Looking for an eSkooly Alternative? How Edflo Compares (2026)

When eSkooly is the right choice

If your budget for software is zero, eSkooly Basic is hard to argue with. eSkooly says the plan is free forever and covers unlimited students and staff, the core modules including admissions and fees, web portals for admins, teachers, students and parents, mobile apps on iOS and Android, and 50,000 free SMS. It also includes employee management with salary processing linked to attendance, and an accounts module with a chart of accounts. That is more than many paid systems give you.

eSkooly is also one of the few products here you can host yourself. Its self-hosted Pro licences are one-time payments of USD 67, 149 or 999, the top one with full source code and the right to resell. If you have someone technical in-house and want the system on your own domain under your own brand, nothing else on our comparison page offers that at that price. Edflo is cloud-only.

• Free Basic plan: unlimited students and staff, core modules, web portals and mobile apps
• Payroll and accounts modules on the free plan's feature pages, not sold as add-ons
• Desktop upgrade at USD 96 a year (plus taxes) for Windows, macOS and Linux, with 24/7 support
• Self-hosted, white-label licences from USD 67, one-time
• eSkooly says 125,000+ institutions use it worldwide

Where the free plan stops: collecting the money

eSkooly's fee module does the paperwork well. It generates fee challans for the whole school in bulk, applies discounts, highlights defaulters, sends SMS reminders and prints receipts. What it does not do, as of October 2026, is let parents pay online: eSkooly's integrations page lists an online payment gateway as Coming Soon. So the money itself still arrives at the counter, by bank transfer or as a screenshot on WhatsApp, and someone in your office matches each payment to a student by hand.

That matching is where a free system gets expensive. Take a 300-student school. Roughly 300 payments a month, each checked against a bank statement or a photo of a receipt. At even two minutes each, that is ten hours of a clerk's month, and the mistakes land on parents who have already paid. Once your fee office spends its first week of every month reconciling, the price of the software is no longer the number that matters.

Parent App

What Edflo does instead

Edflo's fee collection runs on 1BILL over the 1LINK network. Every student has a consumer number, so a parent pays from any 1LINK member bank's app, internet banking or an ATM, or from EasyPaisa and JazzCash. Each payment posts itself to that student's ledger. Nobody matches anything. The 1BILL merchant account is your school's own, so fees settle into your bank account rather than passing through ours. Arrears carry forward, sibling concessions apply automatically, reminders go out on WhatsApp and SMS, and parents get a digital receipt the moment they pay.

The other difference is who sets it up. eSkooly is built for schools worldwide and is largely self-service, with community support on the free plan. Edflo is built for Pakistani schools and set up by our team from Islamabad. We migrate your records free of charge from whatever you use now, eSkooly included, train your staff on site, and most schools are live in about three days. Result cards follow FBISE, Punjab and Sindh board formats and Cambridge-style grading, and if your format differs we build your template in during onboarding.

• Parents pay from any 1LINK bank, ATM, EasyPaisa or JazzCash; payments reconcile themselves
• Fees settle into your school's own merchant account
• Free migration from your current system, plus on-site staff training
• A flat monthly price by school size, from PKR 2,999 for up to 150 students

The honest price comparison

There is no way to make PKR 2,999 a month cheaper than free, and we won't try. A 300-student school pays Edflo PKR 4,999 a month, about PKR 60,000 a year. eSkooly Basic costs nothing, and the Desktop upgrade is USD 96 a year.

So the real question is whether that PKR 60,000 buys back more than it costs: the clerk hours spent reconciling, the defaulters who slip through because reminders depend on someone remembering, and the parent disputes over payments that were made but never recorded. For a small academy collecting fees at the counter, it often doesn't, and eSkooly is the better call. For a school where fee week takes over the office, it usually does.

How to decide

Start with eSkooly's free plan if you have never used school software. It costs you nothing to find out what your staff will actually use. Then watch one fee cycle closely. Count the hours spent matching payments to students, and count the parents who say they paid when your records say they didn't.

If those numbers are small, stay. If they're not, book a demo with us and ask us to run one of your own fee challans through 1BILL on the call. Whoever you choose, get a data-export clause in writing, so moving later never means retyping your records.