Salesforce Education Cloud vs. Skyward Student Management System

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

Skyward SMS is well suited as a Student Management System for anyone who wants to drive their organization based on data. The capabilities of using the fields available as well as adding our own custom forms make data collection extremely easy. Reporting abilities take that data and allow us to make sense of what has been collected

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

• Skyward does well with managing the students' information. It was easy to find a student's schedule, grades, behavior record, or family information because it was all separated out.
• Another strength is the system’s way of requesting time off. All of the steps are laid out in a organized manner, and you can check the status of the request with one click.
• Skyward also pairs well with other applications. Whenever I need a substitute for a class, Skyward links me to Aesop (the absence software) and allows me to put in the request. When I’m done, Skyward updates automatically with that information.

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

• Skyward's reporting can get confusing so it would be nice if it was cleaner and possibly came with some common reports other schools use too.
• Skyward's GUI is out of date and needs a refresher.
• Skyward can have compatibility issues after an update.

Incentivized

It is the system I am most comfortable with, so having to learn a new system outweighs any problems I have with Skyward.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

It takes some time to get used to navigating the features and layers, but once you know your way around it, it's pretty good.

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

Overall great job, issues were taken care of. People in support do care.

Incentivized

Yes, I was part of the implementation team.

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

Skyward is used differently at our school than GoGuardian. GoGuardian is used to monitor student use of technology during school hours, and Skyward is used to track student data such as attendance, uniform, tardy arrivals, grades, and behavior. Overall, Skyward's interface is more user-friendly than GoGuardian. GoGuardian requires even more clicking around to find what you are looking for

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

• I believe that we have had a great Return on our Investment as we have been using this software at a district-wide level for several years now and it keeps being an effective management software system for our students and families.

Incentivized