Populi

This product was in place when I arrived in my role supporting it. It seems to be the choice of many smaller (< 300 student) post-secondary schools. It has served us well for tracking student records but there are lots of little annoyances that cause us to adjust our workflows in order to use the product. It would seem if you had no processes in place and wanted to follow their recommended ones, it would suit you well.

We couldn't be happier. Our sales contact gave us multiple demos of the different modules, trained us and was there for us during every step of the implementation. Everything was done remotely but it works well and there is no additional cost, which is extraordinary. I have helped implement three different SIS systems and the data transfer to Populi was the most efficient and painless I have experienced. The customer support is responsive and goes above and beyond what I expected. Overall they seem to really care about our success and we enjoy working with them.

Pros
Easy to register, add students, course scheduling. Fast customer service however, not very satisfying responds.
Cons
It is not user friendly, very difficult to customize features. Even sending emails to selected students is a hassle. Adding meeting times to courses is awfully difficult and annoying. If you are a new, small institution and need statistics / have to be able to pull out a data any minute when requested I would not recommend this product. Our application information wasn't transferring to system and we found out after customer service that our application was not set right. The reason for that is Populi updated their admissions feature a while ago but our applications were not adopted to new system. So I had to enter age, gender, address, email etc manually for the each student in the system to be able to have an accurate data. No help offered for an error caused by their own management system! Again reporting features lack accuracy and not customizable.
For accreditation purposes I found this system not reliable, I will start looking for alternatives.

Populi is a terrific platform for integrating various data silos across your organization. We moved from a number of different databases into Populi recently, and the combination of all of our information in one place has streamlined our communication process with incoming students and allowed us to more easily collaborate in helping students through processes like enrollment and financial aid. We've struggled with finding some features at times, and in the case of marketing automation, we've discovered that Populi's system isn't quite fully-featured enough for our needs. The UI, also, has a dated feel. Nevertheless, it's a solid, stable platform that gives us integrated access to our contacts.

Populi seems to be an overall better experience than Canvas both from the user standpoint and the administrator standpoint. It is nice having all of the information I need for my classes right at my fingertips.