PowerSchool SIS Reviews & Product Details

The GUI is great and the metaphor for finding students and then reporting or processing is perfect.

The ability to customize is amazing. Using customizations we have been able to provide tools for administrators and teachers to follow students from the first day in the district until they graduate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In the beginning PowerSchool promised a broad spectrum of tools and apps in a single place but now each new tool adds to the price and some of the new tools are not fully integrated. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like pulling reports from PowerSchool. I pull reports for our Acceptable Use Policy and Student Tech Info Listings we provide to classroom teachers. It also helps me with populating certain applications through .csv files that can be pulled when an application can't be done through Clever. I can run reports to assist parents, teachers, and administration throughout the year. The interface is easy to understand and the support from PowerSchool is wonderful when needed. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I really haven't found anything I dislike about PowerSchool. It does what I need it to do in an easy-to-understand interface. I enjoy the flexibility to add screens for our parents' use (ie: student tech info listed under our Other Apps for Guardians page). I really can think of anything I dislike in PowerSchool. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The most helpful pieces of PowerSchool SIS are the ability to compile reports that consist of an assortment of data you may need on your users. There are abundant plug-ins that make everyday use simplified and quick. I am especially fond of the ability to create object reports to my exact specifications with a little work. Also the ability to design reports outside of the interface and upload them. I am also a huge fan of the ability to upload mass amounts of information at once. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The least helpful piece of PowerSchool SIS would have to be the design elements. There is little in the way of design that brings out any visual appeal. Making it appear as a clunky, plain text tool. I would say another issue I have found is that the navigation screens for administers seem very cluttered and incongruent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PowerSchool is rock solid reliable! We have been running it for about 12 years now and have never encountered an issue with the software that would cause our day-to-day operations to suffer.

In addition to reliability, PowerSchool was built to grow. It is a web-based product that allows end-user customization of nearly every data entry screen. There are many outside vendors that have established a relationship with PowerSchool (ISV Partners) that offer other products which integrate wonderfully with PowerSchool. Finally, the database is Oracle and completely accessible to the administrative users to run complex queries on the data. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The SIS is getting a bit long in the tooth. There are other options these days that have a more modern look and feel and offer a few quality of life improvements. PowerSchool seems to be struggling to maintain the dominance they were previously known for. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Powerschool has an amazingly robust SIS system that allows for an incredible number of features, additions, and customizations to be made. There are strong support and user communities that can usually help resolve any issues as well. There really haven't been too many things that we wanted to do within Powerschool that with a little help and knowledge, we couldn't do. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Powerschool can be managed on a fairly simple level with help on special projects, the system can get really complicated and deep really fast. For a small school like ours, that can't dedicate a team or even a single full-time job to learning and managing Powerschool, it means that we often have to rely heavily on their support and the knowledge of others, or simply not utilize certain tools that may save work for us in the end, but whose initial setup is beyond our scope of expertise and capability. It is not so complex that a dedicated person whose whole job was Powerschool could not figure it out, but it is difficult sometimes when we lack that staff position. Lots of possibilities in this SIS, but that comes with lots of things to know to navigate it competently. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I am the ELD Coordinator for my district. I can easily add most information for incoming English Learner students on one screen. The database easily syncs with CALPADS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Program participation is not on the screen where you enter the EL information such as start date, end date, primary language. It requires another step. Teachers do not see the RFEP date on their dashboard when looking at students. It would be helpful if teachers knew how many years it has been since a student was reclassified. Likewise, it is important for teachers and EL coordinators to know how many years a student has been classified an EL. There need to be seminars for EL coordinators specific to entering EL data and how to create reports. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We have gone through the process of evaluating SIS's a couple of times over the last few years. All the sales people will tell you their product does everything you ask about. For esoteric requests, this is often untrue. What sets PowerSchool apart is the ability to customize it, and the community of users that are there to support you as you make changes. There are multiple ways to make the system do what you need it to do. At the simplest level, custom screens can be created with little effort and minimum understanding of data systems. At the other end of the spectrum, new tables can be added and you can integrate other data systems. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

With flexibility comes complexity. To use the system for more than simple end user types of things requires you to invest in your staff to ensure they keep on top of changes and additions to the system. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PowerSchool is a powerful (pun not intended) School Information System. I have used 3 different SIS programs and PowerSchool gives a lot of information to end users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While it is powerful with student data, that is also its weakness. It is not intuitive to use for new clerks. While you can export a lot of data, and you can create your own reports, having some easy to use "canned" reports available to our end users.

Also, the fact that there isn't a "parents" table makes it hard to gather data for families. A cleaner parents table would allow for determining who the student lives with. Right now there is "Mother" and "Father" and then Guardian, but Enrollment uses "Parent 1" and "Parent 2" so it gets all mixed up. Yes, there is a contacts table, but it does not operate easily for connecting students to the parent/guardian.

Also, to connect siblings, the clerks have to manually connect them, as the family because there isn't an automatically assigned family ID during enrollment. I would suggest PowerSchool look at Skyward's family table for ideas on how to make this better. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how PowerSchool SIS has modified its UI. It is very user-friendly and allows our stakeholders to navigate the system much better than in previous versions. I like that administration can troubleshoot grade book issues by opening a read-only copy of an educator's grade book, which truly helps solve issues during distance learning. I like how PowerSchool SIS was able to support the move to distance learning without much effort. I appreciate the support that PowerSchool SIS provides to all levels of users. Their knowledge base and community support are hands down the best in the industry. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What I like about PowerSchool SIS far outweighs what I dislike about it. What I dislike about PowerSchool SIS is that some of its 3rd party integrations apps are clunky and need customization before they can be utilized. I dislike that all other products under the PowerSchool umbrella are not included in PowerSchool SIS without additional cost. I truly would like to see PowerSchool SIS become a fully self-reliant LMS that includes all of its other products at a reasonable cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PowerSchool is good for data collection. It has many data fields built into the system that are linked to the various pages for student data. It is a web-based application that allowed increased access for users. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

State reporting is generally okay unless you have an issue with errors. Calling tech support is often useless. You have to know how to program the language to get the data out of the system. The generic reports built into the system are useless. We even had to build the report cards ourselves. Unless you are tech-savvy, the general office clerk will not be able to pull data from the system. The tech support from PowerSchool SIS is hit or miss and often takes days or weeks to resolve issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.