Alma SIS Reviews

Glad we're using Alma

Pros:

Unlike other SIS's, Alma actually looks and feels like it was made in the 2010's. The system is solid, and has essentially every feature a smaller school like ours would want (and many more that we don't need to use). The gradebook is excellent, and it's easy to transfer classes and students from year-to-year. Their customer service has been great (we accidentally deleted multiple report cards in different places the other day and they quickly and helpfully solved our issue by restoring to a backup), and they are continually adding features and improving the platform. And the cost has been at least 50% less than quotes we were getting from major competitors. Many reasons to switch to Alma.

Cons:

The latest transcripts update was helpful - there are still a couple of features we'd like on the transcripts front, but that's mostly because our school has a unique curriculum. This is totally just a personal preference, but I'd also like to be able to search for classes in the search feature in addition to contacts.

Alma Software Review (SBG school)

Comments: Support has been very helpful, typically it seems we have questions that either haven't been asked before or are not implemented yet. Faculty/staff is able to access the reports tab which helps them track students and contacts quickly and has access to student records and class schedules.

Pros:

Alma is easier than our former software and allows us to use our Standards Based Grading which is our priority. Parents were able to quickly learn how to use the system and the attendance feature is great. Students were also able to learn the system and although it doesn't have a comprehensive calendar with their schedules and our school activities, they were able to use the daily tab to track their classes.

Cons:

The calendar is static and unable to be exported to phones/other calendars so we had to create an app for that. The reports are not as in-depth as needed and we aren't able to save our filters/criteria that we use often. They are still working on SBG reporting so many items we aren't able to track as we typically do through reports. The report card set up is limited for what we need in our report cards; we had to use every work-around to get a report card as we needed, but they do work now.

Alternatives Considered: PraxiSchool and Schoology

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS: K-12 was trying to start Standards Based Grading but didn't meet our deadline.

Switched From: Blackbaud K-12 Solutions

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS: It has what we needed for Standard Based Grading both in assignments and report cards for tracking.

Alma review

Comments: pleasant, would recommend to colleagues in search of a new SIS

Pros:

Ease of use, colorful UI, plenty of features

Cons:

Lack of honor role option on report card, newness to our state has caused some road blocks

Alternatives Considered: PowerSchool

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS: Needed a more user friendly SIS for both staff and families

Switched From: SchoolBrains

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS: Cheaper price than powerschool with similar features

Used for an elementary, has great services, could be improved.

Pros:

I LOVE the customer service. They are always willing to work with us and help us adapt the program to what we need. I love the many different reporting features and how they each have a unique description that helps me find exactly what I need. I also like that I can star the reports I frequently use. I like that I am able to easily fill in grades in the "gradebook" tab, as well as having the opportunity to quickly report final grades at the end of the term. I am also happy with the ease in resetting a password for a user who has forgotten theirs as well as the quick ability to change a username. I appreciate that many users can have access to the same information (meaning a student and both of their parents can have their own accounts but access the same information on their child). I think overall I am mostly impressed with Alma's support team, how quickly and professionally they respond, how they will not let me leave the conversation until they are satisfied that all of my questions have been answered and my concerns resolved, and I love that they are constantly updating, making the website better, and then sending out an email with all of the updates and detailed instructions on how to utilize them.

Cons:

I feel the website could be slightly more user friendly. There are often times it takes longer than I would like to access the information that I need (a lot of clicking through redundant tabs and not a lot of short cuts). I also wish it was easier for parents to understand the website. I don't like that there is no easy way for a parent to access a student's missing work, instead having to look through each class and assignment to see what has and has not been turned in. I also wish there was a way for us, as administrators and teachers, to see exactly what the parents see. It is hard to give advice and support to a parent when their screen looks different from mine; and I often don't know if they can see everything that I can, like all of the notes and assignment descriptions and what not. Otherwise, I am mostly happy with Alma.

One site for all functions, that's every teacher needs

Comments: Most of the time it's fantastic. I can check the report and study progress not only for this year, but many years ago. And I can see students' progress for other subjects also, it helps me to have an overall vision and understanding to the student's study condition.

Pros:

One site for all functions On alma teachers can take attendance, record study progress, make report card, contact parents and students easily through email automatically, report incident. Parents and students can check the attendance, study progress and contact teacher as well.

Cons:

Sometimes it's out of service. It happened many times already. Showed a Bad Gateway.

Great Customer Support

Comments: We have really enjoyed the experience with ALMA. The support staff are very friendly, and if they don't have a solution to an issue, they work hard to find one. They are open to requesting additional options or features they may not currently have available. This makes me feel that they truly want to improve their product. We are very new to using ALMA, but they have proved so far that we made a good choice.

Pros:

I don't have a lot to compare ALMA to, but I feel that the user interface is very intuitive. After light training, I felt that I was able to navigate the software with ease, and perform many of the functions without having to struggle to do so. The resources for questions called the "study guide" has really good searchable articles and videos that addressed almost every issue I had. If I couldn't find the answer, the support staff was quick to respond and help with a solution.

Cons:

Education is so vastly different from one school to the next. On the similar needs of schools I think ALMA performs great, but for specific needs or differences they struggle to meet all our needs. Many times we have to find a work-around for issues we are having. I will add that this is very rare. A specific example is that we can search students by grade. We can search specific classes, but not the whole grade. There are times it would be beneficial to see all the students in one grade.

Alternatives Considered: Sycamore School and FACTS

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS: It was very difficult to use. We had to pay for help every time we had an issue. The reports never looked the way we wanted. It did not handle standards based grading well, and trying to have both standards base with traditional grading was practically impossible without some major programing knowledge. The list goes on, but these were some of our main concerns.

Switched From: Sycamore School and FACTS

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS: - I think the look was more updated - parent perception of quality - Standard or Traditional grading supported - Communication from the console - I'm not sure if the others did this, but it has been very helpful - Customer Support - the reviews on this was a big reason for choosing ALMA

Adopting Alma SIS

Comments: Although we're still on the learning curve, it's been a very positive experience.

Pros:

Best part of the interface: It's very intuitive, logical, and organized. Best part for the tech crew: The tech help staff are very helpful, professional, and supportive.

Cons:

Worst part of the interface: The colors can't be customized to be our school colors. Worst part for the tech crew: The people running the system can't impersonate another user, which makes it hard to see what the user is seeing when you're trying to help someone.

Alternatives Considered: Sycamore School and FACTS

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS: Blackbaud was expensive and complicated to manage.

Switched From: Blackbaud K-12 Solutions

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS: Our teachers who went to the presentations liked the Alma interface the best.

Alma Joy! Sweet as Chocolate

Comments: 5 Star! I work with report cards and transcripts. My families love the electronic report cards sent right to their email for their convenience.

Pros:

User friendly. Thinks how I think. Attractive. Love the webinars. Everyone in Customer Engagement and the Techs are so sweet and caring.

Cons:

Can't really think of anything at this moment.

Lesson Learned

Comments: Great and communicative. The really know their clients.

Pros:

Simple to use, integrates well with other programs, and keeps getting better

Cons:

there are glitches, they fix them quickly

Implementation Review

Comments: Excellent. Implementation folks have been great.

Pros:

The ease of use and functionality. It is very intuitive.

Cons:

Difficulty to look at/find students in different ways, ie Grade, Groups, Activities

Alternatives Considered: Aries

Reasons for Choosing Alma SIS: For the ease of use and reduced cost....

Switched From: PowerSchool

Reasons for Switching to Alma SIS: For the ease of use and reduced cost....

Alma SIS- Big pros and small cons

Comments: EXCELLENT support. The resources provided are clear and helpful, and support staff are more responsive than any other product or service I have experienced. Absolute top notch support.

Pros:

In addition to standard features of other applications, this product provides the ability to generate customized reports on just about any type of student data, and also automates the bulk of our report card procedure.

Cons:

This product does not compile data well- eg. Student grades or attendance expressed as an overall average, rather than being listed by course. Additionally, while attendance by class records is supported, this data is of limited reporting functionality compared to attendance by day.

Moving in good directions

Comments: Far better than any other software I’ve used to manage classes, but still approaches the problem from an administrative, quantitative standpoint, rather than a student development standpoint.

Pros:

There are concessions made to narrative evaluation, which is great for an alternative school. Each block, the system gets cleaner and easier to handle as we write our evaluations for the kids, and, since our output is so much more complex than a single letter grade, it’s really important that the cognitive overhead for each evaluation be as small as possible. I’m really gratified that Alma continually improves this aspect.

Cons:

Touchscreen integration is clunky but getting less so. It’s often hard to see what I’m doing, as column headers disappear as I scroll. There are a bunch of interface elements like this that make interactions awkward or repetitive, which induces frustration and boredom, which leads to errors. It feels like evaluations are 90° off. I want to be able to evaluate a student, but it’s easiest to evaluate not only one class at a time, but one skill for the whole class at a time. It discourages thinking holistically about individual students and encourages comparing them in each skill. I think this makes it harder to do evaluations and makes them less accurate. Daily evaluation notes go nowhere. We take attendance each day, which is dutifully reported, but any qualitative expression we have is thrown away. This does a great disservice to students because it means that, in the course of a day, it’s harder to make qualitative assessments of a student, leaving us only with their attendance data — a quantification that’s easy on a database designer but is hostile to learning.

Alma SIS in a small, rural, school district.

Comments: The staff at Alma are excellent. The transition was difficult because it needed to occur over a short timeframe. But the support was there and we pulled it off.

Pros:

Alma integrated well with Google Apps and provided integrations with other third party software. The interface and design were well thought out with the end-user in mind. Running reports and editing the data are easy and intuitive - and those are the most important aspects of an SIS. The support was excellent, and always available through the Alma Academy.

Cons:

We would like a module that would allow our cafeteria software to integrate so parents could see their child's lunch balance in the same place they view their child's schedule, teacher, and fees. There were also growing pains, as state-required data collections differ in every state and sometimes this meant there were duplicate or similar data fields that confused some of our clerical staff.

A flexible and responsive product. Unbelievably effective and efficient.

Comments: We have reduced our printing costs, improved communication with parents, and successfully submitted our PIMS state reports. Communication with Alma has been great! The online resources and chat feature are very effective. Chat is answered within 10 minutes, often in less time. They have been responsive to our needs. Feedback from the teachers about their use of Alma has been very positive.

Pros:

The user interface is very intuitive. Everything is where one would expect it to be within the program. Migration to Alma from our previous SIS was so straight forward and seamless that I was not sure the SIS was going to be ready on schedule. It was ready on schedule and very few issues have been encountered. Issuing digital report cards is very easy and our parents love it. We also communicate with our parents on a regular basis by using the email feature in Alma. Parents also have expressed satisfaction with the parent portal for checking their student's grades. Teachers find it very easy to use the gradebook.

Cons:

Any concerns/needs we have expressed to Alma have resulted in instant inquiry and potential solutions.

Not for High Schools

Pros:

Honestly tough to answer. It’s nice as a club sponsor to be able to email whole groups of students (not just those in my classes).

Cons:

Basically every single function/aspect is worse than Infinite Campus. Entering grades, making/changing seating charts, printing roster spreadsheets are all more difficult and time consuming than IC. This program is not suited for secondary schools.

I want to love Alma but...

Comments: I really want to love Alma. There's so much potential but the problems we are running into keep building up and fixes are few and far between. Luckily we only have about 1000 students and a few schools. I don't know how we would manage if we were a larger organization.

Pros:

It's the only SIS that looks like it was designed in the past decade. The site itself is easy to use. The basics (scheduling, attendance, calendar, student bios, medical) are all well done, user-friendly, and look great. Gradebook is excellent. Frontline support is helpful.

Cons:

Reporting is a nightmare. Reports come in random formats. The descriptions are confusing. The filtering is confusing or doesn't work right. The screen where you choose reports is just a long confusing list. There's no preview of what the report is or looks like. Some information that you'd expect to be readily available (like a student's current grades) require running one of those confusing reports to find. The district portal is useless. New features that have been added (fees, report builder) feel unfinished and lack basic functionality that one would expect. While the front-line support is good, anything that has to go beyond them gets lost in a black hole when sent to "engineering". There are some quirks to the program that just make no sense. Little things here and there.

Alma: A Teacher's Point of View

Comments: Our overall experience has been satisfactory. We rarely have the "drama" we dealt with when using our previous software. Keeping up to date more quickly and making changes to make the teacher use more efficient and faster would be of big help.

Pros:

Our school was first drawn to Alma because it combined a good software to meet student, parent, and teacher needs with great value. Customer service is fantastic. If any of us ask an online question, help is quick.

Cons:

Alma takes a long time to keep up with the times. For example, we have used it several years, but they just added the ability to enter a score on one student's grade book for a given assignment, and then hit enter, and then an automatic opening to the next student's grade to enter. In effect, it now performs well with a number key pad. Entry was singularly entered one a time which was so slow. In addition, there should be a quicker way to approve report cards. Finally, because we want students to monitory their grades, it would be helpful for them to have their own password access for limited viewing, keeping the parent password private for fuller access.

A Great SIS - and Getting Better

Comments: Our school has tried several different solutions for grading and record keeping, and Alma is by far the best we have encountered. We tried Power School (a user-unfriendly dinosaur) and internally developed software (effective but too labor-intensive and time consuming to develop and maintain), and Alma is far superior to both. I really cannot recommend Alma highly enough.

Pros:

The best thing abour Alma is its ease of use. In addition, it has one of the most professional and responsive customer support departments I have ever encountered in any product or industry.

Cons:

It does not yet have all of the functionality that we would like, particularly in the area of recording curriculum, but since we adopted it three years ago they have regulerly added new features and improved the functionality of what was already there. I really do believe that in short order they will address curriculum within the program, and at that point every major use we have for an SIS would be covered.

Dysfunctional, Disorganized, Shallow, Time Consuming, Primitive, Not intuitive, Poor Design

Comments: None

Pros:

I have found little positive to say about the functioning of the software. It does not fit the size of our organization and the design structure is too primitive. There are too many steps involved for transactions.

Cons:

*the que*lack of confidentiality*process of accessing information, having to scroll through entire population to select students for reports*scheduling functionality is primitive* data reliability and validity for student grades and transcripts* student and parent use has diminished* report card processing is cumbersome* student display of schedule; no full year* student print out of schedule and on and on

People are unhappy thru out the school system, very disappointing.

Comments: Face page has all in one, everything needed for information of a student.

Pros:

Common sense functions, easy to move about. I like the look of the program and is easy to teach to other users. I like how the reports card area is set up, altho we can not print them easily without a pdf converter!

Cons:

Reports -reports are not in pdf forms as needed. Hate the reports, most secretaries do not have time to mess with formats and a lot of us do not have the software to even do so, corporations do not want to provide that due to budgeting. Please start making PDF options. The reports options are basically useless for my position of lead secretary. Not doing well with our higher grade level schools. We can not even run reports cards.... the reports make us do more work, and we do not need more work . We do not have the abilities to use the reports. PDF form is a better option for secretaries. The biggest complaint thru the system is Reports are not what we need....

"Alma SIS: An Innovative School Management Solution for the 21st Century".

Comments: I have had a great experience with Alma SIS. The system is incredibly user friendly, with a modern and intuitive interface. I have found several features to be incredibly helpful, such as the ability to easily track student progress and quickly access student data. The system also allows for easy customization, such as creating personalized dashboards and reports.

Pros:

I liked how powerful and customizable the Alma SIS software is. With it, I can customize every single detail of my school's workflow, from scheduling classes and managing student accounts to tracking attendance, setting up library catalogs, and creating custom reports. The software also allows me to easily create groups and import data from various sources, including student information systems, library catalogs, and grade books.

Cons:

One of the main issues I have with Alma SIS is its lack of scalability for larger campuses. It's very difficult to effectively manage large amounts of data, and Alma SIS does not provide the necessary solutions for efficiently managing large schools. Additionally, the interface is not intuitive and can be difficult to navigate. Finally, Alma SIS does not offer any customization options, so campuses are limited in terms of how they can customize the platform to their needs.

Alma for Schools

Comments: Overall, I love Alma! At first, I was a little intimidated by having to switch my grading over to a system and fit what I would typically do into a "box" that was essentially pre-decided for me. I was glad to see how customizable all of the options are on Alma. I also love that parents/students can see grades at any time!

Pros:

I love that as a teacher I can customize my grade book easily and have different types of assignments weighted differently (and it does all of the math for me!). I also am so happy about the fact that I can publish the grades to where students or parents can see the grades instantly. It is also very easy to email home mid-term grades to all students/parents in one email :) .

Cons:

Some of the functionalities that Alma offers are great functions, but they are not always user friendly. For example, there are A LOT of steps to go through to create a report card/progress report. I had a very difficult time figuring out how to create a progress report for a student who took one elective class first term (sewing) and a different elective class second term (art), and other students were vice-versa without it causing issues on the report card. I would also like to have the ability for students/parents to see a percentage grade for a class as opposed to just a letter grade. It makes a difference when you see a 79% vs 70%. I would also like to be able to truly design my own report card. I can make what I want fit onto a single page, but with the options available on Alma, it is not as easy to adjust certain areas to make everything fit.

Alma - An Easy-to-Use Gradebook

Comments: Whenever I have had a question, it is answered pretty quickly. Alma has also done a good job of responding to our concerns.

Pros:

I like that Alma has customized the system to a lot of our needs since we first adopted it. It's very easy to use!

Cons:

I would like for the Alma gradebook to work more seamlessly with our LMS, Schoology.

Alma SIS

Comments: Great! Love their customer service and speed of response

Pros:

Ease of navigating, state reporting and Alma response to making sure reports work well.

Cons:

Nothing so far, it has been very easy to set up and get our information into the system.

I greatly enjoyed the user-friendly interface as compared with Plus Portals: Alma had all I need.

Comments: This was the most user-friendly, aesthetically pleasing learning management platform I have used. The staff seemed friendly and in consistent dialogue for improvement, which puts it ahead of the others I have used.

Pros:

Aside from the user-friendly interface (for faculty, parents, and students), I liked, essentially, how accommodating the site was for my needs. I liked that posting assignments was easy and that eventually the option to duplicate assignments was added. I also like being able to upload files, links, and write (and see clearly!) instructions in the assignment narrative box. Speaking of which, the option to comment thoughtfully on assignments was great.

Cons:

I remember wishing that I wanted the duplicate feature to duplicate everything as it only copied some of the information, not all of it. I also wish teachers could set preferences, like a memory or default setting, so that I wouldn't have to click between tabs if that was not a frequently used tab (for instance, clicking "details" instead of seeing the student roster when checking assignments).