brightwheel
reviews and complaints

We have had brightwheel for 3 months. They have undercharged customers 2 out of 3 months and then sent an apology email both times asking for us to please bear with them. A business can not pay its bills on apologies. They also misrepresented the features of the billing section of this app, one can not send out an invoice immediately or go back and add late charges or extra day charges to customers. They again asked us to bear with them as they fix this glitch and promised a discount until it’s fixed...no discount. The customers get confused because we have to tell them that brightwheel is undercharging them for some reason that we can’t explain because brightwheel has yet to explain the problem to us. Also customer service is nonexistent after the 1st month. We are currently looking for better quality services and there are many that do the same things and hopefully better!

I created an account but for some reason I’m not receiving anything from my daughters daycare. My sister receives everything. Because of her I know I have two different profiles somehow. Both use my email, but I only have access to the one not connected with the school.

I’d rather just have a sign in/out sheet when I pick up and drop off my daughter. I would rather talk to her teacher than have to rely on this app for updates on my daughter.

I don’t see how teachers have time to update parents and guardians on 20+ toddlers and still engage with them, but I guess that’s beside the point. My daughter had been in school almost a week and I haven’t been able to use this app at all.

How do I get access to the right profile? The school said they can’t fix it on their end and I have to call customer support. Anyone know the number? Cause I can’t find that either.

More than a little annoyed.

I use this app for my two kids who attend daycare. It’s great to see real-time what they are up to during the day and to communicate with daycare. I love that photos and videos can be posted in here! This really helps me to feel more connected to daycare, especially when pick up and drop off can be busy and doesn’t leave time for much discussion with the daycare staff. It’s also super convenient for making daycare payments.

Improvement Ideas - 1) Can you add a lost & found section that all parents can have access to? We have lost clothes at daycare and also had clothes sent home with us that aren’t ours. It would be awesome to have a spot to post photos of lost items or ISO posts that can be seen by other parents. 2) When I’m messaging about vacation days, early pick ups, etc. it would be nice to have an area to do that for both kids instead of having to post twice under each child’s tab.

This app is fairly reliable, intuitive to navigate and has a clean, appealing UI. Adding a few key features for parents would take it to the next level:
1. Display who sent a message. Currently, I only know if a note is from my child’s teacher, preschool director or an assistant if she/he remembers to sign their name.
2. Allow message threads. I need to be able to reply back to a specific message (this is compounded by not knowing who wrote a message).
3. Badge notifications. I want to be able to see quickly whether there are new notifications without opening the app and scrolling.
4. Enable payments. I should be able to view and pay an invoice from within the app.

With these 4 features, this app would be a solid five stars.

A bonus feature would be the ability to customize notifications by child (e.g. I have two kids and want to receive food notifications for one child but not the other).

I’ve been advised by our daycare provider that Brightwheel no longer allows staff to check children in and out, only parents. The problem is, my dad drops my daughter off and isn’t tech savvy, so he’s not able to. I like to know when my daughter has been dropped off and picked up with the convenience of the app. He takes her because of my working hours, so calling him isn’t always convenient (or safe if he’s on the road).

***Also, this is an extra check during the summer months when children are left in hot cars accidentally. Why not make this feature available for providers and thwart any accidental occurrences? If a dad is used to seeing those notifications at work and doesn’t get one, he can text mom and a crisis can possibly be avoided early… just because of a simple check in notification. It also helps the daycare providers keep tabs on everyone.

Please reconsider including this feature again!

Would you rather your child’s teacher have their focus on a tablet, entering information, or would you rather they were with your children, 100% focused, playing and giving them learning experiences? The problem with this app, and similar apps, is that it pulls too much of a teacher’s focus. As a former teacher and current administrator, I have seen how much of a distraction and interruption Brighthwheel is.

I get that parents, especially new parents, like to stay informed, but part of sending your child to daycare is learning how to let go. Brightwheel implies no trust between parents and teachers, and it’s insulting. It doesn’t surprise me that a parent, not a teacher, developed this app.

Bottom line- a teacher texting their friend vs a teacher entering in what the kids are for lunch; to the children it’s all the same! Their teacher is looking at a screen, not them, and what kind of lesson does that teach?

I've had multiple conversations with the developers and they have "taken feedback" and yet no one had addressed the badge issue. "That's the way it works" unfortunately does not work for users of this application. In case developers need clarification: "The iPhone uses badges to indicate that a new message, email, push notification, or voicemail is waiting. Each app with new unread information has a white number with a red background in the upper right hand corner of the appicon. This is a badge." This IS NOT how Brightwheel (looking more like ReinventingWheel) works.. The technicians say that the push notifications on lock screen are the only notification you get and that's the way it is. Once this app comes into some recent century and starts using badges correctly this app would be amazing. But for now it just sits unused and not letting me know about my child so it's a waste of funding and developers time.

Our daycare started using this app after the pandemic began - it’s an excellent way to keep parents informed while contact is limited. I love that all info is shared with my spouse, and cuts down on paper for the environment! We have switched classes and see that each teacher has flexibility to use as much or as little as they want. We love the updates throughout the day while working - one item I would mention as feedback is the notifications. I see the notification pop up but if I don’t look at it right away there is nothing on the app icon to alert that I have a notification. I’d love to see something similar to red dots with a number, like when you get a text message or email.

I’d also love to be able to “like” an activity log or message item to quickly acknowledge that it was seen (both for parent and teacher). I feel sometimes a thumbs up can cover a response in the activity log that I wouldn’t need to go to the messages to reply.

Tried to notify developer, but Support is terrible.

Update 1/10:
Developer says badges are a “feature” that they decided not to use in the app . Support says they are “working diligently on a fix”. I actually tend to believe support over the developer at this point, since badges were functional prior to iOS 13, and users have the ability to turn them off on all apps. So I take back my original comment about support being terrible. It’s more of a company trait.
Support response below:
Thank you for contacting brightwheel! My name is Kristy and I'd be happy to help you today.

We currently do not have a timeline for the notification fix. However, our engineers are aware and are working on diligently on resolving the issue.

Thank you for providing your account and mobile information. The more examples we have the better and faster we can create the fix. We appreciate your assistance and patience during this time.

Thank you,
Kristy M.
brightwheel Support

This is a nightmare of an app with even worse customer service. I used this app for my daycare with no major issues for about 3 weeks. One day ALL of my parent and emergency contact info had been changed or deleted. Several of the students showed the exact same parent and emergency info of some random mystery person, other parents had been swapped around. It was a complete disaster to say the least. I wish I could say it got better after contacting 'Jennifer', some random employees and a non-existent tech support that would be 'following up with me' and working on the issue. Needless to say, several emails and phone calls later no one has attempted to reach out to me and apologize or help with this unacceptable glitch. I have gone weeks without having heard back from
Jennifer concerning this matter. However, I have had several people contact me regarding extending my brightwheel Premium service. Perhaps brightwheel should spend less time in their sales department and more time on creating an app that's actually functional.

We have been one of Brightwheel’s longest customers. We started off when the app was small and had just a few features, and we stayed because of the product they have built and we fully believe In Brightwheel & their mission! They have proven over and over that they are listening to us as caregivers and parents as they add all of our requested features. When we were told we would need to move to a paid version earlier this year, there was no hesitation because this has revolutionized our work and our ability to communicate with families. This app helped us immediately contact a parent for a child that was having a seizure, helped us to identify food allergies through the daily food log (that didn’t get lost because it was paper!), and is a selling point for our school because everyone likes having access to know what their child is doing each day! It saves us money on paper, time it takes to write out each activity for each child, and our parents LOVE it! We love brightwheel and I will never have enough positive things to say. Thank you Dave, Jen and team!

UPDATE: I will paraphrase the developer response: “staff members have a list of codes”: we don’t care to fill this data or provide it from a list despite the fact it exists in-app. “You can change your code”: we don’t care that there’s a three step process replacing a physical one step process, just memorize it. My one star review stands, this app complicates the relationship with my provider rather than simplifies it.

This app is counter intuitive for signing my child in and out of her school. First, I need a code (which the app remembers and is required to sign up), but when I scan the QR code (location validation) I have to enter the code—which is stored, but I can no longer reference without canceling the check in— followed by a checklist, and—finally—a signature.

How this is better than signing my name on a sheet I can’t fathom. I’m sure I’m stuck with it until I convince the board to drop this software, but forcing me the remember a pin for check in each day while juggling a toddler, backpacks, and a lunchbox is an irritation.

This could be seamless, but it isn’t optimized for the parents, it is optimized for the day care provider.

So, I don't own a daycare or an early childhood (education/learning) center - I am an in-home nanny so my experience may be different than others. However, IF YOU ARE AN IN-HOME NANNY THIS IS STILL AN AWESOME TOOL (and killer selling feature) to use! Do parents require you to keep a journal? Tedious. This is quick, fast, and MUCH easier! Plus, parents actually have a much more detailed outline/journal/understanding of what their child has been up to during the day. Keeping track of naps (start and end), number and type of diaper changes, feeding times (types and amounts), and the best part is you can (still, idk if every nanny does but I do) send as many pictures as you want. It's an incredible way to help keep parents informed, feeling confident in your ability and that their child(ten) is(are) having a great day - and, (at least for me this might be most important) parents trust in my (your) ability as a nanny and just as a person is built faster because they are able to feel more included in their child's(children's) day

I whole heartedly recommend, and I NEVER take the time to recommend anything. This app is an absolute MUST HAVE if you care for children.

Idea for the developers: maybe in the future have the option for caring for the elderly, pets, etc.

If my daughter’s school didn’t require I use this app for payments, I wouldn’t. I had a temporary payment method set up when I first enrolled her. When I was able to set my actual bank account, I set it as the default method. Seems easy enough, right? Wrong. It kept charging my back up for three consecutive weeks. What the app does when this happens is it will “pay” her school automatically and I have to go in and pay them in cash or cashiers check PLUS an additional $20. I even tried deleting the secondary account myself but the app doesn’t allow me to. I had to have someone from the brightwheel app do it for me. Oh, and the whole “we’ll get back to you within 30 minutes thing... it took almost an hour and half for them to get back to me. So on top of the $2/month I pay in service fees, I’ve paid an additional $60 this month all because the app doesn’t actually acknowledge a default payment method as just that AND the fees my back up payment institution charged me for bouncing payments. So unfortunately, because I love my daughters teachers and school, I am forced to continue giving this company my money every month. Never mind how embarrassing it is to constantly have your payments bounce even though you have the money to cover it. I would give zero stars if I could.

I have a lot of complaints with this app!

1. It looks bad to parents. It is set up so that categories can only be entered weekly, not monthly. This means that on the daily plans, if you use different days for different target areas like we do, it looks to parents like there’s lots of missing areas each day.

2. No sense of community. There is no place for posts to the whole school, or the whole class. Parent engagement with pictures and lesson plans has dropped to almost nothing since we switched to this app. Disappointing!

3. Pictures are incredibly difficult to post, and the appearances of the posts are messy. You must tag each child in the picture, which takes a very long time. The pictures are posted to the child’s profile as an individual post each. This means that the caption you put is repeatedly posted with each photo. It looks so awful and unprofessional!

4. You can’t enter lesson plans from your phone. This is so inconvenient! Additionally, the entire system of entering lesson plans takes so long. My prep time isn’t enough anymore because of all the hoops you have to jump through just to post an activity.

TL;DR I sincerely recommend choosing a different platform if you care about professionalism, parent engagement, or completing lesson plans efficiently.

We all know as admins and directors that parent communication is a large part of our role and successful and concise communication can be a challenge. How many have posted notes, made a sign, sent an email or three just to share one message? So introducing a new system to a community can seem daunting--well, we just had a remarkably simple and straightforward transition to Brightwheel to kick off the school year. As both a childcare owner and a parent I explored both interfaces, the parent experience is so CLEAN, it is hard to get confused on so the wrong thing--sign up is instant, if they enter the email address you write them at and make up a password, they're done! We explored a zillion options when looking to go paperless and make our billing automated and our records digital. The program aspects and features of the competitors were inaccessible--you have to schedule a 20 minute demo (sales pitch) to glean anything. Brightwheel has no sales team, the product is free and their faq and info public, I found this to say a lot. Over the last two months we have watched rollout after rollout of updates hitting on our various wish list items. Today's update brought us easy staff sign in, we are excited about more and we are thrilled about our service as a premium member at a cost affordable in a tight margin industry. Happy to speak further with others wondering about the daily experience..

I work for a county daycare center that uses this app as a receptionist. And it’s… fine? It allows you to message parents and do attendance, but other than that, the features it has feel like bloat that make it much harder to navigate.

It is a little bit baffling honestly how unfriendly the UI is to me. For starters, it’s very different depending if you are using mobile or the web interface, and not in a good, optimized-for-the-platform way. You can’t check out kids on the web version, and it’s much harder to manage students on the iPadOS version.

It just all feels very cluttered. You should be able to hide menus if, say, you do billing through someone else. Maybe you can—I don’t have full admin privileges, and if you can I’ll gladly revise my review—but even the simplest tasks are made a chore.

One thing that really bugs me is that you can’t click on a student’s name in the messaging portal and have it take you to their profile. You have to get out of messaging, go to students, click the “Student’s Name” dropdown, search through that, click on it, and hit apply. What?!? Couldn’t we have a dynamically-updating search bar? It’s the little things like this that drive me up the wall. It shouldn’t be so hard to sort by age, or school, or whatever.

I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s a struggle sometimes. I think the platform would greatly benefit by having a UX Designer get in there and change things around. There are so, so, so many ways that 7-click tasks could be made into 1-click tasks.

Nothing I reviewed earlier has improved. I’ve also come to view the watch part as a “teaser”. It says I have a brightwheel message but I can’t read it or respond to it. It’s basically useless if I have to keep my phone with me all the time.

I am a teacher. My preschool switched to brightwheel this fall. Initially I was optimistic about having everything in one app instead of having a separate messaging app, a photo app, etc. Using brightwheel is not intuitive. The message symbol has to be tapped twice—once at the bottom left and then again on the top right—before actually being able to compose a message. I figured out how to post a photo (it has to be an activity and is tagged as a student photo whether it is or isn’t ) but it was made more challenging because the instructions were not using the terms I saw in the app and when I finally posted the photo there was no “sent” message so I couldn’t really know that it’d been sent without checking by opening the class and then an independent student. The help department did get back to me on Tuesday after the Labor Day holiday but even those directions did not reflect the actual terms used in the
app.

Update: I found a way to post a note without tagging a child but it means even more steps and still doesn’t say “sent” so not a great option. Please add a way to know that something has been sent.

Integrating “messages” and “activities” into one chronological stream would be extremely helpful.

After taking first day of school pics and sending them to parents as “activities” I realized how many steps were involved in the process and it took longer than my usual app.

I think this app may make administrators lives easier but it does not help make my day as a teacher any easier. It requires more time to send messages and photos than the apps I was previously using. I can’t have messages and my screenshot messages in the same message stream. I worry that parents may not respond as quickly because the messages I send are only in the brightwheel app and not appearing as texts. There are also no badges on the brightwheel app symbol to let any of us know there’s a new message. Adding badges would be a huge plus.

Brightwheel seems to have a lot of features but the features I need as a teacher are time consuming to use and I really can’t do it during the preschool day. It takes too much time away from the kids.

When I first downloaded this app for my home daycare a lot of the features were free and extremely useful. Everybody enjoyed it. Now they marked almost 90% off the app as “premium” only. This forces providers to pay to use for what used to be free. You cannot upload curriculum, custom, videos, pics, etc. within the features. If my clients didn’t love the app, I would switch all together.

No way for the user to edit children when the school’s application doesn’t work. School tends to be unfamiliar with editing profiles. App needs a way to easily edit profiles. We’ve had to re-enter child codes multiple times and it’s easier to just re-add your child since there is no way to delete old profiles. Could be a decent app if it straight forward, otherwise, can’t give zero stars.

The video feature (which is why I paid for the app) wasn’t posting the videos I recorded. After minimal effort on their behalf of trying to solve my problem they stated that technology wasn’t certain and they can’t fix my problem. My videos weren’t posting to the children’s timelines so the purpose of having the app was gone because no one wanted to solve my problem. Taking my business elsewhere.

This apps check in is so inefficient with useless steps. You would imagine when you scan the QR code you are done, but no.. it ask you a bunch of Covid questions, and then it ask you to sign a signature and wait, not done yet.. it ask you to input PIN. Is someone concern someone stealing my phone, kidnap my kid and drop them off at daycare without my approval? And even if so, use biometrics to confirm identity like all apps now.

Every other app I’ve ever made a payment through has a confirmation prompt when you go to pay. This app just sends it through the moment you hit the button. I hit the “pay” button expecting a prompt that would let me add a new payment method. It just sent it through on the account I did NOT want to use. When I reached out to the school, they said this happens and there is nothing that they can do. So I reached out to brightwheel support. They were also not helpful.

It used to be a very useful app. It went from being one of my favorite apps to my least favorite when it recently caused all updates of any kind to send a notification. Since I can't configure which updates ring my phone my choice is either silence, or the app nonstop buzzing, chiming or ringing for my 3 kids. If I didn't need it for notes from the daycare I would uninstall it.

Unfortunately those settings did not help me. I will reinstall today and see if they work then.

Until this app allows us to select which childcare events we need to be alerted for I am put in a position of either turning off notifications because 90% of the time they worthless (yay my toddler peed. Again.) and miss the important communications that matter or I look keep them on and have my phone/watch going off every time some meaningless thing happens that we don’t need to track.

I will update this review if and when the ability to select which notifications are important to each user is implemented.

Once a week the daycare cannot enter their data and they have to resort to paper
I cannot see the messages about my kid in the app (only my partner can) - even though my kid is correctly tagged in my app and I receive everything except the messages. The only difference is that I have iOS 11 and the newest all version, while my partner has iOS 10 and an old app version.
The data refresh is very clunky and unreliable. Often times I have to exit my kids view into the "my children [view]" and go back to my child for the data to refresh.

It works well when it decides to work. However, when it doesn’t, it’s incredibly frustrating. Several parents, my coworkers, and I have encountered issues with the app freezing, lagging, and forced logouts. When you restart the app after force quitting, it gets stuck on the loading page with the Brightwheel logo.

It’s really disappointing because when it works, it’s fantastic and is a great way to streamline communication with the families of children in our care. But when it doesn’t work, it’s like being thrown back 20 years back technologically speaking.

Your app has been a nuisance loggin on and staying logged on. It literally has been the most annoying and time consuming part of dropping and picking up our kid from his school.

My password is not recognized every time I log in to check my son in or out. It’s not the internet connection because my other apps are working fine. Is it because too many people are on the app at one time? If so, didn’t you anticipate this as a possible issue in the development of the app?

I hope this message can be used to improve the quality of your app. Love everything else..

1) Only have one child? It still makes you click on their name first before seeing updates.

2) Messaging System? Can see a potential lawsuit or class action suit forming from this part of the app. It makes it APPEAR like you are only messaging the child’s teacher. Wrong. EVERY teacher in the center has access to these messages. It is equal to sending a private message in a group chat. Horrible implementation that can lead to seriously awkward situations and even privacy concerns. Highly suggest parents to stay away from this part of the app.

Would not recommend.

I wish our preschool did NOT use this app. It’s lacks security and privacy for divorced families. I can currently change mine and my ex’s profile photos. Another user should not be able to make changes to my profile. It would also be helpful to create an owner and approved add-on’s, instead of allowing all “parents” full access to make changes to the child’s profile. Again, in a divorce situation this can be extremely difficult to manage.
Lastly, the payment method is also not set up for a set of divorced parents. I would encourage the owner of this app to consider making this app user secure.

We have been using the app regularly since our daughter joined daycare over a year ago. The school just informed us that the messaging function will no longer be available starting next week due to it becoming a ‘premium’ feature. This is horrible, taking something away that was included before and that as parents we rely on heavily on a daily basis when we need to communicate with the teacher. If you’re going to have a premium package, make it for new features coming out not for features that your customers have been using for years. I’m sure now other features will follow this path eventually making the whole app useless. Corporate greed at its finest, thanks a lot.

We used to LOVE brightwheel. We have been using it for almost 2 years now. It was free, and they priced themselves on ALWAYS being free, but that changed when they asked us to try the premium version, which had lots of cool new features, such as videos, or assessment tools! All awesome features, but the owner would not pay for prices they were asking for so we couldn’t use brightwheel premium anymore...

When we went back to the free version.. so many of our beloved free features such as parent messaging, incident reports, name to face, etc. are no longer available for free users. :(

We have worked so hard to get our parents on board, and they all LOVE brightwheel so much and how much we are able to communicate through it. Makes us sad we will no longer be able to use brightwheel anymore. It also brings a lot of confusion that we will have to explain to our parents.