CircleUp vs Gradelink

CircleUp is a member-management platform for homeschool co-ops and community groups, combining class registration, event scheduling, online payments, and communication. Its calendar provides day, week, and month views, with RSVPs, attendance tracking, recurring events, and automated reminders. Class tools cover registration with capacity limits, waitlists, enrollment, attendance, and gradebooks. A searchable directory supports family profiles and custom fields; families control whether their details appear in the opt-in directory. Members also get a feed for announcements, photos, and updates, plus group and class chat. Other tools include volunteer signups and hour tracking, documents and forms, a group store, reporting, roles, and permissions. CircleUp is available on web and iOS. The free plan supports up to 10 families. Starter costs $23 a month, billed at $276/year, and supports up to 50 families. Online payments use Stripe, with its standard fee of 2.9% + 30¢ plus a 0.5% CircleUp platform fee; cash and check payments have no CircleUp fee.

Gradelink is a student information system combining school management, teaching, and learning tools. Academic features include attendance, class scheduling, gradebooks, lesson plans, report cards, standards-based grading, and transcripts. Student records can include demographic, medical, and photo information, as well as IEP tracking. Billing covers accounts receivable, billing statements, lunch and incidental billing, and multiple tuition rates. Listed integrations include Apple School Manager, FACTS Tuition Management, Google Classroom, Microsoft School Data Sync, and NCEA reporting. Google Classroom grade syncing is available at no additional charge, and ClassLink syncs rosters automatically. Gradelink includes personalized phone and email support, staff training, help-site access, and automatic software updates. It says school data imports and setup of report cards, GPA, attendance, terms, gradebooks, and transcripts take 5–10 business days after requested materials are received. The SIS subscription starts at $106/mo, with a $275 one-time setup fee shown. Its Student/Parent app for iOS and Android requires Gradelink Standard Service.