CircleUp vs Sentral

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.

Sentral is a cloud-based school management platform for administration, online learning, and student management. It serves government, independent, specialised, and multi-campus schools, bringing administrative, wellbeing, finance, and engagement tools together. Schools can manage profiles, enrolments, health records, activity permissions, transport, classes, attendance, and wellbeing. Finance functions include online payments, configurable fees and discounts, reporting, and links with Xero and Microsoft Dynamics. Teachers have an app for attendance and wellbeing tasks. Parents can use an app or browser portal for notices, teacher messages, absences, payments, and interview bookings, depending on what their school enables; students can view timetables, attendance, notices, and learning tasks. Sentral describes open integrations and flexible APIs, and says schools can configure more than 35 modules. It is available on Android, iOS, web, and API. Sentral says it is ISO 27001 certified and uses encrypted cloud storage. Demographic management is available to independent schools only. Pricing is available through demo and enquiry links, with no public subscription price stated.