Wonde vs. Groupcall Xporter

[Yacapaca]

Can anyone give me a comparative view of Wonde vs. Groupcall Xporter? Ease of use, security, promptness of support, etc? I am coming from the service supplier side, deciding which one to buy our integrations through, so acceptability to schools is a key decision criterion for me.

[supportman]

We use both here with Bromcom, I find Wonde is lovely to use (as a client) and authorizing new apps is a couple of clicks with very clear permissions notes.

 

Groupcall are a bit behind but they do have a cloud importer now which is good. It works, but its not as easy to use as Wonde.

[paulkerton]

Wonde from the end user's POV is far simpler and cleaner. I think they're now in more schools than Groupcall too.

[saggu]

We use both Wonde is more and more reliable, better support. Also easy to manage.

[jemal]

Everytime we get a new service from a supplier needing data exporting, I'm always hoping they say the use Wonde. I think we've got more services from suppliers on Wonde now rather than Groupcall, and that change was very quick (maybe only in the last 3 years or so). The last time I did a groupcall one, was using their newer cloud platform, and it wasn't too bad. Both Wonde and newer version of Xporter seem to work well (in terms of setting them up and forget, with little problems ever happening). Old Xporter often had quirks that needed frequent attention. When we had networking issues once, Wonde actually phoned us to check everything was ok as they've not had a successful sync for a couple days, which was nice. Support before lockdown was great from Wonde too.

 

Only issues with Wonde have been very recent. Seem to be that they may have overstretched themselves with the free school meal voucher scheme they did, and support isn't as quick (albeit lockdown probably didn't help either). Also we had an issue with a feature not working using their gsuite sync product, and when asking about it they said they didn't support that particular feature; when we mentioned they explicitly state it on their website as a feature (a whole paragraph describing it exactly how we wanted it), the response was thanks for letting us know, we'll remove that section from our website.

 

Regarding Groupcall Xporter, I've not had any recent support issues for Xporter, but we use Groupcall Messenger and the level of support for that went from excellent to atrocious when they were acquired by another company a year or 2 ago. Seem a bit better recently (generally at best the first response to a support ticket is the next day, maybe 2 days).

[vikpaw]

Previously always used Groupcall as found them to be useful and Wonde were not around or young.

 

Use Wonde loads now, they give us a regional dashboard so it's easy to manage multiple schools which is handy.

I've never really liked the concept that they take your data (with permission) and extend your security perimeter outwards, but it is on request from a vendor.

There is a lot more security and controls in place now.

 

Change was mostly driven by vendor preference, which is the only slight downside, they seem to be geared up as invisible to the school, and acting on call from the vendor. So they are more of an extension of the vendor and it feels like comms could be improved. We have a lot of schools, that don't know what Wonde is when they are asked to set it up, and there is still confusion about who they should speak to, whether it's the external system provider or Wonde.

 

Thankfully, the MIS - Engage know what to do and will log tickets on Wonde directly to share data and sort out issues.

 

Generally seems to be working well, and when we've had issues with data extraction, they've been very good at working with us to resolve it. We're actually looking at becoming consumers of the service ourselves with an internal project for attendance tracking.

[Yacapaca]

Thanks vikpaw, jemal, saggu, paulkerton and supportman for your very thoughtful answers. You made this one of the easiest decisions I have ever had to take! If only all tech advice was this unequivocal.

[LeMarchand]

I am but a lowly Primary School guy, but I'm gonna throw a spanner in the works by saying that I've never been happy with the attitude of either - but this may be because they don't expect primary schools to have more than rudimentary support, or that the heads had already agreed for them to have carte blanche access. Anyway, with both it seemed a very "done deal": Install this; you don't need to worry your pretty little head about what data we're collecting, so we'll never contact you again or give you any sort of access.

 

Have to say I'm much happier with uploading a csv as at least I know what is going out. That said, we're not as "busy" in that sort of area as a larger or secondary school may be.

[paulkerton]

I am but a lowly Primary School guy, but I'm gonna throw a spanner in the works by saying that I've never been happy with the attitude of either - but this may be because they don't expect primary schools to have more than rudimentary support, or that the heads had already agreed for them to have carte blanche access. Anyway, with both it seemed a very "done deal": Install this; you don't need to worry your pretty little head about what data we're collecting, so we'll never contact you again or give you any sort of access.

 

Really? I've found Wonde is very transparent in telling you what data access is being requested by each vendor as the request is made, and any change requests are made. I don't think I've ever seen Wonde request carte blanche access.

[LeMarchand]

Really? I've found Wonde is very transparent in telling you what data access is being requested by each vendor as the request is made, and any change requests are made. I don't think I've ever seen Wonde request carte blanche access.

 

Really! Of course, I could just be out of the loop - but if my heads are getting notifications (rather than me) they are just rubber stamping them as I've never been consulted. (There's no way that they are actually looking at those sort of comms). The one vendor that stated what they wanted asked for all sorts of stuff like parental emails and mobiles to set up a child's account for something or other and seemed surprised that I dared question it.

[paulkerton]

Really! Of course, I could just be out of the loop - but if my heads are getting notifications (rather than me) they are just rubber stamping them as I've never been consulted. (There's no way that they are actually looking at those sort of comms).

 

No I agree with that. It should go to yourself and/or your compliance/GDPR officer.

 

The one vendor that stated what they wanted asked for all sorts of stuff like parental emails and mobiles to set up a child's account for something or other and seemed surprised that I dared question it.

Well that's where you have the right to reject it. The vendor is the issue if they're asking for information they don't need. That's a true GDPR issue.

[Alis_Klar]

Really! Of course, I could just be out of the loop - but if my heads are getting notifications (rather than me) they are just rubber stamping them as I've never been consulted. (There's no way that they are actually looking at those sort of comms). The one vendor that stated what they wanted asked for all sorts of stuff like parental emails and mobiles to set up a child's account for something or other and seemed surprised that I dared question it.

That has also been my experience. They're not used to anyone questioning what data is slurped.

 

It's possible to untick a data item but then your not sure if it will stop things working with the vendor your working with for example UPNs. It doesn't help that we are with ScholarPack and the data selection API on their side is not very granular so the data being sent to Wonde is pretty much all or nothing on the MIS side.

[Tefters]

Just tried to set Wonde up for our MIS to sync data for EDClass, page 2 of the Sims guide:

 

Add the following groups to the newly created user:○ Assessment Coordinator○ Personnel Officer○ School Administrator○ Senior Management Team○ Third Party Reporting

 

NOPE!

Edited November 18, 2020 by Tefters