Common App vs Gecko

Common App helps students explore colleges, submit applications, and navigate the admissions process. It serves first-year and transfer applicants and lets students explore more than 1,100 Common App colleges. Its first-year guidance covers gathering materials, setting up an account, adding colleges, engaging supporters, reviewing requirements, planning essays, and submitting an application. Accounts can roll over from year to year, and answers in My Common Application can be saved across years. Students who complete a profile may receive non-binding direct admission offers from participating colleges before submitting an application; applying through the program to colleges offering those admissions is free. Otherwise, each college decides whether to charge an application fee and the amount, and many colleges do not charge one. Qualifying students may be eligible for a Common App fee waiver, subject to participating colleges’ policies. The nonprofit membership organization describes its focus as access, equity, and integrity in college admission. Common App is available on web, Android, and iOS. It lists integrations with CRM and SIS providers, school counseling platforms, and embedded services including SlideRoom and UStrive.

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.