PowerSchool Student Information System vs. Salesforce Education Cloud

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

Well suited:

1. Groups that need to integrate their CRM with other partners: many education institutions use Salesforce!
2. Groups with huge student populations now, or expected in the future.
3. Groups that have resources for custom Salesforce development, like an in-house Salesforce Developer role.

Less appropriate:

1. If you expect your company/school will have a limited number of students.
2. If you set up Salesforce to use ONLY Leads or only Contacts, not both. What happens if you have a student re-enroll? How do you handle losing data when converting a Lead to a Contact? If you don't have good answers for these in advance, you'll want to use only Leads or only Contacts to track each student.

Incentivized

• 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

• Great use of integrating across all aspects of enrollment.
• Easy to create tasks for counselors to remember to call prospective students and keep up to date on goals.
• Reporting is fabulous inside of Salesforce.
• All of the Apps in the App Exchange.

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

• Reports - Comes with no out of the box reports.
• OOB functionality may be limited - important to have folks with experience customizing EDA to an organization's needs.
• Upfront cost - Implementation services (either a hired team or consultants) is imperative to make it work.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Great features, but it can feel very cumbersome at times

Incentivized

It was really so easy to sign up and get going with the whole process

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

People will respond on time even though Salesforce is such a large organization. This also includes various methods of getting support beyond just calling - they have dedicated reps, chat, chatter, etc that all make the experience more pleasant.

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

Salesforce.org Education Cloud has many different functionalities that do not revolve around just the assignment and grading aspect of a student's education. They provide ways for staff to communicate with students in real-time and provide additional support, such as mental health resources, which is incredibly important. Not only is the education aspect important, but providing resources to help a student in every aspect of life is possible on Salesforce and is very useful.

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

• This is always awesome to find and have companies where you can educate yourself online.
• Even when you look at things such as FOREX, this is one of the biggest industries, so it is a tell tale sign that it is well on track to the future.

Incentivized