Every spring, we get the same question from heads of school: should we move from FACTS to Blackbaud? FACTS (formerly RenWeb) and Blackbaud Education Management are the two dominant SIS platforms for K-12 independent schools, and the choice between them shapes how families, faculty, and the business office interact with the school every day. There is no universally correct answer. There is a correct answer for your school, and it depends on questions most evaluation processes never ask.
The Honest Answer: It Depends — But Less Than People Think
Both platforms can run a private school. Schools succeed and schools struggle on each. The deciding factors are rarely the feature checklist; they are alignment with the school's operating model, the strength of the implementation, and whether the school has an administrator who has actually mastered the platform. A great Blackbaud admin running an imperfect Blackbaud configuration will run circles around a great-on-paper Blackbaud implementation with a checked-out admin.
That said, there are patterns. Schools that benefit most from Blackbaud tend to share a few characteristics. Schools that should probably stay on FACTS — or wait — tend to share a different set. We'll walk through both.
Where FACTS Wins
FACTS is genuinely strong for schools where simplicity is a feature. The interface is approachable for non-technical staff, the billing module is famously good (it is, after all, where FACTS started), and the configuration burden is lower than Blackbaud's. Schools with under ~150 students, schools without a dedicated SIS administrator, and schools whose faculty have lower tolerance for software complexity often run very happily on FACTS for years.
The mobile app experience is also notably stronger out of the box. Families and teachers consistently rate the FACTS app higher than Blackbaud's, particularly for day-to-day interactions like attendance, behavior, and gradebook entry.
Where Blackbaud Wins
Blackbaud's edge shows up in three places: depth of academic configuration, integrated advancement and admissions, and ecosystem flexibility. If your school has complex scheduling needs — block schedules, rotating drops, cross-divisional courses — Blackbaud's scheduler is more powerful, if less forgiving. If your advancement and admissions teams need to share a data backbone with your registrar, Blackbaud's unified database is a real advantage. And if you anticipate building custom reports, integrations, or workflows, Blackbaud's API and reporting tools are deeper.
Larger schools — particularly those with multiple divisions, dual-enrollment programs, or PreK-12 spans — tend to outgrow FACTS in ways that show up as workarounds, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. Those workarounds have a cost that doesn't appear on the SIS invoice but absolutely shows up in the staff hours required to keep the school running.
The Migration Cost Most Schools Underestimate
If you make the move, the biggest cost is not the implementation invoice — it is the staff time absorbed by the transition. Plan on six to nine months from contract to go-live for a complete migration, with significant load on the registrar, business office, advancement office, and at least one administrator who can dedicate meaningful hours to configuration.
- Data migration: cleaning and mapping students, families, courses, transcripts, and contracts
- Configuration: course catalogs, grading scales, report card templates, communication preferences
- Integration: payroll, accounting (Blackbaud Financial Edge NXT or QuickBooks), email, identity
- Training: separate tracks for faculty, staff, families, and administrators
- Parallel running: at least one term of dual-system operation to validate accuracy
- Post-go-live stabilization: at least three months of accelerated support
A Five-Question Decision Framework
When schools ask us to weigh in, we walk through five questions. The answers usually make the decision obvious — sometimes in the opposite direction the head of school expected.
- 1What problem are you actually trying to solve, in one sentence, without naming a vendor? If you cannot answer this, you are not ready to migrate.
- 2Do you have, or can you hire, a real SIS administrator? Blackbaud rewards mastery and punishes neglect more than FACTS does.
- 3How complex is your academic program? Multi-division, multi-track, or cross-listed courses push you toward Blackbaud.
- 4How important is integrated advancement? If development and admissions need the same database as registrar, Blackbaud's unified data wins.
- 5What is your tolerance for a difficult year? A migration in a year that already has leadership turnover, accreditation, or a capital campaign is a migration that will fail.
What a Realistic Transition Looks Like
A well-run FACTS-to-Blackbaud migration is staged. The implementation team usually starts with the academic SIS and gradebook, then layers in enrollment management, then tuition management, then advancement. Trying to flip everything at once is the single most common failure mode we see — and the one most likely to generate a panicked rescue call to a firm like ours in October.
The right partner for the migration matters more than the platform. A vendor-agnostic firm with deep Blackbaud experience can both run the migration and tell you honestly when migration is the wrong move. A pure Blackbaud reseller will sometimes do the latter, but their incentives are not aligned with yours in the way an independent advisor's are.
The Cost of Staying When You Shouldn't
The flip side of overestimating migration cost is underestimating the cost of staying on the wrong platform. The signs are not subtle, but they tend to be normalized: registrar staff working weekends to produce a single complex report, the development office maintaining a parallel donor database in a spreadsheet because the SIS won't talk to it, faculty who have given up on the gradebook and email parents PDF screenshots instead. None of those costs show up on the SIS invoice, but they are real, and they compound.
We tell schools to put a dollar value on the workarounds before deciding to keep them. If your registrar spends ten hours a week on tasks the system should do automatically, that is roughly $25,000 of fully-loaded labor cost per year, every year. Three years of that pays for most of a migration.
Our Honest Take
For schools under 150 students with stable staffing, FACTS is often the right answer indefinitely. For schools over 250 with growing complexity, Blackbaud usually pays off — if the migration is well-run and the school commits to building real internal expertise. The grey zone, 150-250 students, is where we spend most of our advisory time, and it's where the five-question framework above does the most work.
If you'd like an outside read on whether your school sits on the right side of the line, our education practice does focused, vendor-agnostic assessments — no obligation to use us for the migration if you decide to make one.