Blog · Alternatives and comparisons · Education
How education providers should choose analytics software: start from the questions, check the data you hold, ask vendors ten questions, avoid the traps.
Most buying decisions for analytics start from a feature list. For education providers the better start is the questions that come back every month, the files already on hand, and the traps that make a tool look right in a demonstration and wrong in the first board meeting.
| The question | The measure behind it |
|---|---|
| Which contracts are at risk at renewal? | Renewal watch |
| Where are licences unused? | Licence utilisation |
| Did the uplift we proposed at renewal land? | Uplift realised against proposed |
| Are we in front of the trust before it sets its budget? | Budget cycle coverage |
| Which purchase cohorts adopted, and which stalled? | Adoption by purchase cohort |
| How much of a group or trust do we hold? | Group and trust penetration |
Any tool you consider should answer these from your data, not from a sample. Ask to see it.
If a vendor needs a warehouse built before it can read these, count that in the cost and the time.
Ask whether the tool enforces these, and what it does when they fail:
Utilisation against seats bought. Usage sits with the product team and contracts with sales; nobody divides one by the other per institution.
The contracting entity. The customer list is a list of schools.
Uplift realised. Proposed once, conceded many times.
Number of schools as customers. Roll up to the entity that signs.
Logins in total. Per institution, against seats bought.
Renewal rate by count alone. Always with value.
| Criterion | Weight | Tool A | Tool B | Covirage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Answers our six questions on our own data | High | |||
| Time to the first answer | High | |||
| Needs a warehouse or data team | Medium | |||
| AI calculates figures, or only explains computed ones | High | |||
| Every total reconciles; figures open to rows | High | |||
| First-year cost, all in | Medium |
Covirage reads the exports above, answers the questions with figures our tools compute and check, and is set up for you within a week. See analytics software for education compared, AI analytics for education and Covirage for Education.
For the measures in full, with formulas and exports, read Sales KPIs for education and edtech providers.
The answer to their own questions, from the data they already hold, with every figure reconciled. Features matter less than what the tool needs before the first answer and who maintains it.
It can be, with a warehouse and someone to build and maintain the model. Without them, the dashboard shows what changed and the explanation is still an analyst's job.
Usually: usage export, contract file, proposals, ledger, customer master, crm. Most analytics questions in this industry can be answered from those exports.