Inkwelly vs Fedena. Count the total cost, not the licence.
Fedena has been in Indian schools for over a decade and has a genuinely open, flexible core. The comparison that matters isn't feature lists — it's what the whole arrangement costs once you add up everything around it.
- Go-live
- Next working day
- Price
- ₹49–₹199 per student per year
- Migration
- ₹0 — we do the extraction
- Pilot
- 90 days, pro-rata refund
The stitched-together problem
Schools on Fedena often tell us they like the core and have assembled everything around it from other vendors — SMS from one, a payment gateway from another, a parent app from a third. Each works. Together they're several invoices, several support contacts, and several places for a parent's phone number to be wrong.
In Inkwelly those are one product: WhatsApp messaging, every Indian payment gateway, direct bank reconciliation and the parent channel all included rather than integrated.
If you self-host, count the hosting
A self-hosted instance looks cheap on the licence line and rarely is once you count the server, the updates, the backups and the person who knows how it all works. That person is usually doing it on top of their actual job, and the school discovers the real cost the week they leave.
It does have one genuine advantage for a migration: you already control your data and nobody's permission is required to leave.
Side by side
| Inkwelly | Fedena | |
|---|---|---|
| Parent messaging | WhatsApp included, Meta-approved templates, SMS fallback | Typically integrated from a third-party SMS provider |
| Indian payment gateways | Razorpay, PayU, Paytm, Cashfree built in, plus ICICI, HDFC and SBI reconciliation | Available via integration, varying by edition |
| Hosting | Fully hosted on AWS Mumbai, daily encrypted backups | Cloud, or self-hosted with the operational load that carries |
| Pricing model | ₹49–₹199 per student per year, every module included | Per-user cloud pricing, or free self-hosted plus running costs |
| Source | Proprietary; your data exports in standard formats any time | Community edition is open source |
| Go-live | Next working day | Varies with edition and setup |
Where Fedena is the better choice: if you need the source, or you have a genuine institutional requirement to keep everything on your own servers, that's a real constraint and Inkwelly doesn't meet it. We're cloud-only, and an open-source product you can host and modify is a different kind of thing to buy.
The one-invoice difference
- One product to buy rather than four to integrate.
- One support contact when a fee reminder doesn't reach a parent.
- One place a parent's phone number lives, so fixing it fixes everything.
- One bill, at a rate that doesn't change when you add a module.
Frequently asked
What does Inkwelly cost?
₹49–₹199 per student per year, flat at any school size — no enrolment slabs and no per-module upsell. A 500-student school on the middle plan is about ₹49,500 a year. Migration, training and setup are ₹0. The only external costs are WhatsApp message fees and your payment gateway's transaction charge, both billed at cost.
How quickly can we go live?
Go-live can be the next working day. You pick the date; we don't need months of parallel running to get there. Bringing across years of historical records — old marks, past fee ledgers, archived certificates — runs on its own track afterwards and doesn't hold up day one.
Can we try it before committing?
90-day paid pilot on your real data. If it isn't working at day 90, pro-rata refund and your data back in standard formats. We don't offer a free trial on dummy data — it proves nothing to either of us. The pilot runs on your real students, your real fees.
Is Inkwelly open source like Fedena's community edition?
No — Inkwelly is proprietary. Your data is still yours and exports in standard formats whenever you ask, including on the way out. But if having the source itself matters to you, that's a real difference and open source is a genuine reason to stay.
We self-host Fedena. Does that make migration harder?
Easier. You already control the data and nobody needs to grant permission for you to leave. It's also worth adding up what self-hosting has actually been costing in server, updates, backups and somebody's time before you compare the two.
We've integrated SMS and a payment gateway separately.
Those come in-product rather than integrated, which mostly shows up as fewer invoices and one support contact instead of three. Migration brings your fee history across regardless of which gateway collected it.
Our teachers aren't confident with software. Will they actually use it?
The teacher app does one thing well — attendance and marks, in under a minute a class, on any Android phone, in Hindi or your regional language. We do a full day of on-site training at go-live and stay on WhatsApp through the first month. If a teacher is still struggling after that, we come back at no cost.
Where is our data, and can we get it out?
Hosted on AWS Mumbai. Daily encrypted backups, role-based access, and a full export in standard formats whenever you ask — including on the way out.
See Inkwelly next to Fedena
30-minute demo. We open your Fedena account with you and load your data into Inkwelly live. Dated go-live plan by end of call.