e²e²Record-keeping software has one job: prove what your child actually learned. Here is what the three main paid apps cost, what they capture, and whether you can get your data back out.
Homeschool Tracker, Homeschool Planet, and Homeschool Manager are the three paid apps that dominate homeschool tracker app searches, and all three were built as planners first. That matters because a planner records what you intended to teach, not what actually happened, and a home education assessor, whoever reviews your home education, wants to see the second one. This compares what each one costs, what it actually captures, and whether your records survive if you cancel.
A record-keeping app has one job with three parts. It needs to:
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Founding Families: the first 10. €9 a month, or €90 a year, instead of €15. Your rate stays for as long as you stay. Use what helps now. Ignore what doesn't. No obligation to give feedback or take part in research. If you tell me what's working or missing, I'll listen. Your records are yours. You can export them any time.
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For home-educating families raising a 2e child: gifted and neurodivergent at once, often PDA, autistic, ADHD or AuDHD.
Most of the software marketed to home educators does the opposite. It plans lessons, assigns grades, and tracks a curriculum you may not be following, which leaves you translating afterwards instead of recording as you go. For more on what actually counts in that kind of record, see how to build a home education portfolio without worksheets.
For a neurodivergent child, that gap matters more. A tool that expects a child to complete assignments, hit streaks, or log their own work becomes one more demand stacked on a day that already has plenty. Recording works better when it happens quietly, on the parent's side, after the fact.
Homeschool Tracker costs $8 a month, $65 a year, or $119 for two years. A single subscription covers one administrator, three teacher accounts, and up to twenty students, which is aimed at co-ops and larger families as much as a single household.
Its strength is depth and portability. It logs grades, attendance, and lesson plans, and it exports your lesson plans, your resource library, and a student's agenda as CSV files, alongside PDF reports. Nothing is locked into the software.
The gap is the one true of most planner-first tools: a day that didn't follow the plan, an afternoon spent taking a bike engine apart instead of the scheduled lesson, has nowhere obvious to go. You can force it into an assignment record, but the software wasn't built for it.
Homeschool Planet's standard family plan is $9.95 a month or $84.95 a year. It's planner-first: a shared family calendar, drag-and-drop lesson scheduling, and reminders that sync across everyone in the household.
Its record-keeping exists to support the plan. Report cards, transcripts, attendance, and assignment lists print or save to PDF, and if your family follows a set curriculum, that reporting is genuinely useful.
The record is a by-product of ticking off a schedule, not something built to capture what happened outside it. There's no CSV or raw data export we could find, only formatted printouts, so switching tools means starting your history over.
Homeschool Manager is the cheapest of the three: $5.99 a month or $49 a year, with one plan and no tiers to compare. It covers scheduling, grading, attendance, book lists, and volunteer hours.
Report cards and transcripts go through a short wizard and are stored in the student's document section, which is simpler than either of the other two tools.
It still assumes assigned, gradable work. There's no confirmed way to export raw records, only printable report cards and transcripts, so an unstructured learning day is as hard to log here as anywhere else.
Yes, up to a point, and it's where most home educators start. A spreadsheet with a column per area and a row per day costs nothing and asks nothing of the software.
The cost shows up later. You build and maintain the structure yourself, decide the categories, and re-enter anything you want to search or filter afterwards. In a hard week, when logging is the first thing to slip, a blank template stays blank, and there's no report waiting at the end of it.
This question gets skipped in most comparisons, and it matters more than price if you ever need to move. Homeschool Tracker is the only one of the three with a genuine raw-data export: CSV files for lesson plans, your resource library, and a student's agenda, on top of PDF reports.
Homeschool Planet and Homeschool Manager both produce polished printouts, report cards, transcripts, attendance summaries, but neither has a documented way to export the data behind them. If you cancel, you keep the PDFs you already saved and nothing else.
That's fine if a printout is all you'll ever need. It's a problem if you want to search five years of entries by area later, which is closer to what an assessor actually asks for.
If you're weighing Irish options specifically, including how Tusla fits into all this, see our comparison of home education apps in Ireland.
Planning does not work well for a PDA child. Demand avoidance means a plan itself reads as a demand, and the instinct is to refuse it.
An assigned curriculum triggers that response, and so does an app that expects a child to log their own progress.
That's the same problem with homeschool.ie, and with any tool built for a child who will sit down and do the lesson. Homeschooling a PDA child is a different reality: a monumental challenge that leaves a fixed plan in pieces.
None of the five options above were built around one idea: that a record should hold onto raw moments, not just a summary of them. E Squared logs a moment when it happens, a photo and a couple of sentences, tags it to a key skill, and builds a report from that history rather than from a plan you ticked off.
I'm not a spreadsheet person, and being neurodivergent myself, tidy structure was never going to be how I kept records either. I know what works for my kids.
What I couldn't face was the thought of pulling everything into shape before an assessment. Just thinking about it gave me a real knot in my stomach.
At our first assessment, I told our assessor how I planned to homeschool: the tools, the methods, the general approach. I also mentioned an idea I had for a record-keeping tool of my own, and she loved it.
Our next assessment is two years away. Between now and then, all I need to do is click a button and get a full report on my children's learning. That's a genuine relief, and it answers the question that used to nag at me: am I doing enough?
That's the gap the app is meant to close: recording that happens quietly, on the parent's side, so the child-facing side never turns into one more demand. E Squared is still in development, not a finished product yet.
If a record-keeping tool built around a real day, not a lesson plan, is what you've been looking for, you can hold a place on the founding-families list.
How is record-keeping different from planning?
A plan states what you intend to teach and when. A record states what actually happened: what your child did, for how long, and what came of it. Planning software tracks intentions and marks them complete. Record-keeping software needs to hold onto the messy, unplanned version of a day, because that's what a home education assessor is actually looking for evidence of.
Do I need separate software for each child?
No. Homeschool Tracker, Homeschool Planet, and Homeschool Manager all support multiple students under one family subscription, usually up to a set number before a higher tier applies. A spreadsheet or notes app scales the same way: one file, a column or tag per child. The limit worth checking before you pay is the student cap on a plan, not whether multiple children are supported at all.
What about apps for neurodivergent learners?
None of the three paid apps compared here were designed with a neurodivergent child in mind. All of them assume assigned, gradable work, which becomes a demand in itself for a child who avoids demands. The workaround most families use is recording on the parent's side only, after the fact, so the record never becomes something the child has to complete.
Are any of these free?
Not the three paid apps. Each offers a free trial, typically 30 days, before billing starts. Spreadsheets, Google Docs, and free notes apps cost nothing but your own time to build and maintain the structure, which is a real cost, just not a financial one.
Can I export my records if I switch tools?
Only reliably with Homeschool Tracker, which exports CSV files alongside PDF reports. Homeschool Planet and Homeschool Manager produce PDF report cards and transcripts you can save as you go, but neither has a documented way to export the underlying data. If portability matters to you, save PDFs regularly regardless of which tool you use, and treat CSV export as a real feature to check for, not an assumption.