Why schools start looking for an alternative
ManageBac is the platform most IB schools meet first, and for good reason: it has been built around the programmes for a long time, it is used in thousands of IB World Schools, and it carries an official route for registration and coursework submission that nobody else has. A school that is happy on it should stay on it, and nothing below is an argument otherwise.
Schools that do start looking tend to be pushed by one of four things, and it is worth knowing which one is yours before you book a single demo.
The first is scope. Planning and assessment live in one system while attendance, admissions, fees and family communication live in two or three others, and somebody spends their week moving information between them. The second is evidence: the school can plan beautifully but still cannot answer which standards and practices have nothing against them, so every visit becomes an assembly project. The third is cost as the roll grows, which is usually felt at renewal rather than at signature. The fourth is that the school has decided it wants the AI work done inside the platform, against its own curriculum, rather than in a separate tool that cannot see any of it.
Those four lead to genuinely different answers. A school with only the first problem may need an integration, not a migration.
What IB curriculum planning software actually has to do
The phrase covers a much wider job than planning. In an IB school a unit plan is the start of a chain, and software is only worth its licence if the chain holds together end to end.
Programme → unit → learning experience → assessment → student evidence → portfolio → report → standards and practices evidence.
Every tool on the market stores the first link. The differences appear at the joins. If a concept is a word typed into a template, no system can tell you which year groups have met it. If it is a record the unit is linked to, coverage stops being a claim and becomes a query — and a gap becomes something the software can point at before a visiting team does.
The alternatives schools actually shortlist
In practice the shortlist is short, and the honest version of it looks like this. No option here is bad; they are built for different shapes of school.
| Option | The school it suits |
|---|---|
| Stay on ManageBac | Happy with planning and assessment, and reliant on the official IB submission route |
| Toddle | Wants a teacher-facing planning and classroom experience above all else |
| A general LMS | Course delivery, question banks and quiz logic are central to how teachers work |
| A general SIS | District-scale records, state reporting and complex fee structures dominate |
| Planning in documents | Small, single-programme, and not yet paying the coordination cost |
| skodle | Wants the curriculum, the evidence, the reporting and school operations to be one record |
Five questions that separate them
Feature lists converge, and every vendor says yes to a question about supporting the MYP. These five are the ones where the answers actually diverge, and each asks for an artefact rather than a claim.
- Run a coverage report on your demo data now, and show me which units touch one named concept across year groups
- Which standards and practices currently have no evidence attached to them?
- Enter one criterion level in front of me, then open the report card it lands in
- Show me a moderation session: two teachers disagreeing, and where the agreed judgement is recorded
- Give me a sample export file before we sign, so I know what leaving looks like
How skodle models the programme, and why it matters downstream
skodle is built around that chain rather than around an administrative core with IB features bolted on. The difference is not a nicer planner; it is that the framework is stored as linked records instead of as prose inside a document.
A concept library holds key and related concepts per programme with its own coverage dashboard. Curriculum maps run programme-aware from map to unit to lesson and keep version history, so last year stays reproducible rather than being overwritten. PYP is modelled as a real programme of inquiry with transdisciplinary themes and central ideas. MYP units carry the statement of inquiry, the global context and criteria-tagged tasks. Interdisciplinary units join two or more subject groups through a shared inquiry. Learning experiences — the activities that sit between a unit and its assessment — are themselves tagged to the IB elements they deliver.
The payoff is not in the planning screen. It is that everything after it can be counted instead of assembled.
- Key and related concepts per programme, with coverage measured from the links
- Map to unit to lesson with version history, stamped to an academic year
- PYP programme of inquiry, MYP units, interdisciplinary units, DP and CP core
- Learning experiences and student inquiry questions tracked against the unit
Assessment, and the moderation nobody budgets for
Criterion assessment is where a gradebook built for percentages quietly loses meaning. skodle holds MYP criteria and strands as a versioned definition layer per subject, records 0–8 criterion levels, and derives the 1–7 grade from them rather than asking a teacher to arrive at it separately.
The part schools rarely ask about in a demo, and then spend every October on, is standardisation. skodle runs it as a first-class thing: teachers enter independent judgements, the system shows the variance between them, and the consensus is recorded as a decision rather than remembered from a meeting. Report cards are then composed from those records, so a draft exists in a meeting rather than after a week's notice.
- Criteria and strands versioned per subject, so a revision does not rewrite history
- 0–8 levels in, derived 1–7 grade out, with the analytics behind it
- Standardisation as independent judgements, measured variance, recorded consensus
- Report cards built from records already captured, not rebuilt in June
Coverage you can query, and gaps the software finds first
This is the capability that most separates skodle from a planner, and it is worth testing hard in any demo, ours included.
Units are joined to objectives and standards through typed mappings that are approved and versioned — a person decides the link, and the decision is recorded with a name against it. Because coverage is measured from those edges rather than asserted in a document, the system can run the question in reverse.
The gap detector does exactly that. It reports objectives that are unmapped or under-assessed, elements that are under-taught or overused across the school, and units carrying no evidence at all. An IB command centre presents the whole-school view exceptions-first and read-only, which is the right shape for a coordinator: it shows what needs attention rather than asking somebody to go looking for it.
A coordinator who can answer what is missing in March has a different year from one who finds out in the fortnight before a visit.
The DP core, and seeing risk while it can still be fixed
DP and CP components are tracked per student through milestones — internal assessment, the extended essay, theory of knowledge and CAS, and the CP core alongside them — with due dates and predicted grades held against the cohort rather than in a supervisor's spreadsheet.
Alongside that sits a risk view over drafts and the supervisor feedback loop, so a student drifting on an extended essay surfaces while there is still time to act. For CAS and service as action the projects themselves are records, with student reflection attached, rather than a folder of photographs described again at the end of the year.
Authorisation evidence as a by-product, not a project
Evidence assembled in the fortnight before a visit is evidence about that fortnight, and a visiting team can tell. skodle holds IB practices with linked evidence, the gaps between them, the actions raised against those gaps, and a readiness view over the whole set. One evidence store sits underneath every subsystem, so an artefact created for teaching is the same artefact the accreditation view reads.
Two honest qualifications, because this is the claim most often overstated in this market, including by us. Linking evidence to a practice is a deliberate act by a person, not something the software guesses on a school's behalf, and it should stay that way, because deciding that a piece of work genuinely evidences a practice is judgement. And the accreditation model covers IB standards and practices across the four programmes; it is not a general multi-framework accreditation tool.
What it costs, and what that includes
Pricing is per user, per month, and every plan includes every feature — the tier sets the rate, not the functionality, so nothing described in this article sits behind an upgrade.
Spark is $2 per user for up to 150 users. Momentum is $3 per user from 151 to 500. Above 500 users, Pinnacle is a custom plan with volume pricing and dedicated onboarding. Parents are charged at half the rate, $1 and $1.50, because they are usually a school's largest group and its lightest users; charging them as staff would bill the size of the mailing list rather than the size of the school.
Seats are bought as an allowance up front and the account count is capped at what was purchased, so growth is a decision rather than a surprise line at renewal. You can add seats or move tier at any time, and billing follows from the next cycle. When comparing suppliers, ask each one for a written price at double your current roll, and add the cost of every tool the platform would replace — that is the number that changes at renewal.
Where skodle is the wrong answer
A comparison that ends with the author winning is an advertisement, so here is where we would tell you to look elsewhere, starting with the one that matters most in this particular decision.
skodle does not carry the official IB route for candidate registration and eCoursework submission. If that integration is load-bearing for your DP coordinator, that is a real reason to stay where you are, or to keep it alongside whatever else you run, and no amount of planning quality substitutes for it. Ask us about it directly rather than discovering it in March.
Beyond that: if you need district-scale student information management, state reporting pipelines or complex multi-school fee structures, a full SIS will serve you better. If fundraising and advancement matter to your school, we do not do them. If deep course tooling such as question banks and branching quiz logic is central to how your teachers teach, an LMS built for that will do it better. And we are younger than the established platforms, with a shorter track record behind us; that is a fair thing to weigh rather than something to be talked out of.
What to ask before you move anything
Migration is where good decisions go wrong, because the cost lands on the people who did not choose. These are worth settling before a contract rather than after.
- What comes across: units, assessment history, portfolios, or only the current year?
- Who does the moving, and what does it cost if the answer is us?
- What happens to last year's reports — are they still readable after the switch?
- Can we run both systems for one term, and what does that cost?
- Which of our current integrations survive, and which become manual work?
- What is the written price at double our current roll?
- Sign in as a parent and try to reach another family's child
- Give us a sample export file before we sign, not a promise of one
