BlueBic Online Admissions vs Gecko

BlueBic Online Admissions is a digital admissions portal for schools, covering the process from inquiry to matriculation. Schools can publish branded application forms with custom fields for intake needs, medical histories, and emergency contacts. Parents can upload documents from a phone or computer and pay application or entrance exam fees online through Paystack, cards, or bank transfers, with digital receipts. Its computer-based testing tool supports timed questions, randomized choices, and instant scoring, with exams available on-site or remotely using access codes. Applicant records move through review and decision stages, with SMS and email updates to parents. After acceptance and payment of a commitment fee, the system can create a student profile, assign a classroom arm, and generate an admission number. It also lists duplicate detection and multi-branch intake. The portal works on Android, iOS, and web. BlueBic lists a free plan and a free trial; the Service Plan is 1,200 NGN as a one-time purchase, billed per active student per term (4 months), and the Product Plan is 80,000 NGN as a one-time purchase, billed per school per term (4 months).

Gecko is a student engagement CRM for higher education, bringing student conversations, data, and touchpoints together. Its platform includes chat, texting, email, calling, events, contact management, forms, workflows, student portals, AI, and reporting. A shared inbox brings email, text, chat, and social messages together, with tools to assign conversations, add internal notes, and use canned responses. Workflows can use event or scheduled triggers, conditional paths, and connections to external systems through webhooks and APIs. The AI chatbot provides automated support across web, social, and SMS, with complex queries handed to human agents. Other AI capabilities include sentiment analysis, automatic tagging, summaries, and support for over 50 languages. Reporting includes customizable reports, event metrics, communication tracking, and scheduled delivery and exports. Gecko identifies Slate, Salesforce, and Ellucian as systems it works alongside; its Salesforce integration supports two-way API data exchange. Its audience includes admissions, student services, international recruitment, career services, graduate admissions, community colleges, and online education teams. Pricing is on request, and Gecko offers a free 30-minute demo, not described as a product trial.