What Brightwheel doesn't do: a candid founder comparison
Brightwheel is the dominant childcare software platform in the US. Most directors I talk to use it or have used it. They almost all say the same thing: “It does what it does well. There’s just stuff it doesn’t do.”
I started TinyGuard because of the stuff it doesn’t do. This post is what those gaps are, why they matter, and what we built to address them.
What Brightwheel does well
Let me steel-man it first.
- Daily reports for parents. Best-in-class. The UI is clean, photo handling is solid, and parents actually use it.
- Attendance check-in. Smooth, well-integrated with the parent app.
- Billing and tuition. Mature payment integration. It works.
- Brand recognition. Almost every parent has heard of it, which reduces onboarding friction.
- Scale. Tens of thousands of facilities. Vetted at scale.
If you’re running a 30–50 kid daycare with no camera ambitions and standard billing needs, Brightwheel is a perfectly defensible choice. Move on.
Where Brightwheel ends, the second-vendor problem starts
The four things I hear directors complain about most:
1. No cameras.
Brightwheel doesn’t ship cameras, integrate with them, or keep a video archive. If you want parents to peek at a live view of their child’s classroom, you’re buying a separate camera service — Verkada, Eagle Eye, a self-managed NVR, or consumer-grade gear. Now you’ve got two logins, two bills, two BAAs to track, and when an incident happens you’re correlating timestamps across two systems by hand.
2. EVV for elder-adjacent care.
If you run an elder care facility, or a mixed childcare + elder operation, Brightwheel doesn’t do Electronic Visit Verification — the GPS + timestamp tracking required for Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services billing. That’s yet another vendor.
3. Compliance documentation export for licensing audits.
Brightwheel surfaces the data you logged. It doesn’t proactively assemble a compliance packet in the format your state inspector wants. Most directors I talk to spend 8–14 hours pulling documentation together before each licensing audit.
4. Single-tenant HIPAA isolation at the database layer.
Most platforms isolate tenant data at the application layer (industry standard). Database-level isolation — where the database engine itself refuses cross-tenant reads — is rarer. We built it with PostgreSQL FORCE Row-Level Security. Most parents wouldn’t notice; a hospital-adjacent customer might.
What TinyGuard does to close those gaps
We’re pre-launch (zero paying customers as of this writing), so this is what we built, not what we’ve proven in production yet. Caveat noted.
- Cameras integrated. A Pi 5 ships to your facility and auto-discovers your existing IP cameras via ONVIF. Live video in the same dashboard as care logs.
- Care log + video clip linking. Log an incident, attach the clip directly. One record, two media.
- EVV in the same platform. For elder or mixed-vertical facilities, no separate vendor.
- Compliance packet export. One click generates a survey-grade documentation packet.
- Database-level tenant isolation. PostgreSQL FORCE RLS — cross-tenant reads blocked at the engine.
- One BAA covers everything. No multi-vendor BAA-coordination headache.
On price
I won’t quote a competitor’s number that’ll be stale by the time you read this. The structural point is simpler: a parent app plus a camera service is two subscriptions and two bills. TinyGuard is one. Our model is a flat base + a small per-child rate + a flat per-camera rate — one invoice that usually lands at or below what two separate vendors cost. The live calculator is on our pricing page.
Where we’re not (yet) better than Brightwheel
Honesty:
- Track record. Brightwheel has thousands of customers. We have zero. They’ve debugged ten thousand edge cases we haven’t seen yet.
- Brand recognition with parents. Parents have heard of Brightwheel; they haven’t heard of us.
- Scale-proven uptime. Their infrastructure has handled traffic we can’t yet match.
- Mature mobile app. Their parent app is years ahead. Ours is in development.
If those matter more to you than the camera + EVV + compliance gaps, stay on Brightwheel. We’re not the right call yet.
When to consider TinyGuard
- You’re running cameras and software and billing and compliance, and the vendor-juggling is exhausting.
- You’re in elder care or mixed-vertical and need EVV.
- You’re a Founding Partner candidate and want a real discount in exchange for early-customer feedback.
- You read this and the four gaps above sound like your actual life.
One more difference worth naming: our pricing is public. $99/mo per facility + $2.50 per child + a fixed per-camera rate from $7/mo (by retention) — no metered overages, ever. Brightwheel’s is demo-gated, so I can’t print it here; run your own numbers side-by-side on the pricing page or the comparison page.
If yes, my email is del@tinyguard.co, my cell is (510) 686-3357, and you can book a 15-minute demo. Real human, founder, single person. I answer my own phone.
— Del Peck Founder, TinyGuard
Brightwheel is a trademark of its respective owner. This is an independent comparison, not affiliated with or endorsed by Brightwheel.
TinyGuard puts cameras, care logging, billing, and compliance on one on-site box. Book a 15-minute demo or see the pricing.