Free Attendance Management for K-12 Schools

The Community Edition is genuinely free under LGPLv3 — you can download it, run it forever, modify the code, and never pay OpenEduCat a cent. The honest catch: you (or your IT staff) host it on a server you rent or own. A small Linux VPS that comfortably runs attendance for a 1,500-student school costs $10-30/month from providers like DigitalOcean, Hetzner, or Linode. There is no usage cap, no per-student license check, no phone-home. Some optional add-ons (one-click state-reporting connectors, SAML/SSO) are paid; the core attendance, roster, tardy tracking, parent notifications, and Ed-Fi export are not.

You provision a small Linux server (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM is enough for under 2,000 students), install OpenEduCat with the documented install script or a Docker compose file, point your district subdomain at it, and add SSL via Let's Encrypt. Day-to-day, you run apt updates, take nightly database backups (pg_dump in a cron job), and apply OpenEduCat point releases two or three times a year. If your IT team has ever stood up a WordPress site or a Moodle instance, this is the same workload. If you have no IT staff, we don't recommend self-host — pay an Odoo/OpenEduCat partner $50-150/month for managed hosting or use a different product.

The free export produces CSV and XML files that match the Ed-Fi Alliance StudentSchoolAttendanceEvent specification — the same data model adopted by 35+ state education agencies, including Texas (PEIMS via TSDS), Indiana, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. For California's CALPADS, the export covers the core attendance fields used in the CALPADS Student Absence Summary (SABS) file, but the final SIF/CSV layout that CALPADS expects requires either a small mapping step (free, documented) or our paid CALPADS connector add-on (around $40/month). For Texas PEIMS, the Ed-Fi v3 export is directly ingestible by TSDS. We document field mappings on our help site and on the Ed-Fi Alliance Tech Docs site (techdocs.ed-fi.org).

The software is free. SMS sending is a separate gateway cost the school pays directly to whichever provider it chooses — OpenEduCat does not mark this up. As a rough yardstick: Twilio US SMS is currently about $0.0079 per message; a typical 600-student school with a 5% daily absence rate sending one SMS per absence pays roughly $7/month. AWS SNS, MessageBird, and Plivo are similar. International rates vary. If you don't want SMS at all, email notifications via your existing SMTP server (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or your own postfix) are completely free.

Yes, but the cost is hardware, not software. A USB or networked RFID card reader runs $80-300; printable RFID cards are roughly $0.50-1.50 each in bulk. Fingerprint readers run $150-500. QR check-in needs no extra hardware — students scan from a printed badge. We do not sell the hardware and we don't take a cut; you buy from Amazon, ZKTeco, HID, or a local supplier and plug it in. The OpenEduCat attendance module is the same Community Edition module regardless of which input method you use.

Two paths. (1) For paper roll-books, most schools digitize only the current and prior year — older data is kept as scanned PDFs attached to each student record (the Community Edition document module handles attachments). (2) For an existing SIS like PowerSchool, Infinite Campus, or a legacy Skyward install, export attendance as CSV (student ID, date, period, attendance code) and load it through OpenEduCat's CSV import tool — typically a half-day job for one IT person per year of history. We publish a step-by-step migration recipe in our documentation and there is a community Discord where other school admins have shared their import scripts.