Lazarus vs. Blackbaud
Blackbaud is built for schools with a development office.Yours has a head of school and a spreadsheet.
Blackbaud sells an enterprise-grade suite: admissions, SIS, tuition, financial aid, accounting, and fundraising that all talk to each other. If that's your world, it's a serious answer. If you run a school with a few dozen families and one administrator, you need something sharper, and that's what we make. Here's the honest version.
Details checked October 2026, from each company's own pages.
Blackbaud offers admissions and enrollment, a student information system and LMS, tuition and billing, financial aid, school accounting, fundraising, and a website system, sold as a bundle (Total School Solution) or module by module. Pricing is quote-based.
Pick Blackbaud if
- You're a larger, well-funded independent school.
- You need fundraising and fund accounting wired to your SIS and billing.
- You have staff to run an implementation project.
Pick Lazarus if
- You're a small private, charter, or faith-based school and don't need an SIS yet.
- You want to start free and add billing when you're ready.
- You'd rather be live this week than after a multi-month rollout.
Side by side
Lazarus and Blackbaud, line by line
| Feature | Lazarus | Blackbaud |
|---|---|---|
| Student information system | No. No gradebook, attendance, or transcripts. | Yes, with an LMS. |
| Online enrollment applications | Yes. Free to use. One application per household. | Yes: inquiries, applications, checklists, funnel reporting. |
| Tuition billing and payment plans | Yes, from the Basic plan. | Yes: installment plans, a payment portal, posting to the general ledger. |
| Fundraising and accounting | No. | Yes. |
| Published pricing | Yes. Free, $3, and $6 per active student per month. | No. Quote-based. Review sites list K-12 plans from about $21,000 a year. |
| Setup help | Free onboarding on every plan, with help migrating your data. | Implementation is a project. One reviewer reports a fee of several thousand dollars. |
| Cancel any time | Yes. You're never locked in. | Not published. |
Blackbaud doesn't publish prices. The $21,000 starting figure comes from Capterra and Software Advice listings, not from Blackbaud, and your quote depends on school size and modules. A 100-student school on Lazarus Basic pays $3,600 a year.
Where Blackbaud wins
Everything under one roof, at scale. Fundraising, fund accounting, an SIS, and billing in one system is a real advantage for a school with a development office and a business manager. We don't try to compete there.
Where we pull ahead
Speed and fit. Reviewers describe starting prices in the tens of thousands, heavy implementations, and a steep learning curve. Lazarus starts free, onboarding costs nothing, and each tool does one job, so a part-time administrator can run them. If your pain is applications and tuition, you shouldn't have to buy a campus-wide platform to fix it.
Why Lazarus
A small team with a lot of road behind it
We're small by choice. It's why we move the way we do, and why you get a partner who's done this kind of thing before instead of a vendor with a queue.
Systems, not features
Anyone can bolt on a button. We design how applications, households, billing, and events work together, so a family's information is entered once and every part of your school uses it.
Nimble on purpose
No committee and no quarterly roadmap to wait for. Dozens of changes ship every month, and when a school tells us what's missing, it gets built instead of logged.
Experience from outside the industry
We've spent our careers building products in fintech and search at scale, and running service businesses. We brought that know-how to an underserved industry to make software that's beautiful, functional, affordable, and intentional.
For the teacher who became a founder
Starting a school means wearing hats you've never worn: admissions director, billing clerk, webmaster. We know that feeling, and we built Lazarus so the move from teacher to school leader is as smooth and rewarding as it can be.
Need grades or attendance? Much of what the bigger systems offer is on our roadmap, and being small means we can build it fast, alongside the schools that need it first. Tell us what matters most.
Your questions, answered
Get quick answers to the most common questions about our platform and services.
See all questionsIs Lazarus a cheaper alternative to Blackbaud?
For enrollment applications and tuition billing, yes: collecting applications is free and billing starts at $3 per active student per month. Blackbaud covers far more (SIS, fundraising, accounting), so it isn't a like-for-like replacement.
How much does Blackbaud K-12 cost?
Blackbaud doesn't publish pricing. Capterra and Software Advice list K-12 plans from about $21,000 per year, with the final quote depending on school size and modules.
Does Lazarus have an SIS or gradebook like Blackbaud?
No. Lazarus handles enrollment applications, households, tuition billing, and events, but not grades, attendance, or transcripts.
Sources, checked October 2026
We make Lazarus, so weigh this accordingly. If something here is out of date, tell us and we'll fix it.
Also compare: Lazarus vs. FACTS, Lazarus vs. Sycamore, Lazarus vs. Brightwheel, Lazarus vs. Procare, Lazarus vs. Spark, or see how we compare feature by feature.
See if it fits your school
Start free, collect applications today, and add billing when you're ready. Bring your spreadsheets and we'll help you move.