This rapidly progressing digital era has witnessed a lot of advancements in the educational sector. One such technological breakthrough in the field of education is a student information system (SIS). This system enables educational institutions to store, track, manage, and organize students’ records and information online.
Educational institutions can manage their day-to-day operations more easily and effectively with the help of a student information system. It provides the functionality required to automate various processes and tasks, from administrative operations to student activities and teaching responsibilities.
There are many cases in which features of a student information system are found as standalone applications. Examples of such features include attendance tracking and admission management. However, SIS includes all functionalities required for managing administrative, student, and teaching tasks.
This article will help you become familiar with some of the most popular student information systems used today and their features. But before it, let us look at the definition and the remarkable benefits of a student information system.
What is a Student Information System (SIS)?
A student information system (SIS) is a web-based software and a structured information exchange platform that brings together students, teachers, parents, and the administration of a school or college. It is also known as the student management, student administration, or school administration system.
Student information systems enable colleges and schools to supervise and maintain various student-related activities, such as attendance, recording test results, forming student schedules, generating performance reports, enrolling students in courses, etc.
In a nutshell, student information systems have diverse uses, from managing students’ records to administrative functions in a college, school, or any educational establishment.
Benefits of a Student Information System
The following are some of the key benefits of a student information system:
- A student information system is not limited to managing students or administrative activities. It also makes the process of student enrollment hassle-free.
- It eliminates the need to manage oodles of student information manually. With just a few clicks, you can easily store, manage, track, and organize student information in a student information system.
- This system also serves as a student portal where students can track their attendance, progress, payment dues, courses, etc.
- Since the entire management process gets automated with SIS, much manpower, resources, and time are saved.
- With a large amount of student data, it becomes pretty challenging to organize and manage manually, which may result in human errors. A student information system can reduce human errors and allows you to manage students' data in one place.
- It lets parents view their children’s progress, grades, and attendance.
- Since SIS integrates students, parents, teachers, and administrators, it facilitates effortless communication among them.
Top 10 Student Information Systems (SIS) to Use in 2023
The following is a curated list of the top 10 student information systems that can help educational institutions to manage student data easily and efficiently:
1. PowerSchool SIS
PowerSchool SIS is a leading student information system for K-12 educational institutions. It is a flexible, secure, easy-to-use system that powers all your school operations. Moreover, it provides real-time access to attendance, scores, grades, course schedules, assignments, etc.
This SIS has a clean, intuitive, and easy-to-use interface. Also, you can access it from any browser or device, including mobile phones.
Key Highlights
- You can customize PowerSchool SIS without the vendor's help and coding knowledge.
- Reliable and proven attendance and scheduling processes that provide accurate and timely information for reporting.
- PowerTeacher Pro Gradebook provides various flexible setup options, including unlimited grade scale creation and optimization of both standards-based and traditional grading.
- Seamlessly integrates with other PowerSchool products, including PowerSchool Hosting, PowerPack, PowerSchool Enrollment & Enrollment Express, and PowerSchool Ecollect Forms.
- Provides parents with the ability to check attendance, scores, assignments, and many more with real-time push notifications.
- Comes with hundreds of pre-built reports and allows you to create your own reports.
Pricing
You need to contact the sales teams to get pricing.
2. Gradelink SIS
Gradelink SIS is another powerful SIS on our list with an easy-to-use and intuitive interface. It is a one-stop solution for all your school management needs. Since it is a web-based SIS, thus you and your staff can access it from anywhere using any device.
You don’t have to worry if you are unaware of this SIS since it provides training without additional charges. You can train all your staff members to use this system effectively. Also, various tutorials on Gradelink’s website educate you on using the system.
Key Highlights
- Attendance: This feature of Gradelink SIS allows you to maintain the attendance of students. Moreover, you can schedule holidays in advance.
- Classes & Scheduling: With this feature, you and your staff can create and schedule student classes.
- Communication: Gradelink SIS supports voice messaging and text alerts to enable effective communication among students, teachers, administrators, and parents.
- Integration: This SIS can seamlessly integrate with many third-party applications, including Google Classroom, Microsoft School Data Sync (SDS), and Apple School Manager.
- Report Cards: You can create comprehensive report and progress cards for each student.
- Parent Access: Parents can receive attendance and progress reports via email.
- Teacher Gradebook: This feature facilitates standards-based grading.
- Medical Records: Gradelink SIS also maintains the health records of students, such as insurance information, medical history, allergies, medications, and immunizations.
Pricing
Gradelink SIS provides a free demo account. To get pricing details, you need to contact the sales team.
3. FACTS Student Information System
FACTS Student Information System simplifies the school management process. It automates the flow of information between teachers, students, administrators, and parents. This SIS is ideal for K-12 educational institutions. Moreover, FACTS provides essential solutions that meet the needs of principals, admission directors, and other school leaders.
Along with SIS, FACTS comes with a learning management system (LMS). This system monitors and measures student progress and improves communication. In addition, this system makes it quite easy for administrators, teachers, and principals to carry out various management-related tasks.
Key Highlights
- Student Dashboard: This dashboard includes academics, contact information, progress reports, courses, schedules, etc.
- Family Dashboard: This dashboard shows demographics and related information.
- Administrator Tools: Various tools facilitate administration tasks, such as creating and sending email messages, setting up automated emails for attendance reports, etc.
- Reporting: You can create your own reports or use pre-built reports. Pre-built reports include term reports, transcripts, course listings, class lists, etc.
- SIS Gradebook: This comprehensive SIS Gradebook supports standards-based grading.
- Multi-device Support: Teachers can use this SIS from various devices, including desktops, laptops, and mobile devices.
Pricing
You need to contact the vendor for pricing.
4. Wisenet
Wisenet is a comprehensive system that manages a student's entire learning life cycle, i.e., from inquiry to graduation, all under one roof. Initially, this application was developed only for maintaining students’ records. However, over time, it developed into a full-featured student information system.
Whether you are a higher education organization, short course provider, or corporate training institution, Wisenet can meet all your management needs. It ensures that all your records, reports, and communication is safe and up-to-date.
Key Highlights
- People and Enrollment: With this feature, you can allow students to enroll in any of the available courses, organize schedules using a scheduling wizard, manage grades and results, track progress, and maintain their records with ease.
- Automation and Integration: Learncycle Workflows is the original production of Wisenet. It is an automation framework that automates various tasks, including delivering messages to groups or individuals and generating reports, letters, or contracts required at any stage of students’ learning lifecycle.
- Sales and Marketing: This feature enables administrators to market their courses, keep leads engaged, manage the sales funnel, and capture all essential data of each applicant.
- Documents: Wisenets comes with hundreds of pre-built templates to prepare documents. Moreover, there is a feature called uReports, which allows you to create custom reports, letters, and contracts. You can generate either a single report or in bulk.
- Messaging: You can send ad-hoc or scheduled automated messages to individuals or groups.
Pricing
You can book a demo to learn how Wisenet works. If you like it, you can choose any of its three plans: Starter, Standard, and Premium.
- Starter: Starts from $195 per month (billed annually)
- Standard: Starts from $330 per month (billed annually)
- Premium: Starts from $495 per month (billed annually)
5. Skyward Student Management Suite
Skyward Student Management Suite comprises three management systems - SIS, School ERP, and Municipality Management Suite.
Skyward’s SIS is ideal for K-12 educational institutions and allows them to focus primarily on student learning rather than management tasks. It engages families or parents on a deeper level and provides the best educational experience for students.
Key Highlights
- Office and Administration: This feature allows you to eliminate manual office tasks and automate everything, from enrollment, scheduling classes, and fee management to tracking progress and reporting.
- Classroom Tools: There are various classroom tools, including a grade book and message center. It also integrates a tool that helps teachers maintain and track students' attendance. Moreover, it consists of a teacher portal where teachers can easily access information about students with just one click.
- Family Engagement: Parents can track their children's progress through Family Access.
- Student Services: Counsellors are provided with students' behavior, progress, and reports so that they can guide them for their future.
Pricing
You can schedule a live demo or request a video demo to learn how Skyward Student Management Suite works. To know about pricing, you need to contact the sales team.
6. Alma
Alms is another popular student information system on our list. This application aims to help educational institutions and training organizations to empower student operations, enhance family engagement, and boost student outcomes. It helps your learning community to adopt both traditional and progressive instructional practices.
Key Highlights
- Alma supports a standards-based grading system.
- There are personalized learning schedules.
- It can integrate seamlessly with Google Classroom.
- Every student gets different assignments.
- It boosts student, family, and school engagement.
- This system eliminates the need for manual registration and enrollment process.
- There are hundreds of pre-built report templates. Moreover, you can create custom reports.
- It supports group messaging for staff, students, and parents.
Pricing
You can request pricing by answering a few questions.
7. Workday
Workday is a robust SIS that is helping various educational institutions to keep teachers, students, administrators, and parents united throughout a student’s learning journey. It streamlines administrative tasks and students’ learning processes so that you spend less time on mundane tasks.
Key Highlights
- Admissions: With Workday Admissions, you can easily manage new admissions. It helps you to collect, track, and evaluate student applications quickly. Moreover, it helps you measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and track students' applications in real time.
- Advising: Workday Advising provides in-depth insights into degree and eligibility and helps students find the right path to academic completion. It makes academic planning easier for students.
- Students Records: The Students Records feature allows administrators, teachers, and parents to track student progress and academic records and take action accordingly.
- Student Finance: This Workday feature helps students keep their financial transactions up-to-date. It has a built-in Financial Aid system that correctly calculates student course amounts and allows parents to pay that amount.
Pricing
You need to reach out to sales to get detailed pricing information.
8. QuickSchools
QuickSchools is an online school management software or student information system. It is a comprehensive solution to all your school management needs. The best part of this software is that it is simple to use and does not require any training.
Moreover, QuickSchools helps you manage and organize each class’s schedule, keep track of each student’s behavior and progress, maintain attendance, communicate with parents, and accomplish every other school management task perfectly.
Key Highlights
- Student Information: Teachers can easily access students' particulars - grades, parents' information, contact information, academic reports, and address.
- Teacher Information: This feature allows students to track their teachers’ information, such as their contact information, residential address, etc.
- Parent Access: Parents can log in and observe their children’s progress, academic reports, and attendance records.
- Attendance: Students, parents, and teachers can track the attendance of each subject and every period.
- Gradebook: Teachers can follow the standards-based grading system.
- Homework: This feature lets teachers create homework assignments and instantly share them with students.
- Email Text and Voice Messages: Teachers and administrators can convey important notices to parents via email or voice messages.
- Report Creator: With a Report Creator, teachers, and administrators can create, save, and share reports with students and parents.
Pricing
QuickSchools provide a 30-day free trial. Once the trial period is over, you need to subscribe to one of its four plans: Gaia, Apollo, Athena, and Enterprise.
- Gaia: $0.99 per month per student
- Apollo: $1.49 per month per student
- Athena: $2.99 per month per student
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
9. MyClassCampus
MyClassCampus is another popular SIS ideal for schools, colleges, coaching centers, or training organizations. It incorporates more than 40 modules, which makes it a more efficient and feature-rich school management application.
Moreover, it is a mobile and web-based school management platform that serves as a one-stop solution for all the management needs of your institute.
Key Highlights
- Institute Management: This module is the heart of MyClassCampus. It helps institutes to build basic infrastructure, such as departments, courses, faculties, students, classrooms, etc., with primary settings.
- Online Admissions: This module facilitates a paperless admission process. Along with improving administrators' efficiency, the online admission process is convenient for parents, as they do not have to visit the institute physically.
- Attendance Management: MyClassCampus supports three different ways of attendance, namely manual, machine-based, and QR-based. The machine-based attendance system provides three different ways: face recognition, biometrics, and RFID.
- Academic Planner: The Academic Planner is beneficial for students as well as teachers. Teachers can create a teaching plan or schedule for each class using Academic Planner.
- Fees Management: MyClassCampus has a dynamic fee management system that allows parents to pay fees in installments or in one go. Also, it manages the payment of students that have been given discounts based on scholarships.
Pricing
Just by registering, you can get a free trial. But you need to reach out to sales to get detailed pricing information.
10. BigSIS
BigSIS is the last student information system on our list. This application helps you to manage all your school data under one roof efficiently. It is a web-based solution that can meet all your needs related to school management.
This application has many features, such as student management, attendance management, grade book, volunteer management, integrated email, and many more. The best part of this SIS is that you can only add the features you need.
Key Highlights
- Student Reports and Grades: This feature is part of the Teacher Portal. It allows teachers to write reports for each student and assign grades based on their exam performance.
- Attendance Management: Teachers or administrators can track students' attendance in any course by the end of the day or course. It entirely depends on a teacher to take attendance via a pen and paper and later enter it manually in the system or a computer/tablet.
- Student Management: This feature helps administrators to track the information of every student, such as admission details, enrollment and registration details, etc.
- Integrated Email: BigSIS has an integrated email system that allows you to simultaneously send messages to a group of people.
- Gradebook: This module helps teachers create a grade book for each course and weighted categories for quizzes, homework, tests, class participation, etc.
Pricing
BigSIS provides three different editions, namely Pro, Pro+, and Comprehensive.
- Pro: $199 per month
- Pro+: $299 per month
- Comprehensive: $499 per month
Conclusion
SIS has made it easier for educational institutions to manage administrative tasks and streamline the learning process for students.
The above student information systems have the ability to ensure seamless coordination between students, teachers, administrators, and parents. Also, they come in handy for parents to keep track of their children’s progress and reports.
All the SIS on our list are subscription-based, and only Wisenet, MyClassCampus, and QuickSchools offer a free trial.
Let us know in the comments section if you use any other SIS for your institute.
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