CounselMore vs. CollegePlannerPro:
Which College Planning Software Should I Use to Start My College Planning Practice? Comparison of two software platforms
Comparing software is what we do, not professionally but we're knowledgable enough that we take opinions on everything tech. When it comes to education technology, we've seen a lot! We compare software based on many factors but most importantly the user’s ability to capitalize on the platform to meet specific goals of the broad addressable-user. This is a comparison of College Planner Pro and CounselMore, both educational service management softwares for college readiness practitioners who provide guidance on college shopping, selection, application and enrollment choices directly to students and families. This is an opinion article.
By attending and watching several publicly available recorded demonstrations of both software platforms, interviewing attendees of both software demonstrations and reviewing public information of previous comparisons and more recent analysis, we offer this comparison and out humble opinions, and the best part is, you don't have to agree with us.
Choosing the right college planning software is crucial for independent educational consultants (IECs), school counselors, and non-profits.
Both CounselMore and CollegePlannerPro offer solutions, but a closer look reveals that CounselMore provides a more robust, versatile, and innovative platform designed to streamline your operations and elevate your services.
Here's the facts:
Streamlined Operations and Time Optimization differences between:
CollegePlanner Pro and CounselMore College Counseling Software
Hands down, CounselMore excels in simplifying workflows and freeing up your time. This was immediately demonstrated by the functionality titled: Routine Assignments. A practitioner can create a curriculum per offering and standardize service delivery. Standardized repeatable processes are a time-tested proven essential to successful service focused businesses/programs.
The repeatable curriculum can be unique to the practitioner's need but CounselMore also offers a standard curriculum based on identified best-practices. Curriculum can be applied per grade level or topic and automatically activates assignments, such as: sending action-items to the Junior grade, while the counselor actual time focuses on the Seniors. This automation, along with features like Google Drive sharing and client information collection, allows the counselor to manage more clients without compromising quality. CounselMore also provides time-tracking tools for invoicing and grant reporting.
CollegePlannerPro also offers similar tools but when pressed we were able to find out from long-time, current users that the utilization was added more recently than CounselMore's routine assignment functions. The CollegePlanner Pro user told us they used the repeatable to-do as a convenience for mitigating unnecessary typing but the option didn't seem to wedge into a broader identified process work flow. As a software developer, I'm going to guess the feature was added as a response and not as an integration into the specific use-case scenarios of the actual customer needs. I could be wrong, this is only a guess.
CollegePlanner Pro also had time tracking and invoicing, but again it does not appear to have the same degree of functions attached to specific process detail or flow.
Enhanced Client Experience differences between CounselMore College Counseling Software and CollegePlanner Pro
CounselMore offers three portals per Active student record, Counselor Portal, Student Portal, Parent Portal. Unique to CounselMore is the dedicated Parent Portal to keep parents engaged and informed, while also allowing them to collaborate in the college search process. This offering spoke to the nuanced need (identified through pre-demonstration interviews) of the college planning practitioner, who may want to divide communications and viewpoints between the two stakeholders. CounselMore answered to the unique needs of the practitioner.
It's fair to mention, when this was uncovered in our study, it was the beginning of a list of needs CounselMore has identified and delivered tools built for specific use-case. As a fellow developer, this spoke to the integrity of CounselMore's technology development process.
CollegePlanner Pro does provide a way to communicate with parents and students, but it does not seem to have this same level of focused engagement for parents. There is a over-reliance on external email-communication instead of a technology solution managing communications. An over-reliance on email seemed to be a pervasive problem for every practitioner who participated in our interview. CounselMore's curriculum of "assignments" was emailed externally while also being managed in the app. Interesting!
CounselMore also provides a Student Portal with a modern web interface designed to be engaging but respect the student’s time. The appreciation for efficiency has been something student-users have been vocal about as determined by written reviews and a subject's comment:
"I asked a student (not-my-student) what they thought of CounselMore and she said she loved the App Tracker - thats' why I bought CounselMore, and my students love it too!"
Moreover, CounselMore boats a staggering 70% student portal engagement rate on their website.
CounselMore's 3 portals all look, feel and operate the same. CollegePlannerPro also enables students to engage with their college lists, but not with a same user interface. Unlike CounselMore, the planners who choose CollegePlanner Pro will have to learn two platforms in order to serve their students on the student portal and will not have a parent portal to divide stakeholders' interests throughout the process. Although cumbersome this may only be a consideration for those less tech savvy study participants.
College Search and List Building
CounselMore’s unique college admissions database of 3,000 domestic and international schools includes application requirements
and essay prompts. The data is from Peterson's data wholesalers and updated. It appears that both CounselMore and CollegePlanner Pro offer similar data although CounselMore offers many many more data points than CollegePlanner Pro. CounselMore offers compelling capabilities to store and save additional data points and edit the information. This collaboration of traditional data and the user's ability to add to the search apparatus told a story of user-needs. Participants said that educational consultants provide different types of services and they recognized this capability as a place they could save unique things they liked to track. Having the essay prompts and application requirements available as part of the college application project management was a clear winner for every participant. CounselMore provides this information in even its lowest $35 per month plan! More on price below.
CounselMore’s multi Phase College List Builder helps create tailored lists quickly and build a process for managing the apps simultaneously.
The information is date stamped for freshness and leads to efficient college finding, list building and application tracking.
CollegePlannerPro also provides college profiles, but the sources do not describe an integrated database like CounselMore's. CounselMore further helps to shape a student’s application persona, which maximizes admission and scholarship opportunities. Practitioners can also see their overall results against other practitioners to reflect on their strategies. CounselMore was a clear winner on data offering.
Application Management of CollegePlanner Pro
CounselMore provides an application tracker to effortlessly track deadlines and ensure timely submissions. These requirements are stacked into email communications keeping everyone on track with steady automated communication. It also helps with the essay process by exporting all essays to Google Drive, directly into the student’s folder, on the counselor's Google Drive, streamlining the process and maintaining the counselor's ownership over information.
CollegePlannerPro enables storage of files and documents by copy and paste linking, whereas CounselMore’s is integrated with the Counselor’s Google Drive choice. College Planner Pro also does not seem to have an application process tracker although it had a place to check off when the application was done. In this side-by-side study, the student’s application profile could not be completed, nor the project management intention of our study participants, nor the final goal of application outcome recording.
Data-Driven Insights of CounselMore College Planning Software
CounselMore provides valuable analytical data reports to enable you and your students to make informed decisions.
While CollegePlannerPro does allow counselors to customize profiles and store information, it also doesn't appear to offer the same level of data analysis. CounselMore also provides client facing broadcasts, newsletters and messaging to keep everyone updated.
An standout feature CounselMore has is the ability to parse and communicate with specific students all applying to a specific school. Participants immediately found value in that functionality.
Flexibility and Scalability and Opinions
CounselMore is designed to adapt to your practice, whether you are a single counselor or a multi-counselor organization. You can add or remove additional counselors licenses each month without a contract. More on price below. CounselMore offers account setup, which we believe to be a consultative meeting supported by video tutorials. There are several listings for public community events, which we attended 3 in one week and found the community to be knowledgeable and friendly.
In addition to the community, we were offer a network of experienced professionals and partners, who offer coaching services specific to CounselMore. These services were offered by recognized educational consultants. Participants commented that if they choose CounselMore they would investigate these and other peripheral resources. They found value in the offering.
CollegePlanner Pro is also used by many counselors, but none of the sources described the same level of flexibility, scalability or community support that CounselMore offered, which is why it is mentioned here.
User Experience of CollegePlanner Pro
CounselMore's simple user-friendly design makes learning for the student client easy. On the Counselor side, long-term (more than one year using CounselMore) practitioners say they “spent time” getting to know CounselMore and make incremental improvements as they understood the capabilities. Many new users of CounselMore expressed an initial challenge and panic to knowing what to do first in CounselMore but all unanimously agreed the “time was worth it” as they say it increased their "freedom" from routine administrative tasks.
“It works great but I had to make an effort to make choices about my practice and how I wanted to deliver services. There were plug-n-play options that I employed but there were absolutely choices that I avoided when building the practice that CounselMore helped me to enforce best practices based on their studies - and that has made all the difference! I handle 300 incoming families a year!” Dr. Jessica Ruzicka, Peer Mentor
“We use College Planner Pro with 30 counselors and most of our practice is outside of College Planner Pro. Too many systems! I like that CounselMore is a hub for the practice. We are still investigating everything it can do, it seems like that is part of any software adoption. Now that our process is built into the list builder and our assignments represent the product - we are feeling more confident about how we will grow beyond 30 counselors!” A counselor presently in a trial of CounselMore
Key Takeaways of comparing CollegePlanner Pro and CounselMore
While both CollegePlannerPro and CounselMore are designed to support educational consultants, CounselMore stands out as a more innovative and comprehensive solution. Its advanced features, emphasis on student and parent engagement, and powerful college search tools give it a distinct edge in the market.
During our not-scientific research, we observed that many practitioners relied on tools like Google Sheets to manage their services, bypassing specialized software altogether. This highlighted a significant opportunity for software platforms to showcase their value through demonstrations, especially for consultants who are unaware of what these tools can offer. Many survey responders were unclear on what constituted the product of educational services but were about to open companies specializing in the service. When asked what they would provide, the response was varied with a common list of "student-needs" but not a repeatable practice os service delivery...see paragraph one of this article. In those circumstances the college-planner-to-be found CounselMore a "relief" to know there was a process they "could follow",
Interestingly, many attendees of the study’s demonstrations—were part of a certificate program at a university’s continuing education center—came in with pre-existing opinions about both platforms. After experiencing demos of CounselMore and CollegePlannerPro, there was a marked increase in CounselMore’s ratings. This underscores the importance of hands-on demonstrations to help potential customers fully appreciate any software's capabilities.
It’s noteworthy that initial skepticism about CounselMore sometimes existed without prior usage. This phenomenon may stem from factors such as the influence of market incumbency, unverified assumptions, marketing tactics, or other biases. However, post-demonstration shifts in perception reaffirm CounselMore’s potential to reshape industry standards and deliver unparalleled value to educational consultants.
This was a fun project and in no way scientific but we believe offers a novice a healthy plain look at why CounselMore was chosen for an EdTech award three times.
Addendum
The Price Comparison between CollegePlanner Pro and CounselMore
Choosing the right college planning software involves more than just features; it's also about getting the best value for your investment. While both CounselMore and CollegePlannerPro offer solutions for educational consultants, a closer look reveals that
CounselMore's pricing model provides greater flexibility and cost-effectiveness, especially as your practice evolves.
Both software companies offer per-student pricing, but CounselMore stands out with a significantly lower per-student cost compared to CollegePlannerPro. CounselMore’s flexible plan allows customers to easily scale their billing up or down based on their needs, providing unmatched adaptability for growing practices.
Scalability and Flexible Licensing between CollegePlanner Pro and CounselMore
One of the key advantages of CounselMore is its
scalability. The platform is designed to adapt to your needs whether you're a solo counselor or part of a larger team. This is particularly evident in their licensing model. CounselMore allows you to
add licenses when more counselors are needed and remove them when they're not. This kind of flexibility is ideal for practices that experience seasonal fluctuations or that are in a stage of growth, allowing for better budget management.
While CollegePlannerPro is used by over 2,000 independent educational consultants (so says their website), the sources do not provide specific details about its pricing model or licensing flexibility. This lack of information makes it difficult to assess whether CollegePlannerPro offers similar cost-saving opportunities. Through anecdotal conversations we were told that CollegePlanner Pro has an added burden of a limiting the number of Active students that can be added to an account without being forced to move to a higher price point. Because of this practitioners said they often "turned student records off" temporarily to make adjustments on other records and had to remember who to turn back on later. For this reason CounselMore's pricing structure offered greater flexibility without commitment.
Cost-Effective Features between CollegePlanner Pro and CounselMore
CounselMore is designed to streamline operations, reduce errors, and automate many administrative tasks, such as time management, client information collection, and Google Drive sharing. These time-saving features translate to cost savings by allowing you to focus on more essential aspects of your business, like your client interactions and unique programming, without increasing overhead.
CounselMore automates the process of sending assignment emails to students and parents, and following up with automated text messages, saving you time and money.
CollegePlannerPro offers features to help users stay organized, including file storage, time tracking, texting and invoicing. These features also likely contribute to time savings. However, the sources do not explicitly state that CollegePlannerPro offers them "time savings" or the same kind of automation that CounselMore does in terms of assignment emails, client info collection, Google Drive integration, and follow-up texting.
Transparency and Value between CollegePlanner Pro and CounselMore
CounselMore offers a 14-day free trial, free set-up, and free live training, demonstrating a commitment to transparency and value for new users. This approach allows potential users to fully explore the platform's capabilities without any financial commitment, and get help with the initial set up.
CollegePlannerPro also offers a longer free, 30-days. However, it is unclear from the sources whether CollegePlannerPro offers free live training other than tech support.
Long-Term Cost Savings between CollegePlanner Pro and CounselMore
With CounselMore's flexible licensing, automated features, and focus on time optimization, the potential for long-term cost savings is significant. By streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency, CounselMore helps counselors serve more students without needing to increase staff or resources proportionally, which makes it especially beneficial for practices that are looking to scale. CounselMore also provides the means to track time for both grant reporting and invoicing, which helps a business manage its money effectively.
Lastly, leveraging CounselMore to deliver a business owner's proprietary curriculum creates a measurable, repeatable process. This not only enhances efficiency but also adds value to the business, positioning it for resale to the next generation of college counselors.
Key Takeaways
While both platforms provide valuable services,
CounselMore stands out for its cost-effectiveness because of its scalable licensing, automated features, and commitment to transparency. By choosing CounselMore, you are not only investing in a comprehensive college planning software, you are also making a smart decision that allows you to manage your budget better and grow your practice with reduced financial risk.
