Best madrasah management software in the UK: a 2026 buyer's guide

The three types of option

Almost every choice falls into one of three buckets. Knowing which bucket a product sits in tells you most of what you need to know.

• Do it yourself with spreadsheets and WhatsApp. Free and familiar, but nothing joins up and progress is lost when a teacher leaves. Fine for a very small, brand-new madrasah, painful beyond that.
• Generic school management systems. Capable, but built for mainstream secular schools, so there is usually no Hifz, no Juz-30 and no dua tracking, and often far more than a madrasah needs at a price to match.
• Purpose-built Islamic school software. Made for how madrasahs actually work, with Quran and Hifz tracking built in rather than bolted on. This is the category IlmFlow sits in.

The ten platforms UK madrasahs actually come across

These are the products a UK madrasah is most likely to find when it starts looking, listed alphabetically. Every entry below is taken from the product's own public website in August 2026. Where a website does not mention something, this guide says so rather than guessing, because an absence from a marketing page is not proof a feature does not exist.

Two things are worth noticing before you read the table. First, more of these are British than people expect, so "UK based" on its own no longer narrows the field much. Second, not one of them mentions UK staff payroll, which is the single biggest gap in this market.

A short note on each one

The table tells you the shape of each product. This is the detail behind it.

• Alif Cloud. Islamic school software with a Quran tracker that records memorisation by surah and ayah range, marked passed, failed or pending. Billing runs through Stripe. It says it serves more than 50 Islamic schools across North America, so the fit for a UK maktab timetable is worth testing carefully.
• e-Maktab. A UK student management system for maktabs and madrasahs, best known for collecting fees by direct debit, which is genuinely convenient for admin. Registers, absence notifications to parents and multi-site management are all covered. Its public site does not mention Hifz tracking.
• IBEAMS. Built and maintained by IBEUK in Leicester, and the longest-established name on this list. It says it is trusted by over 200 Islamic schools and maktabs and displays a Trustpilot rating of 4.4 out of 5. The feature list is wide: registers, fees with integrated payments and invoicing, a parent portal, syllabus tracking, merits and demerits, a custom curriculum builder and Hifz progress diaries. Pricing is published at £15, £30 or £60 a month by student numbers, though several things are paid add-ons on top, including the student diary and phone support at £10 a month each.
• IlmFlow. UK built, and the platform behind this guide, so read this entry with that in mind. Hifz tracking follows the three daily listenings, and maktab classes get Juz-30 surah and dua tracking. It is the only one here that also runs UK staff payroll. Pricing is published on the website.
• Ilmify. A broad platform covering attendance, fees, exams, Hifz, Salah and Tarbiyah tracking, plus transport and inventory. Its pricing is in dollars and rupees and it names India, the UAE and Saudi Arabia as its markets, so it was not designed around UK rules.
• Labbaik. UK registered (company number 17166064), covering Quran and Hifz progress across Qaidah, Tajweed, Quran, Hifz and Alimiyyah pathways, plus the Safar publication curriculum. Free to use, with revenue coming from a 1.5% fee on card payments taken through the platform rather than a subscription. Its public site does not mention UK staff payroll.
• MadrasaSIMS. Made by FlexiSAF Edusoft, with offices in London and Dubai. Strong on the school-administration side: student and staff records, fees with payment gateways, computer-based testing and automated report cards. Its public page does not mention Quran or Hifz tracking.
• MaktabMate. UK registered with data held in London, and built by a serving imam, which shows in the detail. Juz-by-juz Hifdh tracking with tests, daily reading logs for maktab classes, fees with sibling discounts, house points and a staff clock-in system. Parent access is free on every plan. Card payments were still in testing at the time of writing.
• Raziil. Covers attendance, online fees by direct debit, lesson planning, exams and a parent app, and keeps a separate Hifz diary with revisions. The site is credited to HexCube Technology Solutions and does not state a country.
• Sudoor HMS. Focused specifically on Hifz rather than trying to be everything, tracking Sabaq, Sabqi and Manzil alongside attendance, exams and finance. If memorisation is the main thing you need to manage, it is a narrower and more focused option.

• IBEAMS reviews on Trustpilot (source for the 4.4 rating above)

The 10 things to check before you choose

Whatever you are looking at, run it against this list. A good madrasah platform should tick all ten.

• Is it built for Islamic schools? Hifz (Sabak, Sabak Para, Dhor), Juz-30 and duas should be built in.
• Is the register fast, and does it alert parents on an absence automatically?
• Does it keep a permanent progress record that survives a change of teacher?
• Can you track fees and take payments straight to your own bank?
• Does it handle UK staff payroll, PAYE, NI, pensions and payslips?
• Do parents and teachers get their own secure, role-based portals?
• Is your data private to your madrasah, GDPR-friendly, and exportable on request?
• Does it work on a phone, for teachers and parents who are mostly mobile?
• Is the pricing clear, with no hidden tiers or per-feature charges?
• Is there real setup help and support, not just a sign-up form?

Comparing the three options honestly

Here is how the three buckets tend to stack up. The point is not that one is always right, it is to match the option to where your madrasah is now.

Check whether it was actually built for the UK

This is the check most buyers skip, and it is the one that causes the most trouble later. A great deal of madrasah software is built for India, Bangladesh, the Gulf or North America, where the market is much larger. It will often be perfectly good software. It just was not written with a UK madrasah in mind.

The giveaway is usually the pricing page: if the prices are in dollars or rupees, the product was designed around a different set of rules. Be fair about this, though. As the table above shows, several of these platforms genuinely are British, so "UK based" by itself no longer tells you much. The sharper question is whether the product handles the four things a UK madrasah runs into in practice.

• Paid staff and HMRC. If you pay teachers, UK payroll means PAYE, National Insurance, pension auto-enrolment, payslips and P60s. Software built for another country will not do any of this, and you will end up running payroll separately.
• UK GDPR. You are holding named children's attendance and progress records. UK data protection expects those to be held securely, seen only by staff who need them, and available to a parent on request. Ask where the data is actually stored.
• The maktab timetable. UK madrasahs mostly run weekday evenings and weekends, often in two slots, alongside the children's day school. Systems designed for a full-time school day frequently cannot express that at all.
• Term dates and closures. Eid, half terms and one-off closures need to drop out of attendance percentages automatically, on a UK school calendar.

Where IlmFlow fits, honestly

IlmFlow publishes this guide, so treat this section as the interested party talking and judge the rest of the page on whether it was fair to everyone else.

IlmFlow is in the third bucket, built specifically for UK madrasahs and maktabs, and designed to tick all ten checks above: Hifz and Quran tracking, a fast register with automatic parent alerts, fees to your own bank, UK staff payroll, parent and teacher portals, and pricing published on the website at 25p per active student per month with a £15 minimum.

The one thing it does that nothing else on this list advertises is UK staff payroll: PAYE, National Insurance, pension deductions, payslips and P60s for the teachers you pay. Filing directly to HMRC through RTI is on the roadmap and is not live yet, so payroll figures are prepared in IlmFlow and filed by whoever handles your submissions.

It is not the cheapest, and it is honest to say so. A madrasah of 200 students pays £50 a month on IlmFlow's per-student pricing, where a flat-rate plan elsewhere may cost less. What you get for it is the payroll, the UK build and everything included rather than split across tiers. If you have fifteen children and a spreadsheet you love, you may not need any of this yet.

IlmFlow is also new, in its first year, with no long customer list to point at. That is a fair reason to be cautious, and the reason there is a 30-day free trial rather than a sales pitch.

How this comparison was put together

Everything above comes from each product's own public website, read in August 2026. Nothing here is based on a paid placement, an affiliate deal or a review score, and no product paid to be included or excluded.

Software changes quickly and marketing pages do not always list everything a product can do. If you run one of these platforms and something here is wrong or out of date, get in touch and it will be corrected.

Common questions