CircleUp vs iGradePlus Enterprise School Management System

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.

iGradePlus Enterprise School Management System is a web-based service for schools and districts managing student information, staff, multiple schools, and communications with students and parents. An Enterprise subscription can cover one school, several schools, or a whole district, with users assigned to schools to restrict data access. Teachers and administrators have gradebooks, GPA calculations, attendance and behavior tracking, assessments, schedules, and transcripts. They can create report templates and produce grade, attendance, behavior, progress, and report card reports across multiple teachers’ gradebooks. Student portals and up to four parent or guardian portal accounts per student are included. Zoom integration allows teachers to schedule and hold student video meetings inside the web app, with links shown in student portal calendars. The service works in major browsers on Windows, Mac OS-X, and Linux, while data is stored on its servers. The maker describes SSL transfers, encrypted sensitive profile data, nightly local and remote backups retained 30 days, and a 30-day activity log. A sample Enterprise price is $3,055 a year for 400 students, with unlimited teachers and administrators.