PowerSchool SIS Reviews & Product Details

Very customizable, provides long term data storage, is very usable in its native state Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

So powerful and complex that it requires specialized knowledge and advanced skills to fully harness. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Very comprehensive and excellent support. Video tutorials and a large community forum is provided as part of the service. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Setup is fairly complicated, but the support team offers excellent guidance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the help desk chat feature. It benefits me, as someone new to the position, with the ability to review the transcript of the session. The help desk personnel are very intuitive and they assist you in a positive way so that you learn from the session. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I would like to see more training videos offered without having to pay additional dollars. From a user standpoint, I would like to see the system allow a one point of entry system instead of filling out the same information on multiple screens. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Importing and Exporting data is excellent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Brick and mortar focus. We need more tools for communication. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The size (customer base) of PowerSchool Ability to take action on active selections of students is nice Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Database structure is extremely inconsistent - FirstName in one spot First_name in another and fName in another - everywhere you look things are like this. Disastirous user interface akin to reading the whitepages, but not alphabetical. Online support is split between at least three systems (PowerSchool Community, PowerSource and the built in help. There is no SSO between Community, the latest system they are pushing) SSO is "technically" available, but support cannot find a single customer that has got it to work. It's that bad. The documentation is all wrong, it was clearly built just to check a box for RFPs, but not to actually work for customers. Importing & Exporting data is a disaster. This is the absolute worst part of the product. There are multiple ways to import & export, each have limitations, no one tool can do it all. For example, you cannot schedule an import of a Student Email address. You can only schedule exports using AutoComm, which is no longer being developed. Data Import Manager / Data Export Manager have significant issues as well, and you cannot schedule imports with Data Import Manager. Things like including or excluding a header row -- nope. The options are all terrible - it's as if the person who was in charge of data import & export had never worked with text files in their life. You can't export contact fields as a CSV - you can use a DAT code, and get them in a comma-space format, but not the first column - that's actually CSV. It's unbelievably bad. I cannot state enough how bad data import & export is. **If you want a database you can't load data into, or get data out of -- PowerSchool is for you!** There is no field level history (i.e. who changed this students name, when, and what was it before?) Everything is a "customization" which costs extra, and is unsupported after it is delivered. Trying to get simple things (like a report card) built the way anyone might want will require thousands of dollars of customization - because nothing in PowerSchool is straight forward. PowerSchool's own products DO NOT work together - for example their registration product will register a returning student, and that returning student will end up with a DUPLICATE student number. The login the parent uses for registration is NOT the same login the parent will use for the Parent Portal -- that confuses EVERY parent. If you think buying from PowerSchool means you will have a suite of integrated solutions for your district, you are mistaken. 3rd party products often integrate better than PowerSchool's own solutions. For the size of PowerSchool, they don't play well with other large players - i.e you would expect a built-in export to Follett Destiny (the #1 library system in use by schools) but nope - you're on your own for everything like that. There are other modules (like Health) but they are all severely limited. Change comes slowly if at all. For every deficiency or bug, you are told to make an "Enhancement Request" which will sit for 5-10 years, and then the company will be sold again by then. The code for the entire product should likely be scrapped, and started over - I feel bad for their developers. It's clear PowerSchool has been passed from owner, to owner, to owner - each did things differently, for decades. Did I mention the user interface - while generally OK, once you're in the admin pages, things are buried deep, and in improbable locations. There are zero icons or anything, it's all text, and really painful to look at. The documentation is wrong the day it is written. The formatting of the documentation is awful. The documentation is not helpful, it often contradicts itself. The rework of the contacts database is a mess - before at least you could find who mom and dad were - now the relationship between child and guardian is very muddy at best. There is no support for contact language - so you won't know if Mom is a Spanish speaker, as an example. I see us leaving PowerSchool in a few years - the product is broken beyond repair, try as they may, I don't think it's possible -- PowerSchool will keep hacking patches on, but when the core is this broken, the only way to move forward is to scrap what they have, and start fresh. They won't do that. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The power and flexibility of the system. The ability to talk with other systems to make it a single point of student data and change management. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The system can be daunting to understand fully - you are much closer to the database which has tremendous upside, but also can be daunting. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PS has many features that allow for one-stop-shop data collection for staff. It is the hub for data in our district. PS offers training and is customizable to an extent. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The bones of the system do not support innovative assessment reporting or standards based grading. We have to adjust how we report grades to fit the system instead of the system supporting how we want to communicate student learning and understanding to our community. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've been with PS since 2007 and found that PowerSchool is a very feature rich-SIS and they add more capabilities every year. We have the ability to add custom fields and pages and have access to all of our data tables. Incident management and health functions help us stay compliant with our department of Ed. We especially like PowerScheduler and our ability to automatically build and load all of our schedules every year. The PowerTeacher Pro gradebook allows us to grade students with both traditional grades and standards-based grades simultaneously and PowerSchool Registration has saved us time and money by allowing parents to register students and update student info online. The PS Community is a great place to find answers and connect with other users. There are a lot of reasons PowerSchool is the #1 SIS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My only issues with PS have been some slow response times from tech support. They tend to get overloaded at the times of year when we are all way too busy. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PowerSchool is flexible enough to support almost any requirement a school requires. PowerSchool has informative web portals for students, parents, teachers and administrators. PowerSchool has a wide variety of integrations with other products, some of which are PowerSchool products and others are from 3rd party software developers. This integration with other products makes PowerSchool Most of the program uses a modern user interface. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

PowerSchool's mobile application is antiquated. There are parts of PowerSchool which are not modifiable such as emails that are sent to parents. Customizations are difficult to maintain over time. Powerschool is powerful and is therefore complex to setup. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how well it integrates with Schoology and the reporting option for individual students. Being able to find a student or teacher with a tech issue when they have an issue is easy with powerschool. The app works well and parents find it easy to set up after a quick tutorial. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes Powerschool and Schoology do not sync and it causes a lot of havoc. When the Schoology grades and the Powerschool grades do not match up or a grade does not show up in Powerschool, it makes the teacher look bad and causes issues with students and parents that would have otherwise been avoided. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.