Have you been thinking of trying out a digital homeschool planner, but aren’t sure where to start? I’m about to make homeschool planning a lot easier for you! Let’s review 10 of the most popular homeschool planning apps together, and decide which is the best and which is just not worth your time or money.
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Homeschool Hall Planning App
The first homeschool planning app is offered by a website called Homeschool Hall. If you go to their website, you can sign up for what they call their activity journal. With this, you can track and plan homeschool activities, create printable reports and transcripts, and even find local co-ops and homeschool groups.
The homeschool hall activity journal can be accessed on desktop and mobile devices. This homeschool scheduling program does not offer a free trial, but they do have a 14 day money back guarantee. If you pay monthly this will cost $7.99 a month, or you can save by purchasing a yearly membership for $79.99.
With this online homeschool planner, you’ll be able to add assignments and activities to your calendar, so you get a nice view of what your month looks like. You can also log completed assignments and activities, and view statistics and grades. You can create a high school transcript and even view the homeschool directory of co-ops, clubs, and more.
Homeschool Planet
Next on our list of digital homeschool planners is Homeschool Planet. This website has a lot to offer, including planning and scheduling, lesson plans, attendance tracking, transcripts, and even a free homeschool ID card!
Homeschool Planet offers a 30 day free trial, and when you sign up, you get to choose one free lesson plan to algin with whatever curriculum you are using. They have a lot to choose from, so there’s a good chance your curriculum is on the list. You also don’t need to provide any credit card info, so you won’t be charged if you forget to cancel before the 30 days is up. Those are my favorite kind of free trials! After your free trial, you’ll pay either $7.95 a month or $69.95 for a full year membership.
This homeschool planning app allows you to create a detailed schedule and get a nice view of what you have coming up for the day, week or month. There are a lot of settings you can tweak here, and several different reports you can print, including assignments, report cards, and transcripts. My favorite feature is their rescheduling helper. Need to take a day off, or reschedule overdue assignments? Use this tool to easily adjust your school year to accommodate the additional assignments.
Syllabird Online Homeschool Planner
The next online homeschool planner that I want to share with you is an app called Syllabird. This might be the most visually appealing homeschool scheduling program on the list, and it has a lot of great features. Create courses, lesson plans and assignments and easily add them to the calendar. You can also create detailed transcripts at any time, although this feature is still in Beta.
Syllabird allows you to test out their homeschool scheduler for 14 days with no credit card required. If you decide to keep your membership after the trial period ends, it will cost $6 a month for their essential plan or $9 a month for premium. You can also save by purchasing the yearly membership for either of these plans up front.
Similar to other online homeschool planners, you will create courses and lessons and add them to your calendar. When you first sign up, they will add two training courses which are designed to teach you how to use the program, but you can remove them if you like. You can easily add vacations and days off and Syllabird will reschedule your students’ assignments for you. You can also reschedule overdue assignments. The only thing I really didn’t like about this homeschool planner is that I can’t seem to figure out how to view the calendar by month instead of just by week.
Related – Homeschool+ Review – Online Homeschooling Program for PreK – 2nd Grade
Well Planned Gal
Another online homeschool planner that you may not have heard of is from Well Planned Gal. This is another digital homeschool scheduler that you can try out for 30 days risk free. With this planner, you can create your own schedule, or you can choose a pre-planned curriculum schedule to align with your current curriculum. They have a lot to choose from, so there’s a good chance you’ll find your exact curriculum here.
Once your 30 day free trial is over, your account will revert to a free plan, which will include ads, but still allows you to use their lesson plan features. If you prefer to keep the full feature version, it will cost $65 for the year. With the free trial, you will be able to add free curriculum schedules as well, so you can really test it out before you commit to it.
This program is similar to the other online homeschool planners, allowing you to add courses and create a lesson schedule which you can view as a calendar or by daily assignments. Keep track of assignments by checking them off when they’re completed, create custom check lists, and even create meal plans. You can also create progress reports, attendance reports, and transcripts.
One thing I noticed about this site that I didn’t like so much was the loading speed. Sometimes pages take awhile to load all the data, and it also takes several seconds to save your data when you enter it. So that’s kind of a big drawback for me with this one.
Homeschool Tracker Homeschool Planning App
If you’re looking for an online homeschool planner that’s been around for a long time, you might want to try Homeschool Tracker. This is a fairly simple and straightforward homeschool planner that includes all the record keeping, planning, grading and reporting features you would expect in a homeschool planning app. Although they don’t have an app to download, you can access the planner on the web from desktop and mobile devices.
Unfortunately, Homeschool Tracker is one of the few online homeschool planners that does not offer a free trial. So if you want to try it out, you’ll have to pay for at least one month, as they also do not have any money back guarantees. The cost of this membership is $8 a month, or $65 a year for their annual membership. They also offer a 2 year membership for $119.
This program was not as intuitive to set up as some of the other digital planners on this list, although they do offer support to help get you started. You get the same lesson planning and reporting features that you’d find on some of the other homeschool planner apps that we’ve looked at, but in a more bare bones kind of set up. If you’ve ever used Microsoft Access or other database programs like that, this really feels like something like that, except that your information will be stored online.
Scholaric
Another very simple and affordable homeschool planning app is Scholaric. This is a really no frills option if you’re just looking to create a simple online schedule and don’t want a bunch of additional features. You can try it out risk free for 15 days, and after that, it’s only $3 a month for one student, so it’s super affordable.
With Scholaric, you can plan your schedule, print out daily lesson plans, set goals, and print report cards and transcripts. It’s really very basic, almost like just creating a spreadsheet. Just keep adding courses and lessons to the grid and eventually you’ll have a full schedule set up. There’s nothing essentially wrong with this program, it’s just a lot more basic, and perhaps a little more difficult to set up because it’s not as user friendly as some of the other online homeschool planners.
Homeschool Panda
Another homeschool planner app that offers a 30 day free trial with no credit card required is Homeschool Panda. This homeschool planning tool allows you to create lesson plans, import plans created by other homeschoolers, and create attendance reports, grading reports and even transcripts.
Homeschool Panda is available on the web or by downloading their mobile app. After your free trial ends, this membership will cost just $5 a month for their homeschooler essentials plan, or $8 a month for the pro version, which includes transcript reports and unlimited storage. You can save on both plans by purchasing a full year up front.
This homeschool planner allows you to set up a very detailed lesson plan and schedule, and gives you a nice calendar view, similar to other online homeschool planning apps. You can search here for lesson plans created by other homeschool parents, and import them into your calendar if you choose. They also have a book tracker where you can create book lists and track reading assignments. There’s also a community feature where you can connect with other homeschool parents, although it does not appear to be very active.
Homeschool Minder Planning App
If you’re looking for a homeschool planning app that’s more simple to use, you mind want to try Homeschool Minder. This is another homeschool planner that will give you a free 30 day trial with just your email address. After that, their plan is just $4.99 a month, or $39.99 a year, so it’s definitely one of the more affordable options.
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Homeschool minder is a web based homeschool planner that allows you to create a calendar, track attendance, plan lessons, create reports and keep track of grades. Unfortunately, they do not have an app to download, but you can access their program on the web from any device that has access to the internet. You can use the calendar to add more than just daily assignments. Log appointments, field trips, and anything else you want.
I found this planner to be very straightforward and simple to use compared to some of the other online homeschool planners. I also like the student records section, which is a great way to keep track of books read, community service activities and standardized test information. They also have a bunch of detailed reports that you can print at any time. The only issue I had with it is that when I was trying to create repeating assignments, sometimes I couldn’t get them to work, or they would skip over days, and I could not figure out why.
Homeschool Manager
If you’re looking for a homeschool planning app that’s really simple to set up, you might want to check out Homeschool Manager. This online homeschool planner also offers a 30 day free trial with no credit card required, and getting started is extremely simple compared to some of the other online homeschool planners on this list.
With Homeschool Manager, you can easily create a simple schedule for each of your students, with as many subjects as you’d like to add. You’ll be able to track grades, create book lists, and generate report cards, attendance lists and transcripts. If you decide you like this homeschool scheduler and want to keep it after your free trial ends, it will cost $5.99 a month or $49 if you purchase a full year up front.
I found this homeschool planning app really simple to set up and use, although not as intuitive as some of the other planners. Once you get your courses and lesson plans set up, it’s pretty simple to follow the calendar, track assignments and print any reports you may need. If you’re looking for a bare bones, easy to manage homeschool planner app without a lot of extra fluff, this may be a good choice for you. I did not notice any issues with their website while testing it out, which is a big plus!
Flexible Homeschool App
If you’re looking for a homeschool planning app that has a lot of flexibility, the Flexible Homeschool App might be a good choice for you. Plan your school year by flexible terms and weeks per term rather than rigid dates, and easily speed up the pace or slow down when you need to without having to reschedule everything.
The Flexible Homeschool App does not offer a free trial, but you can test it out for 30 days for just $1. After that, if you want to keep this homeschool scheduling program, it will cost $10 a month. So it’s a little more expensive than the other planning apps on this list.
Getting set up with this program was very simple. Just add your students, create your school year, and start scheduling assignments. Creating a report is also very simple. And if you want to link to videos or websites, you can do that too.
However, I’m not a fan of the way the calendar looks – I much prefer to be able to view a month at a time when I’m planning things out. I also don’t see any way to create a transcript like some of the other apps on this list offer.
Best Vs. Worst
So now that you’ve seen 10 of the best online homeschool planning apps, it’s that part of the video where we decide which is the BEST and which is the worst. Let’s start with the best.
And remember, this is just my personal opinion based on my own preferences. But for me personally, my favorite homeschool scheduling app on this list is Homeschool Panda.
I really like the way the calendar looks, and the multiple views I can get, so it’s not just by week or month. Scheduling recurring lessons and activities is very simple, and they give you a lot of options if you like a lot of detail. I also like that it includes the book tracker. And even though their included online community doesn’t seem to be very active, that doesn’t bother me as I would not use that feature anyway.
And while there are a couple of things I liked better about the other programs, such as the student records feature in Homeschool Minder, or the neat rescheduling tool on Homeschool Planet – overall this is the one I’m most likely to go with, as I do happen to be looking for an online homeschool planner for myself!
And now, for the worst homeschool planning app on the list. And this is a tough one, as there were problems with a lot of these planning apps, so it’s hard to choose just one. But if I had to pick the worst homeschool planning app, or at least the one I would be least likely to use, it would have to be the one from Well Planned Gal. While they have a lot of neat features that I really like, I just can’t get over the issues with the site speed. It makes me nervous about having my information stored there, and I just don’t trust it. Hopefully they will be able to improve it, as it definitely has a lot of potential.
Which is your favorite online homeschool planning app? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
