GegoK12: an MIT-licensed school ERP schools can actually own
A modular school management system built on Laravel, released open source, with dedicated mobile applications for parents, teachers and transport — used by institutions across several countries.
- SECTOR
- Education / EdTech
- TYPE
- GegoSoft product
- LICENCE
- MIT open source
- DEPLOYED
- 50+ institutions
- STATUS
- Active development
Why we open-sourced a school ERP
School management software has a trust problem that has little to do with features. A school signs a multi-year contract, moves years of student records, fee history and examination data into a vendor's cloud, and then discovers the cost of leaving. Data export is partial. The schema is undocumented. Renewal pricing moves in one direction.
We released GegoK12 under the MIT licence to remove that argument entirely. A school can read the source, host it themselves, export its own database, hire any Laravel developer to modify it, and continue running the system if GegoSoft disappeared tomorrow. That is a stronger commitment than any contractual assurance we could offer.
The licence is the product decision. Everything else follows from it.
The commercial model sits above the core rather than inside it. The school management system is free and complete. Premium add-ons, mobile applications, hosting, migration and support are paid. Schools that want to self-host and manage it themselves can, and some do — which we consider a feature of the model, not leakage from it.
The design problem: five audiences, one dataset
A school ERP is not one application. The same underlying data has to be presented to five groups whose needs barely overlap.
Administrators
Need breadth and control: enrolment, staff, fees, examinations, inventory, reporting across the whole institution.
Teachers
Need speed on a narrow set of daily tasks: attendance, homework, lesson plans, marks entry — often between classes, on a phone.
Parents
Need one child's information and nothing else, with no training and no manual. Many will open the app only when something needs attention.
Students
Need homework, timetable, results and classroom communication in a form that fits how they already use a phone.
Transport staff
Need route and attendance information in the field, frequently on poor connectivity.
Building one responsive web application for all five produces something every group tolerates and none uses willingly. We split it: a full-featured Laravel web application for administration and staff, and separate Flutter applications for parents, teachers and transport, each shaped around what that group opens their phone to do.
What the platform covers
Every module below is in the open source core.
Three mobile applications, three different jobs
Attendance, homework, results, fees, notices and calendar for their children only. Multiple children under one login.
Attendance marking, homework assignment, classroom wall posts and timetable — built for use between periods.
Route information, student boarding records and trip status for transport staff working away from a desk.
Technology choices and why
An open source product is judged partly on how easily someone else can maintain it. That constrained the stack more than performance did.
Laravel
The largest pool of hireable developers of any PHP framework. A school that wants to modify GegoK12 without us can find someone locally.
MySQL
Academic data is relational and stable. Schools already have staff or vendors who can back it up and read it.
Livewire and Vue.js
Livewire keeps most administrative screens in PHP, lowering the barrier to contribution. Vue handles the genuinely interactive screens.
Tailwind CSS
Utility classes make it practical for a school's own developer to restyle without unpicking a custom CSS architecture.
Flutter
Three applications across Android and iOS from shared codebases, maintained by a team that is primarily web-focused.
Nginx
Deployable on modest hardware. Some institutions run GegoK12 on their own servers, and it has to work there.
How the team maintains it
GegoK12 predates our adoption of AI-assisted development, so it offers a clear before-and-after. Our engineers now use Claude Code as standard daily tooling, and on a codebase this size the effect is most visible in the unglamorous work: framework upgrades, test coverage across older modules, refactoring, and building customisations for individual institutions.
Reviews and design decisions remain with the engineering team, and every change passes normal review before merge. What changed is throughput on maintenance work that used to compete with new development for the same hours.
Where it stands
GegoK12 remains under active development, with premium add-ons and institution-specific customisations built on the open source core.
Common questions
Is GegoK12 really free?
The school management system is released under the MIT licence, which means you can use, modify, host and redistribute it, including commercially. Premium add-ons, the mobile applications, hosting, data migration and support are paid services.
Can our school host it on our own server?
Yes. It runs on a standard Laravel, MySQL and Nginx stack on modest hardware. We also offer managed hosting for schools that would rather not run infrastructure.
Can it be customised for how our school works?
Yes, and you are not dependent on us to do it. The source is open, so any competent Laravel developer can modify it. We build customisations for institutions that prefer us to handle it.
Can we migrate from our current school management software?
Usually. It depends on what your existing vendor will export. We assess the available data before committing to a migration, so you know what carries over.
What happens to our data if we stop working with GegoSoft?
You keep it, along with a working system. The database is yours, the schema is open, and the application continues to run. This is the main reason we chose an open licence.
Does GegoK12 support multiple branches or campuses?
EDIT-ANSWER — confirm current multi-branch capability before publishing. Do not claim it if it is roadmap rather than shipped.
Related work
Looking at school management software?
Tell us how your school runs today and what your current system does badly. We will tell you whether GegoK12 fits, what it would take to migrate, and when you would be better served by something else.
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