Everything on this page about another product comes from that product's own public material. Where we could not confirm something, we do not claim it. Where they do something we do not, it says so.
The student information system, the learning platform, attendance, behavior, the nurse's log, the parent portal, video meetings, e-signature, forms and enrollment, the buses and the lunch line, with a phone app, on one price per student. Nothing is re-keyed between modules because there is only one record.
PowerSchool and Skyward are mature, hosted, deeply integrated with state reporting, and carry reference lists we cannot match yet. We are the newer product with the shorter list, and we say so before they do. What we offer instead is one system where they offer several under one brand, a published per-student price, and a product you can try in your browser right now without a sales call.
Some of what a search turns up is software a school buys once and hosts itself. The comparison there is not feature by feature; it is who carries the risk of patching, backups, upgrades and a public-facing server holding student records. We carry it, watch every school nightly, and show you the results.
Each section ends with what the other product does that we do not, as of the date at the bottom. If one of those is the thing your district needs, say so on the first call. We would rather lose the deal early than waste your year.
PowerSchool SIS, PowerSchool Enrollment, Schoology for the learning platform, and a long list of acquired products joined by integrations.
Several products under one brand, licensed separately, each with its own interface and its own data model, and a per-student price that is negotiated rather than published. For a large district with a team to run it, that breadth is the point.
One application, one database per district, one sign-in, one price on the website. A teacher's gradebook, the attendance screen, the nurse's visit log and the parent's app are views of the same record, so an approved enrollment form writes straight into it and a changed address is changed everywhere.
In December 2024 a breach of PowerSchool's support tooling exposed student and teacher records across a large number of districts; the company disclosed it and offered monitoring. We mention it because every district evaluating us has read about it. Our answer to "what happens if your support staff are phished" is a written security audit we will send you, not a press release.
Years of state-reporting integrations in every state (ours: Michigan built as a screen, other states as clean extracts a person finishes), a marketplace of third-party integrations, and a reference list measured in thousands of districts.
Hosted or on your own servers, a strong Midwest customer base, and a reputation for office and finance work: payroll and HR alongside the student system.
A student information system with Family Access as the parent portal, and a business suite - payroll, HR, finance - that we do not offer. Districts that want one vendor for the business office and the classroom will weigh that heavily, and should.
New Student Online Enrollment is a good product. A district renames, shows, hides and requires fields without code, demands document uploads, translates the forms, adds a CAPTCHA, sends automated emails, and the system recognises returning students and existing families.
Theirs is a fixed form made adjustable. Ours is a builder: any field in any order, grouped into steps you name, including a signature, a named contact, a document upload or an attestation - the family confirms they hold a document and the school stores nothing. Each field maps, or not, to the student record; approval copies the answer in and shows the reviewer the old value beside the new. A family starts without an account, is saved as it types, and resumes by link or by a short code plus the child's date of birth.
Forms translated into other languages (ours carry whatever the district typed; the family app and family pages are in Spanish, the forms are not yet). An automated email to the family on submission and decision (we send none, by design; families are reached in the portal and the app). A CAPTCHA (we throttle and ban instead). And the annual "verify what we have on file" pass as a packaged workflow - ours does it as a prefilled parent form, which works but is not a button yet.
Sold on the CodeCanyon marketplace as a one-time purchase, with small paid add-ons for transport, hostel, library and examinations, and six months of marketplace support included.
A PHP script the school installs on its own server and owns from then on: the hosting, the patches, the backups, the PHP upgrades, and a public-facing server holding student records. Its core is administration and fee collection; examinations are marks entry; there is no learning platform and no accounting. It is built for cost-conscious schools, mostly outside the United States, and for a small private school with a volunteer administrator the price may be the whole decision.
We are not competing on $59. The comparison is about who carries the risk. Our schools are hosted, patched by us, backed up by us, scanned for uploads, watched nightly by a portal that runs a self-test on every school and tells us before the school notices, and provisioned for a new district in minutes rather than a weekend.
Who patches it. Where the backups go. Who answers when the developer stops answering marketplace comments. Whether a one-time-purchase script facing the internet is a defensible place for records covered by federal student privacy law. And whether marks entry is a gradebook.
Smart School is a product of QDOCS, sold through CodeCanyon. PowerSchool, Schoology, Skyward and Qmlativ are trademarks of their respective companies, which are not affiliated with us. Descriptions reflect each product's public material as of 13 October 2026; if we have something wrong, tell us and we will correct it.