brightwheel Pricing, Features, Reviews & Alternatives

Pros
I love that it keeps us (mostly) paperless! All activity is logged so we have no need for paper daily sheets. We can easily message our parents individually AND send out messages to the whole school.

Cons
The billing feature isn't quite where we need it do be, but they have already fixed it and we are just waiting to be updated to the new platform.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
The Brightwheel app enables our employees to easily communicate with parents anytime of day or night and keeps them from giving out their personal phone numbers. The system is very user friendly and has easy to follow instructions and prompts.

Cons
The reporting from a financial side is not very clear if you are coming from another system with a lot of information in reports. Inputting immunizations could be a little quicker like putting a date and selecting the immunizations that were given on the date would be great.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I used this as a childcare provider at a daycare and absolutely loved it. It was so easy and quick to use even with cranky babies and busy toddlers. Our parents raved about it often and loved being able to see child's progress in real time. Being able to easily track diaper changes, feeding times and amounts, sleep schedules, upload photos and videos of play activities and leave messages for parents was vital to my role as a lead teacher and cut down on added paperwork, checking for errors, and trying to remember what to tell the parents at the end of the day.

Cons
I have no critiques of brightwheel! I think all childcare centers would agree it's a great investiment for their busienss.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10

Pros
What we like best is this is a cloud based software. The parent portal allowing parents better access to their child's day and classroom progress as been extremely well received by our parents. We like the check-in feature which allows us to know at any time how many children are in the facility. The ability for the teachers to post notes / pictures for parents allows the parents real time updates instead of waiting till the end of the day to receive a hand written note that is stuffed in the child's belongings and forgotten.

Cons
The back office side of the software is lacking. The reporting capabilities of the software is very limited. For example, we are unable to run an accounts receivable report by family. We can run by child, but you have to run multiple reports for families with more than one child in the program. The software does not currently allow for prepayments or credits on account. Also, on the program side, no ability to run facility or even classroom wide reports - for example a parent directory for all classrooms; allergy report by classroom. All reporting (financial and program) is child driven without the option of classroom or facility driven. This makes extra back office work for our staff - for example creating an allergy list or parent directory in excel to share with teachers. Or tracking receivables in other software, creating double accounting needs.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 5/10

Pros
I love the fact that the one program takes care of communications with faculty and parents, billing and payments, and student information. All of it quickly accessible by computer or cell phone. Customer service is attentive and thorough.

Cons
There are some areas where improvement is necessary. Sometimes when you export information, you may need to tweaking the organization of the information to look the way you want it. The thing is, they invite you to share what you believe needs to improve. In the short 7 months of using this software, and they have made significant updates many of these aspects.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 9/10