Guide
Free school management software in Pakistan
The four kinds of free, what a free plan has to include to run a school day to day, and where the hidden costs sit.
Free school management software is real, but “free” means four different things: a time-limited trial, a cut-down free plan, open-source software you host yourself, or the full product free below a size limit. EDUTIG is the last kind: free for schools of up to 100 students, with the complete product. Knowing which kind you are looking at is most of the evaluation.
What kinds of free are there?
| Kind of free | What you get | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Free trial | The full product for a fixed number of days. | Fine for evaluation, but a school year does not fit in a trial. Know the price before you load real records. |
| Cut-down free plan | Some modules free forever, the rest behind paid plans. | Check whether fees, payroll and portals are in the free part. They often are not, and those are the modules schools come for. |
| Open-source, self-hosted | The software itself, at no licence cost. | You provide the server, backups, updates and the person responsible when it goes down. |
| Full product, free below a size limit | Everything, free while the school stays under the limit. | Confirm the limit fits you for a couple of years, and what the price is beyond it. This is how EDUTIG's Starter package works. |
What does a free plan have to include to be usable?
A plan that cannot run a normal school day is a demo, whatever it is called. Before putting real records in, check the free plan gives you:
- The daily modules: admissions, attendance, exams and fee collection with printable receipts, not just a student list.
- The portals: teachers marking attendance and parents seeing fees are where the time savings actually come from.
- Your data, exportable: if you cannot get your records out, the plan is not free, it is a lock-in with no invoice.
- A way to ask for help that is not a community forum three time zones away.
Where do the hidden costs sit?
Even with genuinely free software, budget for the work around it: entering or migrating existing records, training staff who have only known registers, and messaging. SMS and WhatsApp go through a messaging provider that charges per message, whichever software sends them. None of these are reasons to pay for software; they are reasons to compare total effort, not just licence price. Our guide to software prices in Pakistan shows how to put those totals side by side.
How the EDUTIG Starter package fits
Starter is the complete product for schools of up to 100 students, free to use with no card required, including the teacher, staff, student and parent portals. The paid packages, from USD 11.99 a month, differ by school size and support rather than by features; the pricing page has the current terms, and you can judge the product itself on the product tour.