Firstly, hats off to the team at Reach, they've built a great product to help schools. If you're here evaluating Orah vs. Reach or looking for Reach alternatives then you're already taking the right steps to track and improve student life on campus. Both companies operate globally, supporting a myriad of different schools around the world.
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The Orah Student Life platform helps schools to deliver a high-standard of care. We believe, like many others do, that the health, well-being & safety of a student must be addressed first in order to enable a student to reach their fullest potential at school.
Reach have focused on quantity of features as a way to win schools over as clients, while Orah have chosen to focus on helping schools achieve the most pressing issues facing schools to a world-class standard.
If anything, this is a major point to consider when evaluating these two systems. Orah's approach requires discipline around the scope of a project to make sure that the primary value of a system is not diluted with add-ons or products that look good on paper, but don't necessarily work as best as they can.
In short, if you're wanting reliable software to know where your students are, know that they're safe/healthy and facilitate seamless, real-time communication with an easy-to-use platform, you're in the right place. We created Orah, a reliable & beautifully-designed Student Life Platform.
Our Orah experts are here to help you and your team safeguard your students and improve student life.
Orah's user experience is built so that everyone can pick it up and use it in minutes, it doesn't require complicated help articles or dedicated staff just to make sure it's working properly. Many of our customers who have made the switch to Orah cite the long training times required to get their staff up-to-speed with Reach.
To be fair to Reach, Orah has been praised for its user experience since we started – and we've invested a lot of time and resource into getting our platform up to this standard. But while Reach might not boast the same modern interface, they do have decent help documentation available.
Orah ensures you can easily complete the full picture for where your students are and how they're doing.
Orah's platform does this by allowing your school to:
This gives you the 360* view of student life all in one platform.
With native apps for all devices, your staff can actually move around with Orah and operate on the go with apps that simply work.
Without reliable smartphone apps, your staff end up investing their valuable time to manually update a system behind their desk, rather than interacting with their students.
That's the Orah difference.
I asked our Customer Success and Sales team this simple question to help you understand the differences, they gave us a handful of clear reasons, a few with strong consensus.
Orah works in collaboration with a modern school tech landscape. You can sync important information back and forth between Orah and your SIS - like student sign in/out information showing your classroom teacher's why students might be off-campus or away from their class without any unnecessary follow up.
Orah's attendance tools were designed so that schools who prefer to update their system of record in real-time, can do so without building and maintaining complicated API pushbacks to their student information system. This means that a staff member could take attendance in Orah, and have it update the school's system of record. Alternatively, many schools have opted to make Orah their system of record for school attendance.
Orah's known to be the most reliable software of the two, it's why many of our clients have made the switch. Orah boasts a 99.9% uptime.
It's hard to get value from a software platform when the data entry or data storage is unreliable due to crashing, slow or clunky applications.
We're just a few years away from 2030; parents are millennials or younger now. These families want modern, easy-to-use applications to interact with your school.
Orah's Family app is exactly that, and is preferred by leading schools around the world.
Orah is ISO 27001 certified. At the time of writing (November 2023), Reach Boarding is not ISO 27001 certified.
