Buyer's guide

Microschool management software: an honest, priced comparison

Fourteen options small schools actually shortlist, what each really costs at three school sizes, and — since we make one of them — the sizes and situations where ours is the wrong answer.

Written by the Pearspark team · pricing verified July 2026 · updated July 28, 2026 · about 12 minutes

In short

Microschool management software handles student records, attendance, grading, reporting and tuition billing for a school of roughly 10 to 200 students. Published prices run from free to about $400 a month at 100 students, and the ranking reorders as a school grows, so the cheapest choice at 25 students is often the wrong one at 90. This guide prices fourteen options at three school sizes, each sourced and dated.

What "microschool management software" actually means

It is not one product category. Schools searching this phrase are usually trying to buy some combination of six different jobs, and the vendors that show up sell wildly different subsets of them. Working out which of the six you actually have to do — this year, not eventually — narrows a fourteen-way decision to a two-way one faster than any feature matrix will.

The six jobs are: keeping the official student record; recording attendance; grading and reporting on learning; running admissions and enrollment; billing tuition and collecting it; and giving families a way to see all of it. A tool that does the last three well and the first three barely is a payments product. A tool that does the middle two well and nothing else is a gradebook. Both are sold under this phrase.

How many microschools are there? Nobody actually knows

The figure of 95,000 microschools circulates widely and traces back to no primary source we have been able to find; it should be treated as folklore. RAND and EdChoice converge on somewhere between 750,000 and 2.1 million microschool students, but neither counts institutions, and the National Microschooling Center's own membership — 943 — is the only hard floor available.

If you want a defensible number for how many schools are shopping in this market, use the federal private-school census instead. It counts schools, it is published, and two thirds of it is smaller than 150 students.

US private schools by enrollment

NCES Private School Universe Survey, 2021-22 — the most recent full census. This is the real shape of the small-school market, microschools included.

Enrollment	Schools	Share
Under 50 students	11,878	40.0%
50–149	8,075	27.2%
150–299	5,260	17.7%
300 or more	4,514	15.1%
Total	29,727	100%

Worth knowing before you sign a multi-year contract: the under-50 band shrank 15.0% between the 2017-18 and 2021-22 surveys, and that figure is net of new openings, so it is a floor on the closure rate rather than an estimate of it. Ask any vendor what happens to your records if you close — and get the answer in writing.

What each system costs at 25, 50 and 100 students

Published list pricing where the vendor publishes it, and "quote required" where they don't — we would rather show a gap than invent a number to fill it. Setup fees, school minimums and tier splits are noted in the cell, because those are the parts buyers discover late. Where a vendor sells tiers, the cell shows both the headline tier and the tier that carries the features schools most often ask about.

System	25 students	50 students	100 students
PearsparkFull school system · published, banded	$62.50/mo	$125/mo	$250/mo
NavEdFull school systems	$50/mo Standard · $160 Enterprise	$112.50/mo Standard · $360 Enterprise	$237.50/mo Standard · $760 Enterprise
SchoolCuesFull school systems	From $75/mo (no per-student rate published)	From $75/mo (no per-student rate published)	From $75/mo (no per-student rate published)
QuickSchoolsFull school systems	$29.70/mo Gaia · $44.70 Apollo (30-student minimum)	$49.50/mo Gaia · $74.50 Apollo	$99/mo Gaia · $149 Apollo
SkoolyFull school systems	$49/mo	$49/mo	$49/mo
GradelinkFull school systems	$121/mo + $275 setup (≤50 tier)	$121/mo + $275 setup (≤50 tier)	$164/mo + $275 setup (51–100 tier)
FACTS SIS (formerly RenWeb)Full school systems	Quote required	Quote required	Quote required
Sycamore SchoolFull school systems	$100/mo	$200/mo	$400/mo
TeacherEaseFull school systems	≈$44–73/mo (3–5 teachers)	≈$73–117/mo (5–8 teachers)	≈$117–176/mo (8–12 teachers)
Alma SISFull school systems	Quote required	Quote required	Quote required
Google ClassroomSpecialty & single-purpose tools	Free	Free	Free
ThinkWaveFull school systems	Tiered — from ~$17/mo	Tiered by enrollment	Tiered by enrollment
Jupiter EdSpecialty & single-purpose tools	≈$42/mo ($500/yr minimum)	≈$42/mo ($500/yr minimum)	≈$58–83/mo ($7–10/student/yr)
Transparent ClassroomSpecialty & single-purpose tools	$50/mo	$100/mo	$200/mo
Spreadsheets & the DIY stackThe do-it-yourself stack	Free (+ admin hours)	Free (+ many admin hours)	Free (+ a part-time job of admin hours)

Competitor pricing read from each vendor's own published pages · last verified July 2026 · sources listed at the foot of this page.

Read the table honestly and it says something uncomfortable about us. Pearspark is not the cheapest option at any of these three sizes. At 100 students most of these systems list a lower price than our $250; only Sycamore and NavEd's top Enterprise tier list a higher one, and three — FACTS, Alma and ThinkWave — don't publish a comparable figure at that size. What the difference buys is scope — standards-based grading, lending library, equipment and room booking, volunteer check-in, admissions and tuition billing are all inside our one price, where elsewhere several of them are separate modules or absent. If you don't need that scope, you should not pay for it, and the row above ours is the better buy.

Two names in this search that aren't buyable school software

Prenda comes up constantly in searches for microschool software, and it is not software you can buy. It is a microschool network and curriculum programme: its published fees — $2,199 per student per year for scholarship students, or $219.90 per student per month for direct pay — are charged to families for the whole programme, with a separate fee set by the guide who runs the school on top. The management tools are bundled inside that. There is no pricing page for software alone and no offer to license it to an existing school, so it does not belong in a table of school systems even though it will be the first result you see.

Brightwheel comes up for the same reason and is a different mismatch. It calls itself the number one childcare management software and sells to preschools, childcare centres, in-home childcare, camps and afterschool programmes. K-12 is not mentioned on its site; neither are transcripts, report cards or a gradebook — the nearest thing is progress reports for child development. It also publishes no price at all: its pricing page is a lead form that asks your enrollment capacity and then asks you to talk to someone. If you are running a preschool it may well be the right product. If you need a transcript, it is not the same category.

We have left both out of the price table rather than including them with caveats, because a row in a comparison table is an implicit claim that two things are alternatives, and in these two cases they are not.

Who each one is actually for

The one-line version of each full comparison. These are the same descriptions we publish on the individual comparison pages — they don't get more flattering to us here.

NavEd: Microschools and co-ops that only need the basics — the first five students are free on every tier, and the entry tier is genuinely cheap.
SchoolCues: Small schools that want one vendor for records, billing and heavy parent communication, and are comfortable asking for a quote rather than reading a rate off a page.
QuickSchools: Schools of 40 students and up that want a conventional SIS at the lowest published per-student rate and don't mind that report cards and the parent portal sit one tier up.
Skooly: Programs whose core need is scheduling, bookings, attendance and billing — especially enrichment, tutoring and activity-based schools that never issue a report card.
Gradelink: Private schools of 75–400 students that want a mature, widely used SIS.
FACTS SIS (formerly RenWeb): Established private schools of 200+ students with dedicated admin staff, need-assessed financial aid, and enterprise tuition finance.
Sycamore School: Independent schools of 100–400 students that want per-student pricing and integrated payments.
TeacherEase: Schools focused on standards-based grading with a handful of teachers, especially where per-teacher pricing beats per-student.
Alma SIS: Independent and charter schools of 150+ students that want a modern SIS and don't mind quote-based buying.
Google Classroom: Distributing and collecting classwork, especially if your school already lives in Google Workspace.
ThinkWave: Schools on the tightest budgets that mainly need academics: gradebook, report cards, transcripts.
Jupiter Ed: Schools that want a powerful teacher gradebook with LMS features and don't need operations modules.
Transparent Classroom: Montessori programs whose core need is tracking lessons presented and mastered, Montessori-style.
Spreadsheets & the DIY stack: Brand-new schools of a handful of students, in the semester before the admin work compounds.

Where Pearspark is the wrong answer

If price per student is what decides it, buy QuickSchools. It is a conventional, complete SIS with report cards and transcripts on its $1.49 Apollo plan, and that plan costs $44.70/month at 25 students against our $62.50, and $149 at 100 against our $250. Its 30-student minimum charge means a genuinely tiny school pays for 30 either way, but above that it is cheaper than us at every size in this guide and we are not going to pretend the gap is about quality.

If your programme is built around scheduling and bookings rather than a permanent academic record — an enrichment centre, a tutoring business, a co-op that meets to run classes and collect dues — Skooly is $49/month flat to 100 students, a fifth of what we charge there, with native mobile apps we do not match. The thing to settle first is whether you will ever have to produce a transcript, because that is not a capability Skooly publishes.

Under about 25 students, we are beaten on price by almost everyone and we would rather say so than watch you find out. NavEd's $2.50 Standard tier makes the first five students free on every plan and comes to $50/month at 25 students against our $62.50; ThinkWave starts near $17/month and has a single-teacher edition that is free and does not expire. A school opening in August with nine students should not be paying us $50 a month.

If your school does not give letter grades, our centre of gravity is wrong for you. Only 29% of microschools issue letter grades at all — the rest work in observations, portfolios and mastery evidence. Our gradebook, report cards and transcripts are the reason to buy Pearspark, and if you will never print a transcript you are paying for the wrong half of the product. Transparent Classroom is purpose-built for Montessori observation and lesson records at $2 per child per month.

If you operate as a learning centre under homeschool law rather than as a nonpublic school — which is how a slight majority of microschools operate — you may have no external reporting duty at all, and spreadsheets plus Google Classroom genuinely may be enough for another year. Our own comparison of the do-it-yourself stack says the same thing: it is free, flexible, and fine at eight students. It breaks on accumulated history, not on headcount.

Above roughly 200 students — the top of the range we build for — or anywhere need-assessed financial aid and development are core, FACTS is the established answer and we are not pretending otherwise. Its financial-aid assessment and advancement modules have no equivalent in Pearspark, and at that size a dedicated business office usually wants them.

If the problem you are actually buying software to solve is that families do not hear things, SchoolCues is better shaped for it. Text alerts, newsletters, yearbooks, alumni management and parent-teacher conference scheduling are real modules there and are not things we do at all — our messaging is in-app with email notification and that is the whole of it. They also carry financial-aid management, which we do not.

And if per-teacher pricing suits your shape better than per-student pricing, TeacherEase is likely cheaper: a school of 100 students taught by eight teachers lands near $117–176/month against our $250. Small enrollment with many teachers is the case where per-student pricing flatters us and per-teacher pricing does not.

Six questions that settle this faster than a feature matrix

In rough order of how much each one narrows the field.

Do you issue transcripts? If yes, half the tools marketed to microschools are out immediately, because they never produce one. If no, most of the rest are overbuilt.
Are you a nonpublic school or a learning centre under homeschool law? This decides what you are legally required to keep and report, which decides what the software has to be able to prove.
How many students will you have in two years, not today? The cheapest system at 25 students is often not the cheapest at 100, and migrating a year of grades and attendance is a genuinely bad week.
Does the price include admissions and tuition billing, or are those separate modules with their own setup fees? This is where published prices and real prices diverge most.
What does it cost to leave, and can you export grades, attendance and transcripts yourself without asking? Ask before signing, not after.
If the school closes, who holds the permanent records? Given how quickly small schools open and shut, this is a real question and most vendors have no answer to it.

The fees that don't appear in the headline price

Four of the systems above carry a cost the headline doesn't lead with. Gradelink charges a one-time $275 setup fee — and its Capterra listing, which is where most buyers compare, omits it; adding online enrollment brings the one-time total to $772 before month one. Jupiter Ed's per-student rate sits behind roughly a $500/year school minimum, and QuickSchools bills a minimum of 30 students however many you have, so at both the quoted per-student rate is fiction below a certain size. NavEd's standards-based grading, SSO and API sit in its $8/student Enterprise tier, more than triple the entry rate it is usually quoted at, and QuickSchools' report cards and transcripts sit one tier above its $0.99 headline. None of this is hidden exactly — it is all published somewhere — but none of it is in the number you remember.

What we built, if you want to check the claims

Every capability this guide credits Pearspark with has a page describing what it actually does, written to the same rule: nothing on a roadmap gets written in the present tense.

Gradebook, report cards & transcripts Standards-based grading & mastery Admissions & enrollment Tuition & billing Records, roles & compliance

Or watch it work

Sixty-second screen recordings of the jobs this guide keeps naming — real product, no slides.

Create a tuition plan and add studentsAdmins

Print a report card, transcript, or records packetAdmins

Import past academic history from CSVAdmins

Common questions

What is microschool management software?

It is software that keeps a small school's official records and daily operations in one place: student records, attendance, grading and report cards, admissions, tuition billing, and a portal where families can see it. The phrase covers a wide range in practice — some products sold under it are full student information systems that produce transcripts, others are gradebooks or payment tools with no permanent record at all. The distinction that matters most is whether it produces an official record you could hand to a receiving school.

How much should a microschool expect to pay?

At 25 students, published prices in this guide run from free to about $160/month, with most full systems between $30 and $125. At 100 students the same set runs from free to about $400/month for single-plan systems, and up to $760 on NavEd's top tier. Three costs sit outside the headline: one-time setup fees, which reach $772 at Gradelink if you want online enrollment; school minimums, such as QuickSchools' 30-student floor and Jupiter Ed's roughly $500/year; and features held one tier up. FACTS and Alma do not publish pricing at all and quote per school.

Do I need a full school system if I have 12 students?

Probably not, and we sell one. At 12 students the record-keeping is small enough that spreadsheets plus a free gradebook genuinely work, and the thing that breaks them is accumulated history rather than headcount — two years of attendance, a transcript that needs to be defensible, a family asking for records after leaving. Most schools feel that break somewhere around 25 to 40 students, or at the first transcript request. Buying earlier than that mainly buys tidiness.

What is the difference between a microschool system and a homeschool tracker?

A homeschool tracker records what one family did, for that family's own use and its state's reporting rules. A school system keeps an institutional record about other people's children — which means access control, an audit trail, staff roles, and the ability to produce an official transcript or immunization record on request years later. If you are operating as a learning centre under homeschool law you may genuinely only need the first. If you are a nonpublic school, you need the second, and the difference is legal rather than featural.

Can I get my data out if I switch, or if the school closes?

Ask every vendor on your shortlist, and get it in writing before you sign. The two questions are whether you can export rosters, grades, attendance and transcripts yourself without opening a support ticket, and who holds the permanent record if the school shuts down. Given that the under-50-student band of US private schools shrank 15% over four census years, the second question is not hypothetical. Pearspark keeps each student's permanent records retrievable by the family and by a receiving school even after a school closes; several vendors publish no policy on this at all.

Do microschools need to issue transcripts?

It depends entirely on how the school is legally constituted and on what its families need next. A nonpublic high school whose students apply to college needs real transcripts with GPA and credits. A learning centre operating under homeschool law, where the parent is the school of record, often does not — the family produces its own. This single question does more to narrow a software shortlist than any other, because roughly half the products marketed to microschools never produce a transcript.

Sources

Vendor pricing is read from each vendor's own published pages and re-verified quarterly; last checked July 2026. Where a vendor doesn't publish a price, this guide says so rather than estimating one.

The full comparison behind each row

Each one is sourced feature by feature, last reviewed July 2026, and says plainly where the other system is the better choice.

Pearspark vs SchoolCues Pearspark vs QuickSchools Pearspark vs NavEd Pearspark vs Skooly Pearspark vs Transparent Classroom Pearspark vs the spreadsheet stack All 14 comparisons

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Keep reading

What a small-school SIS really costs How to start a microschool

What Pearspark does, in detail

Gradebook, report cards & transcripts Standards-based grading & mastery Admissions & enrollment Tuition & billing Records, roles & compliance Parent & student portal