Igloo vs. SchoolMessenger

Igloo is really great for giving your organization access to the latest version of documents and templates. It's also great for organizing and versioning shared resources. It can also be customized for your organization in terms of sections, page layout, color scheme, branding, etc. It's not so great for search or for offline use. Overall I'd highly recommend it.

Incentivized

SchoolMessenger used to be a good product for home to school communication. However, if it can't properly integrate with big name, run of the mill student information systems, they really have no business being recommended or used by school districts. Allowing data to be released to parents about other students and parents is what every school district needs to protect against. Would not recommend them for any communication that needs to integrate with any other systems. There are plenty of other competitors out there who provide more responsive customer service and support.

• Igloo gives you great customization abilities and really fits the need for small communication bursts to important company-wide announcements — when their UI was not getting in the way.
• Igloo offers a lot of "bells and whistles" if you need them. But it was hard for these small, nonessential elements to not get in the way of the overall purpose of its use.
• Their sales team was spectacular. But their implementation team was hit or miss. Only one or two people I was able to connect with were both knowledgeable and quickly responsive.

Incentivized

• Email access.
• Attachments.
• Notifications to parents regarding important information.

Incentivized

• Pricing can lead to high costs.
• Users without CSS knowledge may have a hard time to customize themes. Maybe more graphical options to change layouts would be nice.
• NO SSO and LDAP authentication methods available in the basic version.
• Languages support in the basic version.

Incentivized

• Cost is significant. Not unreasonable, to lower price would be great.
• Support is very, very slow to respond. Unless you call in it takes several days to receive a response. I've had tickets open for over a week to resolve the issue.

Incentivized

SchoolMessenger serves our main purpose of sending out emergency notifications and notices to parents. It is great to cut down on the paper use and the ability to attach documents to our notes. We have used this to send home notifications from our Parent-Teacher Organization. Parents have thanked us for sending a back ups due to papers being misplaced and knowing that they have a backup through email.

Incentivized

Overall, this is a good, effective, and cost-efficient product. It is missing some key functionality we had with a previous program which limits my total score, but I still think a lot of school districts can get a lot out of SchoolMessenger. The features and functions they do include work well.

Incentivized

The support is fantastic. I have never had such complete support from a technology service. Every issue has been resolved while I was on the phone. I never had to wait for a callback or an advanced support tech. Their people are very well trained in their product and how to meet their customer's needs.

Incentivized

Igloo stacks up by keeping simple. You can find all functionalities in a very easy way due to the good UI and UX that is provided. Basically, all that you need to improve communication and collaboration in your team/company is available. Also, there are a lot of integration possibilities that can enhance your experience with Igloo.

Incentivized

We went from Final Site to SchoolMessenger. Final Site had a lot of customization with so much functionality and a real professional look and feel. Unfortunately, the cost set us on a new path, which led us to SchoolMessenger. SchoolMessenger packages a lot of the services we need in one, but it is missing core elements of design that Final Site offered us.

Incentivized

• Established a standard communication platform for the organization
• Aided in culture development where employees are able engage and be a part of the right channels
• Information/Data sharing/Personalization of content
• Creation of content
• Transparency of communication across all levels
• Integrations with other tools like Microsoft 365 or Slack

Incentivized

• SchoolMessenger is an excellent tool that links the school admin with the parents directly, which avoids the risks of students not delivering the message.
• Saves money and time not being held hostage by the US postal service.

Incentivized