My Bright Day Reviews

Why are we paying so much in tuition for an elite school with good parent communication when this horrible app is what we get. So far this week updates literally have not worked at all. My kid has been at daycare for 10 hours right now and I have zero updates about food, naps, diaper changes, activities, or pictures. Same thing yesterday and they gave us a physical piece of paper when we checked out, as if they are straight out of the 1990s. Well, at least I was reminded half a dozen times to do the Covid survey after I already did it and she’s already been at daycare for hours.

With all due respect, MyBrightDay is pretty bad. It seems like things get re-arranged every day, and memories disappear constantly. Most times I can’t even click on a memory to see the picture or video. In the ~4 months I’ve had my kid at a Bright Horizons center, I’ve had to uninstall & reinstall MyBrightDay 3 times to fix issues. Personally, I think you should switch to using the brightwheel app. I know that’s a big change, but their job is to build a solid app & website for centers & parents to use. Bright Horizons’ responsibility is to care for children, not build an app. Sure, it might be expensive, but is it worth paying engineers to build a lousy app? (Sorry, engineers).

Seems like I have the same complaints as the majority as far as not being able to communicate with the teacher after drop off. Maybe it’s at the schools request so I’ll give the developers the benefit of the doubt. However, the fact that I can’t scroll through pictures is really frustrating. The pictures are so tiny so I have to open them all one by one just to see if my child is in them. A simple scroll feature could just be added. Once the photos are moved into memories, I am able to finally scroll, but man is it slow.. and they eventually disappear too! Why can’t they just be saved in MyBrightDay ? MyBrightDay is general is frustratingly slow. These issues can be easily fixed but it seems like no effort is being put into actually doing the work. It’s almost like the developers don’t really care, they got paid for the job and in their mind their job is done. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The one thing MyBrightDay should do very well is to get pictures of your child from the teacher to you, and it fails miserably.

1. I can only download pictures gracefully were my child is by themselves, and I have to do so one by one. This is ridiculous, since I lose all context that he is actually in kindergarten. Can’t you just implement “save to picture roll” like WhatsApp?

2. Pictures expire off MyBrightDay after a couple of days, and can be retrieved from old daily emails. Yes, really.

2. The “security” where you supposedly can’t download a group picture is a farce, since anyone can screen capture pictures that are supposedly “locked” for privacy. This is pathetic.

In the end, you are giving parents the worst of both worlds by making it very inconvenient to get pictures of their child, and you are NOT honoring the wishes of whomever doesn’t want to have their picture shared on a social app because it CAN be saved with a screen capture.

Get it together.

My husband and I have been trying for 2 weeks now to obtain access to MyBrightDay as our baby just started daycare and this is MyBrightDay they use. We have been unable to create or access our account, therefore we cannot receive any updates on our baby throughout the day or login to MyBrightDay whatsoever. I’ve called 5 times now trying to obtain help with this and am told every time “we are working on it” but am given no helpful information and no sort of timeline on when they expect this to be resolved. They just keep saying they are “understaffed”. I’ve requested to speak to a supervisor and told there was no one available and they would contact me...well surprise, surprise they never did. This company seems horribly mismanaged and I wish our daycare did not use them. Good luck if you ever have a problem needing IT support. They are worthless.

I cannot make notes inquiring about my kids or update MyBrightDay while my kids are checked in. I have no way to communicate and can’t respond to notes left for me until the next day. If a note is made by the teacher before my kids are checked in on MyBrightDay , I cannot see what they are trying to tell me before school until after they are checked in there. It makes me want to bang my head on a wall. It also has some missing features that are standard in other childcare apps; such as mood updates. The user experience is terrible and needs revamped and more user discovery from tech dev

Something with MyBrightDay continues to be severely broken. After an “update” a few months back, I receive alerts throughout the day for the wrong child, about food that we didn’t send and doesn’t show up in MyBrightDay , etc. meanwhile, my wife can’t view updates or photos at all throughout the day until our child is checked out. MyBrightDay doesn’t fulfill its basic functionality, especially given the tuition that goes towards supporting this system. If the devs supporting MyBrightDay worked at a shop I was running, they would have been fired long ago for breaking our product THIS badly.

I am not a parent but I do work for bright Horizons and work closely with MyBrightDay . Let me tell you MyBrightDay makes me want to quit every day. There is only so much the help desk team can do. Every day is a new issue and all they can really do is say we’re working on it. But we’re not even MyBrightDay developers!! We always have to wait on MyBrightDay developers to fix these issues, but we have to wait months and months for them to even fix a single thing. Of course our team always gets the backlash from parents thinking we’re the ones that created this horrible app. If you’re a parent reading this please know THE HELP DESK ARE NOT THE APPP DEVELOPERS. THERE IS VERY LITTLE THEY CAN DO TO HELP WITH THESE ISSUES. ALL THEY CAN DO IS WAIT FOR THE SO CALLED APP DEVELOPERS TO FIX THESE ISSUES. PLEASE DO NOT BERATE THEM

MyBrightDay was never good to begin with (poor UI/UX, buggy, lacking important features that other daycare-based apps have). However, their ‘upgrade’ killed MyBrightDay and its been unusable for 2+ weeks. They clearly didn’t test before releasing this upgrade. I contacted them directly and got a response basically saying ‘it’s something with how teachers are putting in information and we’re working with individual centers to fix it’. In short, we’re not responsible for our app not working and we’ll fix it whenever we get around to it. Bright Horizons should just move to Brightwheel and get rid of their internal development team as they are taking value away from their company.

This is a great example of an MVP that everyone ended up getting stuck with and no one is happy with. This is the only way I can “interact” with my child during the day, and with the terrible ux and buggy implementation it makes me wish I had asked for a demonstration of MyBrightDay during our “tour” and it would’ve greatly impacted my decision to go with BH.

More than once there have been significant errors in data entry on MyBrightDay , making me think she had eaten food she’s allergic to or had a bottle when she didn’t, which leads me to believe the caregiver side of MyBrightDay is just as bad and erodes my trust in the information it provides.

Either invest in a UX designer or use a pre-built app for this purpose. It is SO important and is getting even more important every day.

It’s good for parents who want to know details of their child’s day- but only when the teachers fill in the right info or post photos consistently. Really have always wished for an option to be able to send the teachers a note- especially as the kids get older. I get that teachers aren’t looking at MyBrightDay all day with infants but when they get more independent it’d be nice to be able to check in personally about something...like if they’ve had a rough drop off or aren’t feeling good. It’d be perfect to have a communication tool build in.

To summarize, MyBrightDay is strange and would benefit from a UX person. The block interface for instance, is not intuitive. Links don’t work in “message blocks”. There is no summary “today” view. Notices aren’t shown as read or unread. Notifications do not take you to a relevant view in MyBrightDay , you just get the ... homescreen, I’ll call it. The settings button is cut off by the edge of my screen on an iPhone 8. The “mark absent” button is obscured behind the “drop off notes” section. MyBrightDay doesn’t display wether my kid is checked in or out, by whom or at what times. All would be helpful ... what my spouse is in a car accident and I don’t know about it yet. Many dates are completely lacking any information ... at least a checked in at/checked out at/did not check in entry for each day would be nice. All images are very low resolution. Why? And the interface just feels generally strange in a way that is difficult to describe but you know it when you see it.

I appreciate that it exists and the work the developers have done. But in it’s current form it’s a low quality app.

Most recent update created more bugs and now the teachers can’t even get their posts to go through. I finally got a picture today from yesterday and there were no reports regarding meals, bathroom or what went on in the classroom today. Before the update I have my settings to let me know real time regarding meals, photos and naps. I was never getting any of those real time notifications. The update still hasn’t fixed that problem. We pay a lot of money in tuition and expect these features to be working. Use some of our tuition money to develop a proper app.

MyBrightDay is great with one HUGE exception- there’s no way for parents to communicate with the educators after check in. Let’s say you’re going to come feed the baby at lunch or you’re going to have the other parent do pickup or you need to answer an educator’s question. There’s no quick way to communicate. Now I have to call the front desk for anything- this causes me to have to step out of meetings then causes my child’s educators to step away from the children to get the classroom phone to get the message, whereas they have a tablet for photos and documentation as they work with the kids, and MyBrightDay is already and always up and in use. You really need to add a message function.

Ever since the v9.8.1 update, none of the content in the “Memories” section will display. I get my child’s picture, the correct month (and can select the month). I also get notifications for alerts, but no alert text outside of the notification preview. No other content either like pictures. I can get the content in the other sections like Daily Report and Drop Off Notes just fine, it’s the Memories section that’s problematic. Which is a huge problem because that’s where the center’s notes and alerts show up.

I’ve logged out and back in, restarted, etc. Same issue keeps happening. Prior to this update, the Memories section content was totally visible. Please fix!

Love the idea of MyBrightDay. It is so nice to have a record of what happens at day care. Some feedback for the developers because you have a great start and there are some key improvements that would really help parents a lot. 1. Communication- we just had multiple tornado warnings and 8 touchdown in our area yesterday. As a parent I could not hear anything from the daycare because their line was busy. It would have been nice if they could have posted an alert on MyBrightDay to notify parents that they were managing the situation and at this time all children and staff were safe. 2. How come check in and check out times are not listed in the daily report?! 3. I live for the pictures. There are push notifications for most things but not pictures. That would be a nice add! 4. Parent communities in MyBrightDay .

Thanks!

It seems as though something has changed very recently with the notifications because we never used to get update notifications for photos, videos, and audio and didn’t change any of our settings. And within MyBrightDay there are lots of detailed notifications I can choose to receive certain real time or not (meals, medications, sunscreen/insect repellent, naps, notes, potties, morning reminder for “please bring” items), but not photos, videos, or audio. I care about all of those other things, but don’t need a notification evertime a photo or video is taken of my kids. For example, just yesterday I got 18 notifications of pictures, videos, and audio that I hadn’t been getting a few weeks ago. It would be really helpful if there was a way to turn off those real time notifications without turning the others off. I like the photos, videos, and audio, but I look at them at the end of the day, whereas the other items I care about as they occur.

Our daycare used to use Baby Connect which we loved but was a bit cumbersome for the teachers so they switched to My Bright Day. Overall, I’d say it’s easy to use.

However, we lost the ability to send instant messages with the teachers like in Baby Connect. MBD has no messaging function except for writing “Morning Drop Off Notes” which we have never used in over 2 years. Teachers can create messages to send to us but the parents have no way of responding.

It was so incredibly helpful to be able to send a quick message back and forth between the parents and teachers to check up on our child, to give a heads up if we were going to pick up later or early than usual, etc. We used that function almost everyday with Baby Connect and not having it in MBD, when it seems so simple to include, is really disappointing.

Please please please, add an instant messaging function ASAP!! It would be a 5 star app if it had a messaging function.

Issues described below are fixed in the latest release - thank you!

The most recent update does not work properly. It no longer allows you to punch images to make them larger; the screen often freezes in strange sizes or with notes floating over other squares; when looking at the view to select previous days; the filter opens constantly. Need release to fix

Great app! Does what it was created to do; communicate care events, curriculum and send pictures. The complaints about needing a message function are not what MyBrightDay was created for. Parents should want their teachers engaged and supervising their children not hovering over a iPad all day checking messages. If you are that in dire need to talk to your teacher, you should call the classroom.

We’ve been using MyBrightDay for 7 months and it is very clunky and poorly designed. It is constantly refreshing, so it takes three times as long as it needs to for me to input my drop off information than it should. Reports from the teachers are not in real time and we’ve noticed that while I can see certain updates, they can take up to an hour later for the same updates to appear for my spouse. Updates to MyBrightDay seem to cause more problems than they fix. I expect better from an app that is supposed to facilitate communication between parents and the daycare.

Still have trouble loading the days sometimes. Really needs to be able to add notes after child has been dropped off. Teacher sometimes asks a question that doesn’t need a phone call and you can’t respond till the next day. Or you forgot to tell them something that you don’t need to call for or you’re in a situation where a call can’t be done but you can’t write. This feature need to be added like yesterday.

Update. They emailed me about my review stating they don’t do basic note update after the child is in school because it will take the teachers time from the children and to call instead. The purpose of the two way communication is to reply to questions the teachers ask ON MyBrightDay with a simple answer. It takes too much time when working and waste of time to call the school, speak to the secretary, and wait for the teacher to take time from the kids for me to say yes and thank you. Where as I can type yes, thank you, we don’t have that child’s coat, or anything else. Prior to covid I’ve attended meetings with all of the parents who requested this, not a two way chat but a way to leave additional notes throughout the day. Obviously any parent with sincere concerns or issues will call. This kind of thinking is instilled through the bright horizons educational system and why I wish I went elsewhere sometimes.