Compared in September 2026

Other planners hold the year you build.
Margin builds it.

You tell it your books and how many lessons are in each one. Every lesson lands on a real date through the last day of your year.

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Plan your whole year.
Stay relaxed when the plan changes.
Print your records anytime.

What makes Margin different from other homeschool planners?

Margin does the planning for you. You tell it which books you are using and how many lessons are in each one, and it puts every lesson on a real date all the way to your last day of school. Most planners hand you an empty calendar and leave the rest to you.

Everything else on this page comes back to that. If Margin built your year in August, it can build it again in October when you lose a week. A calendar you filled in by hand can only be filled in again.

We make Margin, so read this the way you’d read any comparison written by one of the products in it. Every price below came off the company’s own pricing page, and where we couldn’t load a page ourselves, the row says the price is approximate.

What can Margin do that the other planners don’t?

We sat down with the published feature pages of six paid homeschool planners in September 2026, and we could not find any of these ten things on them.

The table is wide. Slide it sideways to see every column.

What you do In Margin In the other six
Lay out a whole year You type the book and the lesson count. Margin puts every lesson on a date through your last day. One evening at the table covers your whole school year. We did not find it. They schedule what you type in, one lesson at a time.
Lose a week to the stomach bug You tell it which days you lost. Margin gives you three ways to catch up, and it can rebuild the rest of the year. It shows you how much longer each one would make your busiest day before you choose. Nothing moves until you pick one. We did not find one that shows you what a catch-up would do to your week before you commit to it.
Count your days for an association Margin counts four kinds of day the way your state means them: a school day, a day off, a field trip, a co-op day. One child can take a day off while the others keep going. Sick days you set aside in August count when you spend them. We found attendance totals. We did not find the four kinds of day, or a day off for one child only.
Get a co-op calendar into the planner You take a photo of it. Margin reads it and types it in for you. It does the same with a book list. The photo is read on your own device and it never leaves it. We did not find it.
Keep the day to a length a child can do You set a cap for each child. Say four hours, and Margin will not plan past four hours. Co-op, piano and the drive there come out of the day first. We found time logging after the fact. We did not find a cap that the plan is built around.
Find out the math book won’t finish Margin tells you in August, and it tells you how many lessons don’t fit, instead of quietly stacking them onto your last two weeks. We did not find a warning like it.
Use your book’s own lesson numbers Margin uses 2.4, or Unit 3 Lesson 1, or whatever your book prints on the page. You can also start a book partway through, at lesson 41 if that’s where you are. We did not find either one.
Undo something you didn’t mean Undo works on everything, and Margin names what moved and where it went before you take it back. We did not find it.
Teach where there’s no signal The year lives on the device. A campground, a waiting room and a dead router all work. Check their own help pages too. Most planners in this category are built to be online.
Keep your children out of a dataset Margin has no ads, no advertising profile and no third-party trackers or pixels. Nothing about your children is handed to an AI or sent to an outside service, and we settled that before the first line of code. Read their privacy policies. We can only speak for ours.

The six we read in September 2026 are Homeschool Planet, Homeschool Tracker, Scholaric, Homeschool Panda, Syllabird and HomeTrail. Feature lists change, so check theirs as well as ours.

Grades and report cards

Does Margin keep grades and print a report card?

Yes, it does. None of it shows up until you ask for it, and that’s the part we care about most.

  • A grade for every subject built from each graded lesson and each graded assignment and averaged into one grade
  • You can weight categories. Tests, Homework and Quizzes are already set up and already weighted. Rename them, reweight them, add your own
  • You edit the A–F scale. You say where an A starts and where a B starts
  • Fall and spring semesters split on your own break dates, if you want them split at all
  • A box to type the letter yourself, which overrides whatever the arithmetic came to. A teacher is allowed to be the teacher
  • You can print a report card. It is one page a child with the subjects down the side

The next part is the one nobody else says out loud.

Weighted categories are where families quit. Cathy Duffy, who reviewed Homeschool Planet warmly, still wrote that setting up the weighting “might take more time than entering the actual assignments.” So Margin comes with the categories already weighted, and you can change them later. A family that keeps no grades at all never sees any of this, and the drawer stays shut.

A high school transcript with credits and a GPA is launching this fall.

See everything it does
A young child colors at the kitchen table with crayons scattered across the paper

Which homeschool planner costs least for a whole family?

Count your children before you look at a sticker price. Scholaric starts at $3 a month for one child and climbs a dollar a child to a $7 cap. Margin is one price for every child you have, and no higher tier is holding anything back.

That last part is worth a second look. Homeschool Panda puts transcripts in Pro. HomeTrail’s free planner has no grading at all, and the tier that does costs $199 a year. Margin has one plan, and that one plan is all of Margin.

The table is wide. Slide it sideways to see every column.

Planner A year More children Held back in a higher tier
Margin $80, or $8 a month The trial runs 14 days. A card starts it. It is included. One price covers however many children you have. Nothing is held back. There is one plan, and it is everything Margin does.
Homeschool Planet About $84.95, or $9.95 a month The trial runs 30 days and takes no card. It is included. One subscription covers the household. Nothing is held back. They sell one product at one price.
Scholaric They have no annual plan. It is $3 a month for one child. The trial runs 15 days. Each child adds a dollar a month, up to a $7 cap. They have no tiers.
Homeschool Panda Essentials costs about $49.99 and Pro about $79.99. There is a free community tier as well. It is included. Transcripts are Pro only.
Syllabird Essential costs $60 and Premium costs $90. The trial runs 14 days. It is included, with unlimited students on both. The higher tier mostly adds storage and priority support.
Homeschool Tracker It starts at $8 a month, or about $65 a year. That annual price is approximate. The trial runs 7 days and takes no card. It is included, up to 20 students. Nothing is held back. Every plan has every feature.
HomeTrail The planner is free with no card. Plus costs $199, or $19.99 a month. The trial on Plus runs 10 days. It is included. All grading, GPA and transcripts are Plus only.

Prices came off each company’s own pricing page in September 2026, and Homeschool Planet’s again on 25 September 2026. Prices move, so check before you pay.

A promise, not a setting

Which planner keeps your children out of an AI model?

Margin does. There are no ads, no advertising profile and no third-party trackers. Nothing your children do in Margin is handed to an AI or sent to an outside service. You never have to go hunting for a switch to shut off, and it isn’t a paragraph buried in a policy.

Your children’s schedule is not a product. It is never sold, never shared, and never handed to an AI to learn from.

It matters more than it sounds like it does. A homeschool planner holds where your children are at ten in the morning, what they’re struggling with, which Tuesdays you drive to co-op, and the name of your church. We decided what happens to all of that before we wrote a line of code, and the answer was nothing.

Photographs are where you can test that. When you snap the co-op calendar, the reading happens on your own phone. Nothing is uploaded, nothing sits on a server and nothing is copied.

What we believe

So how should you pick a homeschool planner?

Pick the one you’ll still be opening in February. Every planner in this category looks good in August.

Most planners get you through September. What’s getting you through February?

Try whatever you’re considering in the middle of a bad week rather than on a quiet Saturday. Cancel a Tuesday. Take a feverish child out for a day. Then see how much retyping the planner asks of you. That one test has told us more about planning software than any feature list, and it is the test we built Margin to pass.

Most planners make you keep up with them. This one keeps up with you.

Margin next to Homeschool Planet Everything Margin does

This is what Margin costs.

$8
a month for your whole family, however many children you have. You can pay $80 a year instead, which gives you two months free.
You get 14 days free, and a card starts the trial. Cancel inside the two weeks and you aren’t charged. If you ever stop paying, you keep your records. You can still open, print and export every year you planned in Margin.
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Your year is already waiting.

Give it your books tonight. Tomorrow morning you’ll open the app and the day will already be there.

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