Most schools choose a platform on the demo and regret it on a Tuesday. This guide is the evaluation stage done properly: what to require, how to run a demo on your own data, what the pricing models actually cost at scale, how the vendors compare, and how to leave one platform for another without losing a term.
This guide is for the owner or administrator of a small or mid-sized school who is choosing a platform: replacing a spreadsheet and six tools, leaving a product that has not kept up, or setting up a new school and trying not to inherit someone else's mistakes. It applies to language schools, tutoring and exam-preparation centres, private academies, training providers and online schools. It is not written for a university procurement office, which has a process, a budget and a lawyer.
One thing to say plainly, because this guide is published by a vendor. SprintUp is one of the products you might shortlist, and the guide says where it fits and where it does not. The evaluation method, the pricing analysis and the security questions are written to be useful whichever platform you choose, and the comparisons are written to a published set of criteria so you can check them. If any of it reads as a sales page, it has failed at its job; tell us.
The six clusters follow the buying process in order: how to evaluate, what it costs, how the vendors compare, how to migrate, what to ask about security, and whether to buy one platform or several tools.
Schools do not choose bad software; they choose good software for a school that is not theirs, on the basis of a demo that was not their Tuesday. The five mistakes below account for most of the regret, and every one of them is avoidable before the contract rather than after.
The longest feature list wins the demo and loses the year. Most of the features will never be used, and the two that matter — does the student exist once, does a change propagate — are not on the list because they are not features.
A demo run on the vendor's data shows the product at its best. A demo run on your enrolment form, your timetable and your invoice shows the product. Bring your own Tuesday and ask to see it.
Per-student and percentage-of-fees pricing is small at forty students and decisive at four hundred. Price every shortlisted product at the size you expect in year three, and ask what happens to the price above that.
Whether you can export every student, class and payment record decides whether you own your school or rent it. Ask before you sign, in writing. The vendors that make this hard are the ones you will most want to leave.
When the answer to "does the timetable reach the invoice" is "there is an integration", someone will have to build, pay for and maintain it. In a small school that someone is you.
Who do you contact on a Tuesday morning when something is wrong, and how long do they take? Ask for the answer as a number, and then email support with a real question during the trial and time it.
Start with what the school runs, not with what the products offer. Seven systems — enrolment, timetable and attendance, teaching, website, fees, reporting, data protection — and under each, the specific things your school does. "Enrolment" is not a requirement; "a parent can enrol a child in a Tuesday B1 class, pay a deposit and receive a portal login without anyone at the school touching it" is. Mark each one must, should or nice, and be honest: a must is something you would reject the product for lacking.
Then the demo, run to your script rather than the vendor's. Bring a real term timetable, three real enrolment scenarios including one that goes wrong, one invoice with an instalment and one with a failed card, and one teacher absence that needs cover. Ask the vendor to do each one live. Watch how many screens it takes, how many things have to be typed twice, and what the vendor says when something does not work. The last of those is the most informative fifteen seconds of the evaluation.
Does the student exist once? Enrol a student in the demo and then find them in the timetable, the invoice and the reports without searching again.
Change a class time and see who finds out. The teacher, the students, the parents, the invoice — or does someone have to tell them?
Ask for the export. Not whether it exists — ask to see one, and look at what is in it.
Ask what the platform takes from student payments, and get the percentage in writing. Then multiply by your year-three revenue.
Ask where the data is hosted, under which law, and for the data processing agreement. A pause is an answer.
Ask who answers support and how fast. Then test it during the trial with a real question, and time it.
The red flags are consistent across the market: a percentage of fees that appears only in the terms; published pricing that ends with "contact us" above a size your school will reach; "there is an integration" as the answer to a core requirement; no export, or an export that requires a support ticket; no data processing agreement; and a trial that cannot be run on your own data. The evaluation cluster turns this into a printable checklist and a demo script you can send to every vendor on the shortlist.
Five pricing models are common in this market, and most vendors combine two. Each one behaves differently as the school grows, and the behaviour at scale is what you are buying.
Scales with the school and is the most honest model when the unit is active students in a running class, because a student between courses costs nothing. Watch for models that count every student ever enrolled, and for the price above the first tier.
Punishes the schools that add staff and rewards the ones that overload them. A school with eight part-time tutors pays the same as one with eight full-time teachers. Common in tutoring software; ask what counts as a seat.
A price per campus or website. Fine for a single-site school and a cliff for the second campus. Ask what a second site costs before the first is full.
Predictable and simple, and usually tiered by a limit — students, storage, features — that you will reach. Find the limit and the price of the next tier.
A share of every payment your students make, on top of or instead of a subscription. It looks small at forty students and is the largest number on the invoice at four hundred, and it grows with the school forever. It is the one model to price at year three before anything else.
Total cost of ownership is the subscription plus everything the subscription does not say: payment processing fees, domains, any percentage of revenue, the labour of keeping separate tools in step, the migration in and — one day — the migration out. Two products with the same headline price can differ by a factor of two on total cost at three hundred students. Work it out for each product on the shortlist at year-three numbers and put the results side by side; the pricing cluster has the worksheet.
On return, be careful with vendor claims, including ours. The saving from a school platform is mostly time: administrator hours spent reconciling tools, and teacher hours spent on preparation and marking. In a one-term pilot at Intellect Academy — our sister school — teachers reported that lesson preparation and grading time fell by roughly half. That is one affiliated school, one term, self-reported, and we say so wherever we quote it. The arithmetic that matters is your own: your teachers' preparation hours, your hourly cost, and what you would do with the time. The ROI article in the pricing cluster gives you the calculation with your numbers, not ours.
SprintUp's own pricing is published in full on the pricing page, with a calculator that shows what Academy costs at your student numbers before you talk to anyone.
Comparison pages published by vendors are usually worthless, because they are written to a list of criteria chosen to produce the answer. Ours are written to the same seven systems as the evaluation checklist, with the pricing model, the percentage taken from student payments, data residency and the export policy stated for each product, and with the honest cases where the other product is the better choice. Where we cannot verify a competitor's claim, we say so rather than guess. If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it with a note.
Eight comparisons are published, each with the vendor’s prices as published on its own site on the date of writing, and each saying where the other product is the better choice:
An assignment tool inside Google Workspace against a complete school platform. Where Classroom is enough, and where it stops.
An enterprise LMS built for universities against a platform built for independent schools. Procurement, price and fit.
A creator course platform with transaction fees against a school platform with live classes and no fee on student payments.
Per-lesson pricing against per-student pricing, worked at three sizes. Often cheaper on subscription; what SprintUp includes for the difference.
A percentage of payments — including ones it does not process — against 0%. The break-even, worked out.
The closest European rival for language schools, cheaper at most sizes. The honest numbers and what each price covers.
Per-tutor pricing that is cheaper for almost every centre, against a school platform with a free plan for solo tutors.
A purpose-built virtual classroom against a whole school platform. Buying a classroom, or buying a school.
Where we could not verify a competitor’s figure on its own site, the page says so rather than guessing, and features that do not appear on a vendor’s pricing page are marked as not listed rather than absent. Every page is reviewed when either product changes.
The fear of switching keeps schools on platforms they have outgrown for years, and the fear is misplaced about which part is hard. Exporting students, classes, enrolments and payment history from one system and importing them into another is days of careful work for a small school, most of it cleaning the data you are about to discover you have. The part that takes a term is the people: teachers who know the old system, families with the old login, invoices mid-instalment. That part is a plan, not a migration.
Export everything first, before you decide anything else. Students, classes, enrolments, payments, attendance if you have it. Look at what is in the export. This is also the moment you find out whether your current vendor honours its exit policy.
Clean before you import. Duplicate students, students who left in 2024, classes with no teacher. A migration is the one opportunity to fix the data nobody had time to fix.
Set the new platform up in the right order — structure, teachers, website, then students — and import into a structure that already exists, not into an empty account.
Run both systems for one term. New enrolments and new invoices go into the new system from a fixed date; existing instalments finish in the old one. Families move at re-enrolment, with one email, not mid-term.
The migration cluster sets out the four steps with the cut-over checklist, and the one thing to do before choosing any platform, including this one: confirm in writing that you can leave it with your data.
A school is a data controller for children's data, and no vendor can carry that obligation for it. What a vendor can do is answer six questions without checking. Where is the data hosted, and under which law? Is there a data processing agreement, in writing, that you can read before signing? Can every student's data be exported on request and erased on request? Who inside the school can see what, and is single sign-on supported? How are backups taken and how would a breach be reported to you? And is the company behind the product an entity you can identify, in a jurisdiction you can reach?
A good answer is specific and immediate. "EU, under GDPR, here is the agreement, export and erasure are supported, here is how access works" is a good answer. "We take security very seriously" is not an answer. "Let me check with the team" is an answer, and the answer is that nobody has asked before.
SprintUp's answers: data is held under GDPR with EU data residency; export and erasure requests can be fulfilled for a school's students; the company is Intellect Education Limited, registered in Ireland. The security cluster expands each question, gives the answer we would give and the answer we would expect from any vendor you shortlist, and the school operations guide covers what the school itself must do as controller.
The honest version of this trade-off is that specialist tools are usually better at their one thing than a platform is at that thing. A dedicated booking product schedules better than most platforms; a dedicated accounting product accounts better than any of them. Best-of-breed is the right answer for an institution with the staff to run the integrations, a specialist need no platform meets, or a contract it cannot leave.
For a small or mid-sized school with one administrator, it is almost always the wrong answer, because the cost of five excellent tools is not five subscriptions. It is the person who keeps the student in step across all five, the errors when they do not, and the evening hours that are the real reason administrators leave. An all-in-one platform that is merely good at each of the seven systems, with one student record underneath, beats five tools that are each excellent and do not know about each other.
SprintUp is an all-in-one platform and this guide is published by SprintUp, so weigh that. It is also not a payroll or accounting system, and a school with several staff or corporate invoicing will run one of those alongside it; the honest position is one platform for the school and one for the books. The all-in-one cluster sets out where the line falls and the cases where separate tools are right.
Trying it with one class: the free plan. One educator, ten students, one website on a SprintUp address, live classes, the student portal and unlimited AI generation on the relax lane. No card. It stays free.
A solo educator with more than ten students: Pro, at €29 a month or €261 a year. Up to fifty students, three websites with your own branding, the fast AI lane with 5,000 credits a month and premium models.
A school with staff: Academy. Every teacher and every student, priced by active students — €99 a month covers the first 25, then €4 each to 100 and €3 beyond. Five websites, 250 fast-lane credits per active student pooled, 30 days free for up to 25 students, and twelve months for the price of ten when paid yearly.
On every plan: students pay the school through Stripe and SprintUp takes 0% of it; campus, website builder, live video, student portal, analytics, AI curriculum tools and the marketplace are included; data is held under GDPR with EU data residency. Domains are sold separately; prices exclude VAT.
Where it does not fit: payroll, accounting, and schools that want to keep an existing SIS and LMS and add a third product between them. The segment guides for language schools and tutoring centres go through the fit for each kind of school in detail.
Write down what the school runs before you look at any product: enrolment, timetable, teaching, website, fees, reporting, data protection. Mark each requirement must, should or nice. Then run every demo on your own Tuesday morning — a real enrolment, a real timetable change, a real invoice — instead of watching the vendor's script. Price it at the student numbers you expect in three years, not this term. Ask what happens to your data if you leave. The evaluation cluster turns that into a checklist and a demo script.
Less depends on the price than on the unit you are charged by. Per student, per teacher, per site, a flat subscription, or a percentage of what your students pay — and often two of those at once. A small per-student price is the largest line on the invoice at scale; a percentage of fees grows with the school forever. Total cost also includes payment processing, domains, any integration between separate tools, and the migration itself. The pricing cluster works through each model with worked numbers.
A learning management system is where teaching lives: courses, activities, assignments, grades. School management software is the operational record: enrolment, timetable, fees, attendance, reporting, and usually the website. Universities run them as separate products with an integration. Small schools want one platform in which the same student record serves both, because they cannot afford to be the integration themselves.
For a small school, the export and import of students, classes and payment history is days of work; the part that takes a term is running the old and new systems side by side while staff and families move over. The migration cluster sets out a four-step plan and the cut-over checklist. The one thing to do before choosing any platform is confirm, in writing, that you can export everything from it later.
Where the data is hosted and under which law; whether there is a data processing agreement in writing; whether every student's data can be exported and erased on request; who inside the school can see what; how access is controlled and whether single sign-on is supported; how backups work and how a breach would be reported. A vendor that has to check should worry you. SprintUp's answers are in the security cluster and on this page.
For a small or mid-sized school with one administrator, almost always: the cost of separate tools is not the subscriptions but the person who keeps them in step. Best-of-breed wins where a school has specialist needs one product cannot meet, an institution-wide contract it cannot leave, or the staff to run an integration. The all-in-one cluster sets out the trade-off honestly, including the cases where SprintUp is the wrong answer.
AI lesson plans, exit quizzes, differentiation, and course outlines — all on the free plan.
Set up your school free →See what schools getA practical evaluation checklist for school software: requirements, demo script, questions to ask, and the red flags that cost you a year.
What school software really costs: pricing models, per-student vs per-teacher, hidden fees, total cost of ownership and a simple ROI calculation.
SprintUp compared with Teachworks, TutorCruncher, Teach 'n Go, TutorBird, LearnCube, Google Classroom, Canvas and Teachable — feature by feature.
Switching school platforms without losing a term: exporting data, importing students, running two systems, and the cut-over checklist.
Security and compliance questions for school software vendors: data residency, GDPR, SSO, backups, and what a good answer looks like.
One platform or five tools? LMS, SIS, booking, website and payments — when all-in-one wins and when it does not.
Google Classroom is an assignment tool. SprintUp is a complete school platform: campus, website, live classes, AI curriculum. Every difference, side by side.
Canvas is an enterprise LMS for universities. SprintUp is built for independent schools, tutoring centres and language schools. The full comparison.
Generation is unlimited on the relax lane on every plan. Credits only buy the fast lane and premium models.