brightwheel: Child Care App Reviews

We have been one of this app’s longest customers. We started off when brightwheel was small and had just a few features, and we stayed because of the product they have built and we fully believe In this app & 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. brightwheel 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 this app and I will never have enough positive things to say. Thank you Dave, Jen and team! 💙

Our daycare started using brightwheel 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 brightwheel 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.

If my daughter’s school didn’t require I use brightwheel 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 brightwheel 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 brightwheel doesn’t allow me to. I had to have someone from the this app 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 brightwheel 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’m a daycare and preschool owner and also have a child in grade school (which uses a different app). I LOVE this app and wish my daughters school will switch over. this app is a time-saver on the admin side, an added bonus on the parent-side, and great tool for the teacher side. Teachers use it to update parents and track children’s progress. Parents rave about it and are always “in the know” of their child’s day, making pick up seamless. When we give tours, we always mention that we use this app and potential clients are in awe when they learn about what brightwheel can do. I also have a little one at my preschool and use brightwheel on the Parent-end. Look no further... coming from someone that uses it on back and front end, and also have experience with other school apps, this is it!!

I use brightwheel 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.

We aren’t currently using brightwheel , only because my daughter isn’t in daycare at the moment. When she is in daycare again, we’re only choosing somewhere that uses brightwheel!

I can’t say enough good things about this. It made me feel so secure trusting a daycare with her. Getting cute little photos of her that I wouldn’t have gotten otherwise was so wonderful. I loved that I could talk with her age group caregiver and send them notifications when I wasn’t feeling like I got enough updates on her.

Just knowing that she’s eating and being notified how much made me feel so good. We just started potty training her at the time too so knowing when she went and when she got a diaper changed instead helped start up conversations.

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 brightwheel, 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. this app implies no trust between parents and teachers, and it’s insulting. It doesn’t surprise me that a parent, not a teacher, developed brightwheel.

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?

this app is a lifesaver! We have been using brightwheel for our summer camp and I have to to say that it has truly been a gift from above. brightwheel has not only enhanced our communication with parents but allowed them to be interactive and provides full transparency into their child’s day to day. this app is definitely a must have and favorite of all of our staff members as it has helped them with becoming super organized with their breakdown of the various groups, activities, child info, etc.

All in all, we couldn’t be happier with our decision to integrate this amazing app to ensure a successful summer! A huge thank you goes to Jamie for your awesome customer service; you truly went above and beyond — thank you.

Ashley

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 this app (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 brightwheel comes into some recent century and starts using badges correctly brightwheel 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.

I have a lot of complaints with brightwheel!

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 brightwheel. 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.

I own and operate a small preschool in South Carolina. From our opening 5 years ago, we incorporated many different apps and ideas in order to communicate with our parents and keep them connected to their children. this app by far has been the best tool for this!

We have never had an issue using this app in our three years of use. Parents rave about brightwheel and many have actually said they chose our preschool over others because of brightwheel . The value it adds to our staff’s day (making communication a breeze) and to our parents’ days (seeing their little ones when they can’t be with them) is priceless.

We have had this app 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 brightwheel, 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 this app is undercharging them for some reason that we can’t explain because this app 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!!!

4 weeks ago I hadn’t heard of brightwheel and now I love it. Check-in and check-out notifications give peace of mind. Activity updates confirm that all is well. And pictures taken by the staff let us see him having fun.

I know the staff gets credit for the updates during the day, but this app helps us know that we chose a great pre-school with a terrific staff. I’ve thanked the staff for their use of this app.

Now I thank this app for a simple to use interface that was intuitive to set up and provides a great service that I hadn’t even thought about. You know it is a great app when it goes straight from “what’s this” to “indispensable”. Awesome!

We used to LOVE this app. 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 this app 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 this app so much and how much we are able to communicate through it. Makes us sad we will no longer be able to use this app anymore. It also brings a lot of confusion that we will have to explain to our parents. 😔

As a parent I love that my child’s daycare uses brightwheel. It allows me to know how much he ate, what he ate, when his diaper was changed, what activities they have been doing as well as getting pictures. I do wish there was a way to “like” the pictures so that I could let the teachers know that I appreciated getting the picture without having to send them a message, which is another awesome feature of brightwheel . I would and have recommended brightwheel to friends who have their kids in daycares that are not yet using this app.

Great app. Great for communication between childcare and parents. However, the no badges part is a bit frustrating. I know they show up on your Notification Center. However, I don’t always see them if a notification comes through and then I get a call or FaceTime shortly after or have to check an email/text. Once you go back to your Notification Center after checking something else, the notification won’t show up. I remember regularly to check anyways but a badge would be much better so I don’t have to rely upon memory. I think most agree 100% on this.

As a parent, brightwheel has been easy to use and a great way to communicate with my child’s teachers, see exactly when his activities are happening etc. I loved the recent addition of being able to “like” or “heart” photos and videos but I would love to see the ability to add comments to any of the logged activities (feedings, diaper changes, photos/vids, etc), so that I don’t have to message the teachers with a question or comment about a specific event and a note or comment can be threaded to it instead. Otherwise, I’d readily recommend this to any of my friends whose childcare providers don’t have a good, automated way to communicate.

Noticed my bill for daughters daycare service was more money then usual. So I contacted the manager at children’s first and was told through the new app she would be unable to accommodate my wife and myself’s work schedule . Some weeks we need only part Time care, and other weeks we full time care. I would always be sure to give daycare our schedule months In advance. (Knowing how they are running a business and trying to maximize profits) We were told from the manager brightwheel was to blame and furthermore we can only keep our daughter enrolled and was forced to choose to be “full time” or “part-time” with very very short notice to do so. We are cash paying parents with a 2nd child coming soon. So if I could give bright wheel “0” stars I would.

I am a daycare provider and brightwheel is absolutely amazing! Not only can I let parents know what’s happening throughout the day but it also allows us to communicate with one another through the messaging feature. I also love that parents can pay me and that I am able to generate reports, through brightwheel ! This is my favorite app; it is everything you need wrapped it one pretty bow. Every parent at my childcare has complimented brightwheel and how much they love it! If you are a childcare provider, I highly recommend brightwheel. You will not be disappointed!

this app is so ridiculously easy to use & a great way to update & communicate with parents throughout the day about what’s going on with their little ones. For example the other day one of my little toddlers in my class had a couple of red marks on her cheek...she hadn’t gotten hurt or anything & I was concerned & messaged mom right away & sent her a picture. The parents love the fact that we’re able update them throughout the day & it makes it easier at pick up time to talk to them about how their child’s day had been.

brightwheel is pure genius. My toddlers daycare recently started using it and I feel so much more connected to her. I know what she has had to eat and how much, her nap schedule, and any “incidents” that may have occurred. I can message her teachers to check in or ask questions anytime and they always get right back to me and brightwheel also allows daycare payments to be automatically debited from my account. brightwheel has made my busy Mom life just a little bit easier and that means so so much to me. So thank you, thank you, thank you!

We use brightwheel for my daughter‘s daycare. I really like it it’s very helpful I can login anytime and as long as the daycare updates everything with her day I can know restrooms breaks what she had for snack and lunch. You can also make your payments online I really like that. However I do not like that when you bring this app up online on my computer you cannot send or receive the messages. That really needs to be updated some people are not allowed to have their cell phones and you need to be able to communicate about your child through the Internet as well.