IlmFlow vs Makatib: comparing two UK madrasah platforms

What Makatib is, fairly stated

Makatib is built by Project Paced Ltd (company number 16969966, registered in England and Wales, with a London office address), for Islamic supplementary schools and Quran classes. It is aimed at teachers and administrators, parents, and smaller madrasahs where an operator also teaches their own classes.

Its published feature list covers attendance tracking with guardian notifications, a fee and payment ledger, exam management with formal reporting, parent-teacher messaging and announcements, and student enrolment and class organisation.

Quran tracking is a real strength on paper: three pathways, described as "Qaida, Nazra and Hifz each tracked the way they're actually taught", with Hifz specifically monitoring Sabaq, Sabqi and Manzil against quality ratings, which is the same idea as IlmFlow's Sabak, Sabak Para and Dhor under different names. Makatib also publishes a dedicated security page describing database-level tenant isolation and role-based access, which is a good sign for a young platform to be talking about at all.

It is currently free during the beta, no card required, with pricing not yet published. Makatib says "founding madrasahs get advance notice and founding terms before anything changes" once it moves to a paid model. Most of the product sits behind a login, so beyond the public marketing page, feature depth cannot be independently checked from outside.

Side by side

Based on what each platform publishes about itself in August 2026.

The honest reasons you might pick Makatib right now

None of these are knocks on IlmFlow. They are simply true things about being early.

• It costs nothing today. A genuine free beta with no card required is a real, zero-risk way to try software while your madrasah is small or you are just getting started.
• It talks openly about security. A dedicated page describing tenant isolation and role-based access is more than most young platforms publish, and worth crediting.
• The Quran-pathway framing may fit how you already teach. If Qaida, Nazra and Hifz as three distinct tracked pathways matches your own structure more naturally than another platform's wording, that is a legitimate reason to prefer it.

The honest reasons you might pick IlmFlow right now

Equally, these are simply true things about being established.

• The price is published and will not change under you. Makatib is free only until it decides otherwise, on terms it has not yet announced. IlmFlow's 25p per active student, £15 minimum, is public today.
• Parents and teachers get their own full portals, not just messaging. Attendance, grades, fees, homework and progress are each visible to the right person, not folded into a single announcements feed.
• UK staff payroll is built in. If you pay teachers, IlmFlow is the only platform on any of our comparisons here that runs PAYE, National Insurance, pensions and payslips alongside the student side.
• It is a settled product, not a beta. What you see today is what you get, rather than a set of features that may still change shape before launch. That said, IlmFlow is also new, in its first year, with no long customer list yet. "Settled" here means the feature set and pricing are fixed, not that there is years of track record behind it.

On price, plainly

There is no honest way to compare price like-for-like here, because Makatib has not published one. If the only thing you care about right now is paying nothing, Makatib wins today, and that is a fair reason to try it.

What you are actually deciding is whether to build your madrasah's records on a free beta with pricing still to be announced, or start on a modest, published price you can plan around from day one. Neither answer is wrong, it depends how much that certainty is worth to you.

Your data, your madrasah

Whichever of these you choose, you are handing over named children's attendance and progress records, so it is worth asking where that data lives and who can see it. Makatib publishes a dedicated security page describing database-level tenant isolation and role-based access, credited earlier in this comparison, which is a genuinely good sign for a young platform to be talking about at all.

On IlmFlow, each madrasah's data is kept private to that madrasah, fee payments go straight to your own bank rather than through IlmFlow, and a full export is available on request. See our plain-English guide to what UK GDPR actually requires of a madrasah, and how IlmFlow protects the data it holds.

• IlmFlow: Security & Trust

How this comparison was put together

Everything about Makatib above comes from its own public marketing page and security page, read in August 2026. Most of the product sits behind a login screen once you go past the marketing pages, so this comparison reflects what is publicly stated rather than a hands-on trial of the finished product. If you run Makatib and something here is out of date, get in touch and it will be corrected.

Everything about IlmFlow comes from its own published pricing and feature pages, the same standard we hold every comparison on this site to.

Common questions