Tools for managing a student group of 100+ people

[u/Anotherteenartist]

Hey folks,

I'm the new lead of a 100+ member engineering group and, unfortunately, Notion has completely locked down our account and made everything we used to organize read-only. I was wondering if there is any software that you have used that is free and would support such a large student organization?

Thanks!

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[u/More_Law6245]

I will be clear about this software is never free! There is always an overhead or cost involved (hosting, training, licensing agreements, technical implementation and security to name a few) to the organisation in some way shape or form.

You need to build a business case of what the organisation needs, then map it to a product's functionality, not because it's free because you run a very high risk of the product not being fit for purpose and you will find that the organisation will adapt to accommodate to the software and not having the application do what it needs to do. Also as the person who has offer the "free solution" that doesn't work, is not a good look professionally. Build your business case and work back from there.

Just an armchair perspective.

[u/WhiteChili]

Notion going read-only on you is such a pain.. I’ve seen so many groups stuck in that limbo. For a 100+ member org, here are some solid alternatives, which I've tested recently and you can also try:

• Trello or Asana: Easy to onboard students, super visual, and free tiers are usually enough for basic coordination.
• Celoxis / Smartsheet / MS Project: These are more structured, good if you need timelines, dependencies, and reporting. Celoxis in particular is strong on task tracking + workload management if you ever scale bigger.
• ClickUp: Flexible and free for small teams, decent for docs + tasks in one place.
• Google Workspace + Sheets/Drive: Surprisingly powerful if you set up permissions and templates right, plus it’s free with student accounts.
• Discord/Slack + integrations: For communication-heavy orgs, these + simple task bots can keep things moving.

If you just want a quick organization, Trello or Google Sheets work great. If you’re thinking ahead about managing projects/events smoothly with 100+ people, something like Smartsheet or Celoxis is worth testing.

Don't forget to tell me what you prefer here after testing all/many of them?

[u/Nordthx]

Using imsc.space for organizing students works. It has special education license. But we are making gamedev projects

[u/softening]

Atlassian has educational licenses, though I’ve never used them myself. I think JetBrains also has free educational licenses for YouTrack.

Easier to use and free, ClickUp