Are you looking to automate school processes like student registration and payment collection?
Then it’s time to find the right student registration software platform, one that will help you achieve process optimization.
Almost every registration software offers an online form builder, mobile registration, online payment processing, and registration analytics.
However, no two platforms are the same.
In this article, we’ll explore nine popular registration tools and highlight their pros and cons, main features, and pricing, so that you can find the right one for your business’s needs.
Regpack
Our own solution, Regpack, is an online registration software that helps educational program directors manage their online student registration and accept online payments from their customers.
With the drag-and-drop online form builder, you can easily build custom registration forms that collect the data you need to effectively run your business.
Source: Regpack
Then you can embed these forms on your website, where parents and students can then sign up for your programs or courses through their mobile devices.
These forms also come with a conditional logic feature, which makes them adapt to the specific user based on their answers to the form’s questions.
In other words, the forms only ask registrants questions that pertain to their unique situations, thereby improving the customer registration experience by saving them time.
Regpack also allows you to provide your customers with flexible payment options, from recurring billing to custom payment plans.
For example, the users below offer their customers three different payment schedules:
Source: Regpack
Additionally, Regpack’s platform enables you to accept a variety of payment methods, including ACH bank transfers, credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, and e-wallet payments.
This ensures that your customers are able to pay for your services using their preferred method.
Thanks to its intuitive user interface and stellar customer support, Regpack is also remarkably easy-to-use:
Source: G2
Pricing for Regpack starts at $125 per month, per admin, with a 2.1% processing fee.
Unlike many comparable tools, this package comes with unlimited team use, unlimited projects, and unlimited users, and more.
Source: Regpack
Overall, Regpack is an affordable tool for after-school programs, camps, schools, and other educational programs looking to enroll their students and process payments all online.
Alma
Alma is a k-12 student information system (SIS) that offers a wide variety of features, from bus route, incident, and attendance tracking all the way to communication tools and a registration form builder:
Source: Alma
Its range of features makes it a great all-in-one solution for a school, and it provides support for both administrators and teachers.
Since it powers almost every aspect of running a school, it can help you tremendously reduce paper costs and improve efficiency.
However, if you’re just looking for a point solution with crucial student registration features, like online registration and automated billing, this tool might have too broad a feature set for your school or program.
One of the major selling points of Alma is that its reporting functionality is comprehensive and easy to use.
Users can quickly create reports that enlighten them on the various aspects of their school, be it student attendance, grade averages, or missing assignments.
A con is that the company doesn’t list any pricing on the website, so you’ll have to sign up for a web demo to get a personalized quote.
Classter
Classter offers an online enrollment management software solution that helps you streamline all the processes involved in enrolling new students, including registration, admissions, application tracking, and online billing.
The software enables parents and students to self-register for classes and programs through online forms that you create on the platform:
Source: Classter
If there are fees associated with your registration process, the registrant can pay these through the online form, and Classter will process the transactions securely.
Inside the administrator’s admissions portal, your team will be able to track and manage applications through their life cycles, as well as any other important documents.
A great feature for applicants is the student’s admission portal, where students can track their application status, view announcements and messages, and apply to other programs at your school.
One downside is the mobile app, as it doesn’t allow you to use a lot of the functionality that you can access on the desktop platform.
The company offers customized pricing, but allows you to get a pricing estimate without speaking to a representative, through their pricing calculator:
Source: Classter
For registration management for a primary school of 250-500 students, the price came out to be 4 euros per student per year for Classter Core.
Corsizio
Corsizio is a student registration software that helps educational programs manage events and classes, offer online registrations to their students, and collect online payments.
Their form builder allows you to create clean, beautiful forms with pre-built and custom fields so that you can create forms that capture the details you need to effectively run your school.
Other useful registration features include waiting lists, real-time updates for new registrations, and an integration with Google Analytics for tracking the performance of your online forms and event pages.
You can also add brand logos to the forms.
Source: Corsizio
The tool enables you to provide your customers with a seamless experience.
Potential students are able to quickly register through their laptops or mobile devices, without having to input a password.
Registrants can also make payments through the form using various methods, and these payments are automatically transferred into your business’s bank account, thanks to Corsizio’s integration with Stripe.
For companies accepting fewer than 50 registrations per month, there’s a free version of the platform.
Above that, the company offers usage-based pricing. You’ll pay 10 cents per every new registration, with no penalty for low registration numbers.
If you’re also looking to accept online payments, the cost is one dollar per transaction.
Source: Corsizio
Because of its free option, this is a great platform for companies that are still in the early growth stages, and offering classes, events, seminars, and training sessions that they post publicly.
However, the platform lacks a private student portal feature, a place where attendees or students can view upcoming events and manage their registrations, payment plans, and scheduling, and that constitutes a major flaw.
CourseStorm
CourseStorm is an online student registration software platform that is simple to use for both your staff and your students.
Their primary customers are arts organizations, community education programs, workforce training and continuing education companies, as well as kids’ activities and camps.
Through the platform, users can quickly build custom registration forms that you host on your website, where students can register for classes and programs as well as make secure payments from the comfort of their homes.
Source: CourseStorm
CourseStorm also offers mobile registrations, group registrations (where one person signs up many), and email marketing features, like automated course recommendations.
This feature automatically emails your students with personalized class recommendations that are based on their registration history.
The software also enables you to create payment plans that you can offer to your students, thereby making payment less of a stressor for them.
Another nifty feature is waiting lists, which will automatically close registration once a course program reaches maximum capacity.
A major downside is that the software’s customization options for pages are slightly limited, which might be frustrating to people who care a lot about controlling the look and feel of their website and forms.
As for pricing, they charge a 4% registration fee and a 3% credit card processing fee, meaning that you only pay for what you use.
Enrollsy
Enrollsy is an online enrollment software with registration and online payment features for any business looking to enroll vendors, students, volunteers, or employees.
Their registration forms are customizable and work on any device, and the platform offers features that improve the registration experience for your customers, such as field validation, multiple enrollments at once, and automated email confirmation.
Enrollsy also comes with a suite of e-signature features to help you streamline the process of signing and managing documents like non-disclosure agreements with employees and field trip permission forms with parents of your students.
Further, the tool has a built-in CRM, secure auto-payments, and reporting functionality that enables you to analyze your enrollment management process and identify ways to improve it.
Pricing starts at $107 per month per location, plus a one-time charge of $299 for software implementation.
Source: Enrollsy
The Starter plan allows access to only one admin user. To add a second, you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro plan.
Jumbula
Jumbula provides an online registration and management system that enables your customers to find, register for, and pay for courses, camps, and other activities through an online process.
You can build custom online registration forms and payment forms with the help of the platform’s setup wizard.
And via these online forms, you’ll be able to accept a wide range of payment methods from your students, including but not limited to ACH transfer, credit card, and PayPal.
Jumbula also offers waitlist and real-time capacity management tools, automated confirmation emails, and a check-in-check-out live attendance tracking feature:
Source: Jumbula
Through the platform, you can access in-depth pre-built reports to gain insight into revenue, balances, student attendance, class setup, medical information, and much more.
Pricing begins at $100 for the Professional plan, which includes many of the essential features for student registration and payment collection and is best suited for small to mid-sized businesses.
Source: Jumbula
Although it’s a robust piece of software, some users might find the learning curve to be a little steep.
There are various steps involved in setting up different programs on the site, and the process of doing so isn’t always intuitive.
That said, many customers say that the support staff is quick to respond and that the video tutorials are helpful when they’re stuck.
Learning Stream
Learning Stream is a registration management platform built for educational and training professionals.
It serves those in need of streamlining their student registrations and automating much of the work involved.
The platform comes with form building, group registrations, online payment processing, texting, custom payment plans, and other useful features for administrators and teachers.
One standout feature is the student portal, where your students can find information about courses and sign up for them without having to speak with a representative from your business.
They’ll also receive notifications about class cancellations and updates about new class offerings. This helps them stay in the loop while reducing your team’s workload.
Although the tool has a lot of great features, some people do find the user experience to be a bit complicated, especially when trying to set up customizations.
As for pricing, Learning Stream uses flat fee pricing and allows unlimited registrations.
Plans start at $450 per month, and each additional admin user costs an extra $60 per month. There is also a one-time setup fee.
Overall, Learning Stream is a solid piece of software for managing your student registrations online, provided that you can afford the relatively steep starting price.
Sawyer
Sawyer is a registration management tool designed for children’s activity businesses like camps, music lessons, or after-school programs,
With Sawyer, you can offer online registrations and bookings, process online payments securely and automatically, take and track attendance, and much more.
The tool also allows you to give parents a variety of payment plans and methods to choose from, thereby making it easier for them to pay.
Source: Sawyer
The software also comes with custom reports that will help you identify key performance metrics and spot bottlenecks in your registration or enrollment process.
Pricing starts at $109 per month (billed annually), plus processing fees, for their Launch Plan, a package meant for smaller teams.
Below are the other pricing tiers:
Source: Sawyer
One flaw with the Launch plan is that it only allows you to use their pre-designed registration forms. You can’t customize them unless you upgrade to Grow.
The Launch plan also restricts access to the auto-billing and waitlist features.
Conclusion
When choosing an online student registration solution, it’s critical that you first create a list of must-have features and set a budget.
Then, start looking for tools that meet those criteria and are specifically designed for businesses like yours.
Don’t hesitate to hop on the phone with a representative at the company and ask them some questions to determine if it’s a good fit.
Software websites can be a bit vague about their offerings, so talking with a product expert, or attending a demo, is often the fastest way to get a feel for the solution’s abilities and ROI.
If you want to learn some other ways aside from adopting technology to lower costs and attract more students, check out our article on nine ways to improve student enrollment.
