Best homeschool tracker for UK families 2026
An honest five-tool round-up of homeschool trackers for UK home educators in 2026. Built around UK law, council reports, and how families actually log their week.
We spent a weekend with five homeschool trackers a UK family might realistically shortlist, scored each one on five criteria, and then wrote down what we actually thought. One of them is ours, so we have set the bar deliberately high for honesty: where another tool beats Willowfolio, we say so in the same paragraph. If by the end you pick a competitor, we would rather you pick the right one than the one we make.
How we scored them.
Each tool gets a score out of 5 on five criteria, for a total out of 25. The criteria are weighted toward what a UK home educator actually deals with day to day, not the spec sheet a US tool happens to ship with.
- UK home-ed law fit. Does the tool understand Section 7 of the Education Act 1996, the Section 437 informal-enquiry flow, Key Stages, and the council-report use case? A US transcript generator does not count.
- Pricing for a typical UK family. Real cost in pounds for the plan a family of one to two children would actually pick, not the marketing teaser.
- Daily-use UX. Can a parent log a real activity, with subject, child, photo, and a note, from a phone in under a minute, without a planning ritual first?
- Multi-child handling at three or more.Does the price curve and the interface still feel sane once you have three, four, or five children logging in the same week?
- Data portability and cancellation. Can you leave cleanly: export your records, get a refund if it did not suit, and avoid an annual lock-in that turns into regret?
Everything below was verified on 13 May 2026 against each tool’s own product or pricing page. Competitor pricing changes faster than we would like, so we re-check this round- up every 90 days. One pricing page (My School Year) returned a 403 on verification day, and we flag that in the relevant card.
The ranking.
Willowfolio
- Price
- £3.75/month first child, £2/month each additional, capped at £11.75/month for five
- Best for
- UK families who want calm record keeping and a council-report PDF without thinking about it.
What works
- Designed end-to-end against UK home-ed law, not a US tool with a Section 7 sticker on it. Key Stages, council-report PDF, and informal-enquiry framing are built in, not bolted on.
- Family-honest pricing: three children pays £7.75/month, five children pays £11.75/month. Both undercut every other paid tool in this round-up.
- Monthly only, with a 30-day refund and a 30-day grace window after cancellation. There is no annual contract to regret.
- UK-operated under UK GDPR. Your child's records sit on EU servers with encrypted off-site backups, and photo location data is stripped on upload before it ever reaches our database. Privacy as standard, not a paid tier.
What does not
- Newest tool in the shortlist. We launched in 2026, so we do not have a 20-year track record to point at.
- Web app rather than a native iOS or Android build today. It installs to your home screen with one tap on Android Chrome, and via the Share menu on iOS Safari, so it sits next to your other apps like a regular icon. A native build is on the roadmap.
- Photo storage above 200MB costs extra at £2 per 5GB, where some US tools bundle larger allowances into a higher annual tier.
Homeschooly
- Price
- Free tier, then £2.99/month or £29.99/year (saves 16%), with a 7-day trial
- Best for
- One-child or two-child UK households on iPhone who want a privacy-first, native-app feel.
What works
- Genuinely UK-built and UK-aware. The free report template names Section 437(1) of the Education Act 1996 explicitly, which almost no other tool in this shortlist does.
- Privacy is the headline of the marketing rather than the small print, with the operator explicitly positioning Homeschooly as a quieter, less data-hungry option. Verifying any specific architecture claim is on the buyer.
- True native iOS app with a clean Switch Learners pattern, photo plus reflection per activity, and the lowest single-user price in the shortlist.
What does not
- Does not model Key Stages explicitly, which gets awkward when a local authority asks for evidence by stage rather than by date.
- Refunds run through the App Store or Play Store rather than a first-party window. Less generous than a 30-day money-back from the company itself.
- Switch Learners is fine for one or two children. For three or more, a family dashboard you can live inside is faster.
My School Year
- Price
- Around $40/year for the family edition, with a 30-day free trial and a Price Lock Guarantee
- Best for
- Planning-first families who like a US-style planbook and a flat annual fee.
What works
- Best annual flat-rate value of the US tools in this shortlist, if the headline figure holds. A family edition covers multiple children at one price.
- The Price Lock Guarantee is a real differentiator: your annual rate does not rise while you stay continuously subscribed.
- Long award history. Multi-year i-Learn Award winner and HowToHomeschool.net Top Pick across 2020 to 2026, which is a fair signal it will not vanish in 18 months.
What does not
- The pricing page was not publicly fetchable on our verification date, so confirm the current rate live before you commit.
- US framing throughout. Transcripts, report cards, and instructional hours are the centrepiece, and a UK council report is a shape-this-yourself job.
- Planbook-first orientation suits a parent who plans ahead. The quick log-what-we-did-today moment needs setup first.
Homeschool Panda
- Price
- Free community tier, then $5/month Essentials or $8/month Pro, with a 30-day no-card trial
- Best for
- Families who want the social and community layer alongside their tracking.
What works
- The community layer (groups, messaging, local connections) is genuinely differentiated. No other tool in this shortlist ships one.
- Tidy planner plus book tracker plus student portal is daily-use friendly, and the writing UI is calmer than the spec sheet suggests.
- The 30-day free trial does not ask for a card up front, which is a fair way to find out whether the shape of the tool suits you.
What does not
- Pro is built around a US college-application transcript, which is not a UK home-ed need.
- No refunds on annual prepayments. Same trap as Homeschool Tracker if you commit for a year and change your mind in week three.
- Multi-child pricing is not crisply published on the pricing page, which is itself a planning headache for a family of three or more.
Homeschool Tracker
- Price
- From around US$8/month (monthly), or approximately US$65/year for up to 20 students (sourced from third-party listings, not verified on the publisher's pricing page on 2026-05-14). No free trial. No refunds.
- Best for
- Curriculum-heavy planners running three or more children on formal courses, or co-ops where one annual fee can cover up to 20 students.
What works
- Deepest record-keeping and reporting feature set in the shortlist, with 20-plus years of iteration behind it. Sixteen report types cover transcripts, report cards, attendance, skill assessments, resource lists, and to-do lists.
- Flat-rate annual pricing covers one Administrator, three Teacher accounts, and up to 20 students, which is genuinely strong for big families and co-ops.
- Strong on lesson planning if you actually want to plan a curriculum week by week, with reading lists, field trips, and assignment-level detail.
What does not
- Zero UK-specific framing. The 16 report types are US gradebook and transcript shapes, and a parent would reshape the outputs by hand for a local-authority enquiry.
- The single hardest line in the shortlist: no free trial, and the publisher's pricing page is explicit that refunds are not provided in whole or for prorated periods. Annual and two-year subscriptions are a real commitment.
- The depth that suits a curriculum-heavy planner is a daily-use tax for a Charlotte Mason, Montessori, or autonomous family, and photo evidence is not advertised as a first-class record type.
When our #1 isn’t right.
We mean that heading. A UK parent with one child, an iPhone, a strong privacy stance, and no real interest in Key Stages is genuinely better served by Homeschoolythan by us. Homeschooly is £2.99/month flat, markets a privacy-first posture, and is a real native app sitting on the home screen. Most of Willowfolio’s lead is built on things a one-child privacy-first family does not need: the £2-per-additional-child taper, the Key Stage scaffolding, the co-parent share, the council-report PDF. Take those out of the picture and Homeschooly is the calmer pick.
Equally, a planning-first family running a US-style scope- and-sequence will get more out of Homeschool Tracker or My School Yearthan out of our logger-shaped daily UX. Compared to those two, Willowfolio leans toward “write down what actually happened today” rather than “plot out the term in advance”. If your home-ed shape is the second thing, the right answer is one of the US tools, with the refund caveats above firmly in mind.
How we checked the facts.
Pricing and feature claims on this page were last verified on 13 May 2026 against each tool’s own product or pricing page. We re-check every 90 days. One source did not load on the day: the My School Year /Plans page returned a 403, so the ≈$40/year figure is sourced from a long-standing third-party listing and is worth confirming live before you buy. If you spot a number that has drifted, write to [email protected] and we will update on the next sweep.
If you want to see what calm record keeping actually feels like before you commit to any of the five, the Willowfolio demo is loaded with a fictional family so you can poke around without signing up. Our pricing page spells out the per-child taper in full, and the compare hub has the head-to-head pages if you have already narrowed it down to two.