Best Charter School Lottery Software in 2026 (Compared)

The software you use for your enrollment lottery makes a bigger difference than you'd expect. The wrong setup means a week of wrestling spreadsheets every spring and a sinking feeling when an auditor asks how the draw worked. The right one makes lottery day boring, which is exactly what you want it to be. Here are the options worth knowing in 2026 and how to think about choosing.

What actually matters when you choose

Before you start comparing logos, get clear on what the software has to nail. The draw needs to be genuinely random and something you can defend later, which rules out anything that's really just a sorted spreadsheet. It has to handle the priorities your school uses, like siblings or residency, without a workaround. It should keep a record of every draw that you can hand to your authorizer. Published pricing is a good sign too, since it means the cost won't depend on how much a salesperson thinks you can pay.

Charter Lottery

This one is ours, so read it with that in mind. We built it to do a single job well, which is running a fair charter lottery and keeping the paperwork that goes with it. The draw uses cryptographically secure randomization and hashes each result so it can be checked later. Sibling, residency, staff, and alumni priorities are built in. The price sits on the website at $240 per school per year, setup is free, and we walk you through your first lottery ourselves. It fits a single school or a small network that doesn't want an enterprise contract.

LotterEase

One of the longest-running names in this niche, and one that a lot of charter schools already use. Schools tend to speak well of the support and training. Pricing isn't listed publicly, so you'll have to ask. If you're weighing the two, I put together a side-by-side with Charter Lottery.

SchoolMint

SchoolMint is a much larger platform covering enrollment, marketing, and communications across whole districts, with a lottery feature living inside it. If you need all of that, it's worth a look. If you mostly need the lottery, it can be more than the job calls for. There's a comparison here.

A few others

Avela and EnrollWise lean into match-based assignment, which is handy for district-wide school choice where families rank several schools. School Pathways bundles a lottery into its student information system. These tend to make sense for larger or district-level setups rather than a single charter.

So which one

Pick the tool that fits the size of your problem. A focused lottery tool wins on price and simplicity when you're one school or a handful. A full enrollment platform earns its cost once you're running choice across a whole district. Most of the charter folks I talk to are in the first group and end up overpaying for the second.

You can line the options up on the comparison pages, or start a free setup and run a practice lottery this afternoon.