Comparisons7 min read
Cheapest ERP software in India
There is no single cheapest ERP, because the products are priced in five different units — and one of them is "free" only if your own team pays to run it. Here is the honest arithmetic, in each vendor's own unit, checked on their own pages.
Checked against vendor websites on .
iVake publishes this page. Prices for other products come from those companies' own public pages on the date shown, and they change — check before you budget. Corrections to hello@ivake.com.
The question "what is the cheapest ERP in India" has three honest answers, one for each situation. A free self-hosted licence is the cheapest if your engineers run it. A per-student rupee rate is the cheapest paid option for a small or mid-sized school. A flat annual plate wins only once the roll is large. Pretending there is one answer is how committees approve a number that was never the real number.
The short versionCheapest paid option for a small or mid-sized school in rupees: iVake at ₹8 per student a month, about ₹19,200 a year for a 200-student school. Cheapest for a very large school: Fedena's flat ₹1,00,000 a year with unlimited users. Cheapest by licence alone: OpenEduCat's Community edition, free under LGPL-3 — with servers, backups, upgrades and support on you. Five of the nine products publish no price at all.
Ranked by what it actually costs you
| Situation | Cheapest published option | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| A small school, paid, in rupees | iVake — ₹8 per student a month | Per-student; rises as the roll grows |
| A mid-sized school, paid, in rupees | iVake — ₹7 from 201 students | Still per-student, not flat |
| A large school, paid, in rupees | Fedena — ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000 a year | Flat with unlimited users; placement and alumni are add-ons |
| You have engineers and want a ₹0 licence | OpenEduCat Community | Free software; you pay servers, upgrades, backups, security and support — their own page says so |
| Only admissions, dollars | Classe365 — $100 a month core | Add-ons at $75 a month each stack up |
| Only admissions, high volume | Meritto — from $8,000 a year | Banded by applications; caps users at 15–50 |
| Everyone else | No price published | Teachmint, MyClassboard, Edunext, Vidyalaya, Skolaro |
Entab CampusCare is excluded: their site did not respond on 18 September 2026. Software directories show prices for several of these products, but those fields are entered into the directory rather than published by the vendor.
Why "cheapest" is the wrong question, asked the wrong way
- Free software is not a free running cost. OpenEduCat's own edition comparison puts servers, installation, upgrades, backups, security and support on you, in your own staff time. That is a budget line, just paid to your own people.
- A per-student rate tracks your roll. At ₹8 a month, a 200-student school pays about ₹19,200 a year — cheaper than any flat plate. Grow to 3,000 and the flat plate pulls ahead.
- A flat plate hides the per-head cost. ₹1,00,000 is excellent for 2,000 students and poor for 200. GST at 18% sits on top of every rupee figure here.
- The price is not the cost. What is charged extra — logins, parent app, modules, support — is where the real number lives. A cheap licence with a per-login fee is not cheap.
What iVake charges, and what is never extra
Campus operations are ₹8 per student per month up to 200 students, ₹7 from 201 to 10,000, and ₹5 above 10,000; universities are quoted individually. Staff logins, the parent and student app, reports, upgrades and support tickets are never charged extra. The trial is 30 days, full features, no card. The calculator is at the pricing page.
Where iVake is not the cheapest
- A large school pays less on a flat plate. Fedena's ₹1,00,000 a year with unlimited users beats a per-student rate once the roll is large enough.
- If you have engineers, open source wins on licence cost. OpenEduCat's Community edition is free to download. iVake is not open source.
- If you only need admissions, a standalone product priced for a counselling floor may fit better than a campus ERP.
If you do one thingWrite down your unit and your roll before you compare any two prices — then ask each vendor to quote on that unit for the next session, with tax and onboarding shown. The cheapest product is the one that is cheapest on your unit, not the one with the smallest number on its homepage.
Three worked examples, at 200, 1,000 and 3,000 students
| School size | What the published lists give you |
|---|---|
| 200 students | iVake at ₹8 a month → about ₹19,200 a year before GST. Fedena's lowest flat plan is ₹50,000. The per-student rate is the cheapest paid option by a distance. |
| 1,000 students | iVake at ₹7 a month → ₹84,000 a year before discounts. Fedena's flat plans span ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000 — the two now overlap, so the flat plate and the per-student rate are genuinely comparable. |
| 3,000 students | Fedena's ₹1,00,000 flat plan with unlimited users beats iVake's per-student rate. The flat plate wins at scale; the per-student rate wins small. |
GST at 18% sits on top of every rupee figure. Dollar and per-module prices are not converted here, because the invoice converts at the rate on the day it is raised.
The pattern is worth stating plainly, because it is the honest answer to "which is cheapest": iVake is the cheapest published paid option for a small to mid-sized school in rupees; the free self-hosted option (OpenEduCat Community) is cheapest only if your own team's time is not counted; and Fedena's flat plate is cheapest once the roll is large. There is no single winner, and a product that claims one is hiding the unit it prices in.
The hidden costs that make "cheap" expensive
- Logins. Meritto caps users at 15 to 50 by plan; OpenEduCat sells user packs. A cheap subscription with a per-login fee is not cheap for a school with sixty staff.
- The parent app. Some products price the mobile app separately — OpenEduCat lists Android and iOS app costs. A school whose parents expect an app will pay that line or lose the parents.
- Modules you will need in year three. On a per-module list, the full lifecycle — fees, LMS, alumni, placement, AI — stacks. Price the basket you will actually have, not the entry tier.
- Migration and training. Most vendors publish nothing; some publish services separately. Get the onboarding cost into the proposal, or it arrives as a change order.
- Free software's running cost. OpenEduCat's own page puts servers, upgrades, backups, security and support on you. That is a budget line paid to your own people, not a saving.
Frequently asked questions
What is the cheapest ERP in India?
It depends on your size and unit. OpenEduCat Community is free to self-host but you run the servers. iVake is the cheapest paid rupee option for a small school (about ₹19,200 a year for 200 students). Fedena's flat ₹1,00,000 a year wins once the roll is large. See the worked examples above.
Is iVake cheaper than Fedena?
Below roughly 600 students, iVake's per-student rate is lower than Fedena's flat plans; above that, Fedena's flat price stays lower as you grow. The two products do not cover the same ground, but the arithmetic is the arithmetic.
Why do five vendors publish no price at all?
Teachmint, MyClassboard, Edunext, Vidyalaya and Skolaro published no figure on their own sites on 18 September 2026. It is a sales strategy — name the number after the demo — which is exactly why "who publishes a price" is the first useful filter.
Sources
- Fedena: pricing and plans
- Meritto: packages and pricing
- Classe365: pricing
- OpenEduCat: editions
- No price on Teachmint, MyClassboard, Edunext, Vidyalaya or Skolaro
- iVake: pricing and calculator
See iVake running on your own data
Share your fee structure and programmes before the call, or sample data with student names removed. We set them up, so you see your own institution on screen rather than a demo account.
- 45 minutes, your data. Not a generic tour of features.
- Migration mapped on the call. We show exactly where your current records land.
- A written rollout plan within two working days, with phases, owners and dates.
- No pressure to switch everything at once. Most schools and colleges start with one department or one intake.