Almanack vs Common Planner

Almanack is a web platform for educators planning curriculum lessons and classroom resources across subjects, grade levels, and languages. Teachers can adjust a lesson’s reading level, topic, content, and pacing while keeping the unit structure intact. It can create below-grade, above-grade, ELL, and IEP versions aligned to the same standards, and generate assessments tied to standards, letter grades, and curriculum units with gradebook-ready artifacts. The free plan costs nothing and includes standards-aligned lesson planning, curriculum design, a lesson and unit planner, slides, basic worksheets and activities, quizzes and assessments, educational games, and custom video recommendations. Almanack lists integrations including Google Classroom, Google Forms, Kahoot, GimKit, Blooket, Wayground, Quizlet, Google Slides, Google Docs, PowerPoint, Word, and PDF. Its Google Classroom integration can import courses, publish lessons as assignments, and display classwork in Almanack course pages. School and district users can sign in through Google, Microsoft Entra ID, Clever, or ClassLink, depending on district configuration.

Common Planner is a web-based collaborative lesson planner for teachers, schools, and districts. Teachers can create lesson and unit plans, organize classes, and reuse planbooks and lessons across school years. They can search for standards, attach them to units, and track which standards have been taught. Shared planbooks support co-planning, sharing plans with administrators, and borrowing plans from other teachers. School leaders can review planning status, standards coverage, and pacing, then comment on lesson plans. The school product page describes AI-assisted insights for identifying missing standards, pacing issues, or instructional gaps. Basic for Teachers includes an AI-powered lesson assistant, daily, weekly, and monthly planning, up to 50 Google Classroom posts, and file uploads from a computer or supported storage services. Pro includes unlimited Classroom posts, unit planning, automatic standards tracking, and up to five collaborators. The Basic plan is free forever; Pro is listed at $5.59 a month, with a one-payment amount of 71.88 USD. The Schools plan includes school-wide templates, membership management, staff training, and ongoing support. There is no app, but the service works through a browser on tablets and smartphones.