Gecko vs OpenEMIS Admissions

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.

OpenEMIS Admissions helps schools handle student applications and enrolment online. Parents can apply for a new or existing student and submit applications to multiple institutions. The form captures student identity, location, address area, birthplace and guardian details. School administrators can review and manage applications using real-time student data, track admission and enrolment status, and approve or reject applications. OpenEMIS Registrations links directly to OpenEMIS Core. The online form works in a browser or on a mobile device with an internet connection; the datasheet lists Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. OpenEMIS can be installed on an organisation’s own IT infrastructure or accessed through dedicated secure hosted workspaces. The product is described as free open source software with no licensing fees; its Free open source software plan is free. Users receive a free knowledge base and product documentation. OpenEMIS says it uses industry-standard security protocols, follows OWASP recommendations and is regularly audited against common web attacks.