Collection Services Read full review
Usability	The user interface is widely modelled on a web 2.0 design (e.g. Facebook). This is not a criticism per se, as it makes moving around the site very easy and familiar. The mobile site is also very well designed, it makes good use of space and is also easy to navigate. Matthew David IT Director Read full review	When faculty are preparing courses from term to term, a portion of the content is static within a specific discipline. The time it takes to import past lessons into new versions of Sakai can be an inefficient use of my time. When I want to add new content and edit from the old content, it's reliant upon me to cut and paste the content from term to term rather than simply import and edit from a backup. Incentivized Andi Sciacca Faculty Member Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	Since Sakai is open-source their documentation is often lacking and support is absolutely needed onsite. Internal documentation is more important with Sakai than other services. The Sakai community is fun, passionate, engaged, and absolutely doing their best, but it's an uphill battle against the current market and trends. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Implementation Rating	No answers on this topic	No, I don't Incentivized Samantha J. Blevins Instructor Read full review
Alternatives Considered	EDSBY was piloted at the school last semester, and I found it made my job easier, which is a boon since time is fleeting and I could get more done with less effort with Edsby. After the pilot the entire school district was signed up to use Edsby. I like it very much. I did use a blog on First Class which was extremely difficult to learn, and a blog on WordPress which was easier to learn how to use but not interactive like Edsby is. To my mind, Edsby is far superior to the former. SM Susan McGuire Secondary English Teacher Read full review	Before using Sakai, we used Blackboard. Ultimately, I think moving to Sakai was a financial decision (it was cheaper), but I believe it ended up being better accepted by faculty and students as well. At the time (this was several years ago), Blackboard's UI wasn't as user-friendly and there were issues with administrating it. I don't think most of campus used it, actually. We changed to Sakai and haven't looked back. Incentivized Sarah Daggett Lecturer, Department of Communication & Theatre Read full review
Return on Investment	For the most part, teachers, parents and students love the system. It provides easy access to the information that they need when they need it. David Lee Vice Principal Read full review	Our Sakai costs are about 10% (ten percent) what it would cost for the big name LMS. For a school with a budget. this is a deciding factor. We can more easily afford more online programs to attract more students. Hard-won resources can go to needy places in the institution rather than to the online infrastructure. Incentivized Terry Golightly Assistant Director Online Instructional Design & Technology Read full review
ScreenShots	Edsby Screenshots