Fedena Alternatives: 2026 School Software Compared 

A school principal in Gujranwala shared her shortlist with us last month: Fedena, Classe365, 'that free one a friend's school uses,' and the Excel files she already had. She'd spent two evenings on vendor websites and still couldn't answer the only question that mattered: what will this actually cost my 480-student school next year? That's not her failing. School software pricing is structured to resist comparison, and since we build Edutig, a competitor to everything on her list, the fairest thing we can do is lay the published facts side by side and put our own numbers under the same light. Everything below comes from the vendors' public pages as of October 2026, with the gaps marked as gaps.

What Fedena Publishes, and What Sits Outside the Sticker

Fedena is the veteran of this category, and its pricing page currently lists three plans billed yearly: Standard at $999, Premium at $1,399, and Ultimate at $1,699, each with unlimited users, plus an Enterprise tier with no published price, where you contact sales. That's more transparency than much of this market manages, and it deserves credit. The arithmetic to watch is what sits outside the sticker. Fedena's own site says your cost depends on the add-ons you choose, naming SMS, the mobile app, biometric devices, vehicle tracking, payment gateways, video conferencing, and e-learning among them, and the pricing page presents web-only and web-plus-mobile-app as separate options. So a school comparing Fedena's $999 against another vendor's number has to first settle which add-ons it needs, price each one, and add them in. There's also Project Fedena, the open-source edition the commercial product grew out of, free to download if you're prepared to host and maintain it yourself.

Classe365: a Clear Core Price, Then $75 Per Module

Classe365 publishes a clearer entry point: the Core module costs $100 a month for an institution of up to 100 students, billed monthly, with 10 percent off for annual billing and a 15-day trial. Above 100 students, the page lists enrollment tiers up to 1000-plus but shows no prices for them, so our 480-student principal is back to asking. The structure to understand is the add-on list: Fee and Invoicing, Finance and Accounting, the LMS, CRM and enrollment forms, alumni, white label, and several more are each a separate module at $75 a month. For a school in Pakistan or the Gulf, where fee collection is the workflow that decides whether software survives at all, fee handling being a paid add-on rather than part of the core is the single most important line on that page. Setup and data migration are charged too, from $2 per student virtually or $1,500 a day on-site, though virtual training is free. In fairness, pricing on student count alone, with unlimited staff and parent accounts, is a genuinely clean rule.

The Open-Source Route and the Spreadsheet Route

openSIS and Project Fedena both offer community editions with no license fee, and for a network with a capable IT person they're real options. The honest accounting: the license is the cheap part. You take on a server or cloud hosting, backups that actually run, security patches, and upgrades that sometimes break your customizations, and the whole arrangement depends on one person who can resign. That's the same failure mode as the spreadsheet route, which we've costed in detail before: 'free' software whose real price is labor, error write-offs, and the eventual bad month when the person or the file is gone. If you have genuine in-house IT capacity, open source can work well. If the plan is 'the computer teacher will manage it,' it's a deferred invoice.

Where Edutig Sits, Same Scrutiny Applied

Our own numbers, stated the way we wish every vendor stated theirs. Edutig is free for schools with up to 100 students, and the free tier is the complete product, not a trial. Paid plans are flat per school per month: $11.99 for 101 to 350 students, $23.99 for 351 to 850, and $39.99 above that. Every tier includes everything, so there's no module arithmetic to do: fee management, the parent app, attendance, exams, and the rest are in the price, and the only thing that changes between tiers is the student count. We build and support it from Lahore, which matters if your school runs on this region's hours, banks, and languages. The trade-off to weigh honestly: Fedena and Classe365 are older products with longer international track records, and if your shortlist depends on a feature they have and we don't, that settles it. The full tier breakdown is on our pricing page, with nothing gated behind a sales call.

Four Questions That Make Any Comparison Honest

• Total cost over three years at your real enrollment, with every add-on you'd actually use priced in: SMS, mobile app, fee module, migration
• What happens when you cross a student threshold, and whether that jump is published or negotiated
• Data export: what format, at what cost, and how fast, written into the contract before you sign
• Support: which hours, which languages, and whether the person answering can change the system or only log a ticket

The Short Version

Fedena publishes yearly plan prices, and the add-ons carry real weight in the final number. Classe365 publishes a clean core price up to 100 students, then unpublished tiers and $75-a-month modules, fees included among them. Open source is free the way a puppy is free. Spreadsheets cost more than all of the above once you count the labor and the errors. And Edutig is the one where the published price is the whole price, which is exactly the kind of claim you should verify on our pricing page rather than take from the vendor making it. Whichever way you go, make every vendor fill in the same four blanks above, for your enrollment, in writing. The ones who answer quickly are telling you something. So are the ones who don't.