Populi Overview
What is Populi?
Designed for higher education, Populi is web-based college management. It covers academics, admissions, online learning, student billing, financial aid, donations, contacts, library, bookstore, and more. Secure and intuitive, everyone at your school can use it. Our plain, simple pricing scales with your enrollment with no hidden fees or upfront costs. Every customer gets friendly, responsive customer support, together with implementation, data migration, training, and software updates.
Populi Overview
Pricing
Pricing options
$199 per month for unlimited faculty and staff + $7per month per billable student
Populi Features
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Populi Reviews
Populi Reviews
Best SIS system for smaller colleges that we have used
We couldn't be happier. Our sales contact gave us multiple demos of the different modules, trained us and was there for us during every step of the implementation. Everything was done remotely but it works well and there is no additional cost, which is extraordinary. I have helped implement three different SIS systems and the data transfer to Populi was the most efficient and painless I have experienced. The customer support is responsive and goes above and beyond what I expected. Overall they seem to really care about our success and we enjoy working with them.
Why did we wait so long?
Our company has had no one who wishes we could go back to the way it was before Populi. Support has been consistently helpful, patient, and nearly always impressively prompt. I think it would be true to say we have never enjoyed this level of qualified, friendly support from any other software vendor.
You get what you pay for and perhaps a little less!
Pros
Easy to register, add students, course scheduling. Fast customer service however, not very satisfying responds.
Cons
It is not user friendly, very difficult to customize features. Even sending emails to selected students is a hassle. Adding meeting times to courses is awfully difficult and annoying. If you are a new, small institution and need statistics / have to be able to pull out a data any minute when requested I would not recommend this product. Our application information wasn't transferring to system and we found out after customer service that our application was not set right. The reason for that is Populi updated their admissions feature a while ago but our applications were not adopted to new system. So I had to enter age, gender, address, email etc manually for the each student in the system to be able to have an accurate data. No help offered for an error caused by their own management system! Again reporting features lack accuracy and not customizable.
For accreditation purposes I found this system not reliable, I will start looking for alternatives.
A solid, straightforward choice for higher-education relationship management
Populi is a terrific platform for integrating various data silos across your organization. We moved from a number of different databases into Populi recently, and the combination of all of our information in one place has streamlined our communication process with incoming students and allowed us to more easily collaborate in helping students through processes like enrollment and financial aid. We've struggled with finding some features at times, and in the case of marketing automation, we've discovered that Populi's system isn't quite fully-featured enough for our needs. The UI, also, has a dated feel. Nevertheless, it's a solid, stable platform that gives us integrated access to our contacts.
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Great all-in-one SIS
Pros
This software is very intuitive, and staff, faculty and students have gotten completely up to speed in a very short period of time. Being hosted on the web means students and staff can log in from anywhere with any device and backups are taken care of automatically. The built in LMS features are really robust and have eliminated the need for google classroom, survey monkey, and other fixes we had been using.
I am also very impressed with the built in reporting; there are preset reports for clearinghouse, IPEDS, retention etc.. and the ad-hoc reporting tool allows for almost unlimited custom reporting.
The support staff team are very kind and responsive, and the data conversion from our old system was virtually painless. When searching for a new SIS we interviewed over 8 firms and are very glad we settled on Populi.
Cons
There are very few things we have found that we wanted that the system was not already set up to do, but for these you can always suggest product enhancements to the support team.
Best SIS system for smaller colleges that we have used
We couldn't be happier. Our sales contact gave us multiple demos of the different modules, trained us and was there for us during every step of the implementation. Everything was done remotely but it works well and there is no additional cost, which is extraordinary. I have helped implement three different SIS systems and the data transfer to Populi was the most efficient and painless I have experienced. The customer support is responsive and goes above and beyond what I expected. Overall they seem to really care about our success and we enjoy working with them.
Pros
It's designed by people who obviously understand the needs of a higher education institution. It is easy to use, intuitive, flexible and fast. You don't have to find ways to work-around problem areas, it just works amazingly well. The integrated LMS is smooth and very capable. The integration of the different modules e.g. student billing and financial aid, is seamless. The customer support is amazing. The implementation costs are next to zero.
Cons
It is designed to be simple to use so reporting and security permissions are not as flexible as our previous system. We have adapted to that though because the benefits far outweigh the drawbacks. The customer support team also run customized reports for us when we need them and they are constantly making improvements to the system.
Why did we wait so long?
Our company has had no one who wishes we could go back to the way it was before Populi. Support has been consistently helpful, patient, and nearly always impressively prompt. I think it would be true to say we have never enjoyed this level of qualified, friendly support from any other software vendor.
Pros
It is clearly designed for our industry - most of the features we might like it turns out are already in place. It is so great to have student records, financial records, academic catalog info, communications, and even recruitment working in the same integrated environment.
Cons
Sometimes it is difficult or impossible to select the exact dataset we are interested in finding, or to create reports that would be useful to us. I think we can expect this with any software not custom-designed for our company. It is also true that by exporting data, we ca work with it in other software to get where we want to go . . . it can be just a bit long-handled sometimes.
You get what you pay for and perhaps a little less!
Pros
Easy to register, add students, course scheduling. Fast customer service however, not very satisfying responds.
Cons
It is not user friendly, very difficult to customize features. Even sending emails to selected students is a hassle. Adding meeting times to courses is awfully difficult and annoying. If you are a new, small institution and need statistics / have to be able to pull out a data any minute when requested I would not recommend this product. Our application information wasn't transferring to system and we found out after customer service that our application was not set right. The reason for that is Populi updated their admissions feature a while ago but our applications were not adopted to new system. So I had to enter age, gender, address, email etc manually for the each student in the system to be able to have an accurate data. No help offered for an error caused by their own management system! Again reporting features lack accuracy and not customizable.
For accreditation purposes I found this system not reliable, I will start looking for alternatives.
Response from Populi
Hi Ozlen, I didn't realize how frustrated you were after our conversation yesterday! My apologies.
I don't remember discussing your difficulties emailing students or adding meeting times. I'd be happy to hop back on the phone to go over that with you!
Regarding applications, its true that we updated admissions a couple of years ago and released a bunch of new features. Applications that were set up before that time have to be tweaked to take advantage of the new features, but I'd be happy to schedule a time to work through that with you. I think there were only a few fields that needed to be tweaked, but lets set up a time and we can make sure its good to go!
Again, I'm sorry that you've had a frustrating experience. We'll be in touch to see if we can win back your loyalty!
Sincerely,
Isaac Grauke, CEO
Populi
A solid, straightforward choice for higher-education relationship management
Populi is a terrific platform for integrating various data silos across your organization. We moved from a number of different databases into Populi recently, and the combination of all of our information in one place has streamlined our communication process with incoming students and allowed us to more easily collaborate in helping students through processes like enrollment and financial aid. We've struggled with finding some features at times, and in the case of marketing automation, we've discovered that Populi's system isn't quite fully-featured enough for our needs. The UI, also, has a dated feel. Nevertheless, it's a solid, stable platform that gives us integrated access to our contacts.
Pros
Populi is very straightforward, and makes it relatively easy to manage a high number of complex relationships with contacts
Tracking a contact from first inquiry through to alumni donor is very simple
Contacting contacts directly from within Populi works more smoothly than the communication platforms on some competitors
Support is extremely useful and quick
Cons
The automation platform is time-based and lacks some of the triggers and sophistication available in competitors
Some features are hidden inside of layers behind the straightforward UI, and it can be frustrating to track them down
Sometimes, a seemingly simple feature will be missing, and require extensive conversations with support. Support is top-notch and very helpful, but it can be annoying if you prefer to do things yourself.
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Populi Pricing
Populi Pricing
$199 per month for unlimited faculty and staff + $7per month per billable student
$199 per month for unlimited faculty and staff + $7per month per billable student
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Populi Features
Populi Features
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Categories
Categories
Additional information for Populi
Additional information for Populi
Key features of Populi
- API
- Attendance management
- Auditing reports
- Daily attendance
- Daily backup
- Event calendar
- Financial management
- General ledger
- Help desk
- Integrated reports, IPEDS reporting
- Intuitive dashboard
- Learning management
- SAP alerts
- Scheduling
- Student budgeting
- Student information/records management
- Student portal
Populi FAQs
Populi FAQs
Below are some frequently asked questions for Populi.
Q. What type of pricing plans does Populi offer?
Populi offers the following pricing plans:
Starting from: US$199,00/month
Pricing model: Subscription
Free Trial: Not Available
$199 per month for unlimited faculty and staff + $7per month per billable student
Q. What are the main features of Populi?
Populi offers the following features:
- API
- Attendance management
- Auditing reports
- Daily attendance
- Daily backup
- Event calendar
- Financial management
- General ledger
- Help desk
- Integrated reports, IPEDS reporting
- Intuitive dashboard
- Learning management
- SAP alerts
- Scheduling
- Student budgeting
- Student information/records management
- Student portal
Q. Who are the typical users of Populi?
Populi has the following typical customers:
Small Business, Mid Size Business
Q. What languages does Populi support?
Populi supports the following languages:
English
Q. What type of pricing plans does Populi offer?
Populi has the following pricing plans:
Subscription
Q. Does Populi support mobile devices?
Populi supports the following devices:
Android, iPhone
Q. What other apps does Populi integrate with?
Populi integrates with the following applications:
Canvas LMS, Edvance360, Google Workspace, Stripe
Q. What level of support does Populi offer?
Populi offers the following support options:
Knowledge Base, Online Support, Video Tutorials, Forum
