University Portal

Universities and colleges spend vast sums on admin tasks. With thousands of staff and students to manage, higher education institutions face complex operational challenges. This can lead to rising costs and undermine student satisfaction.

One way to address this is to provide your students and staff with a simple, powerful self-service portal. This eliminates the need for manual admin tasks, leading to improved profitability and student experiences.

What is a university portal?

A university portal is a secure, private platform, which empowers staff and students to take control over their own administrative needs. This means providing a central resource for information relating to different student services.

Students can then view this information and take action, including booking resources, registering for courses, contacting staff, and more.

In the same platform, admin and teaching staff are able to access student information and behavior data. The goal of a university portal is to streamline administrative and operational workflows, providing better optimized and more efficient services.

Why do universities use portal apps?

Universities and colleges face more competition than ever before. With the rising cost of education, students want to know that they’re getting the best value for their money. University experiences are a key decision factor for prospective students.

Beyond this, many prospective students are choosing alternatives to traditional education, such as newer institutions, online learning, or vocational courses. With rising competition, universities must maximize their profitability by reducing operational costs.

Universities use portal apps to streamline their internal workflows, provide improved student experiences, and maintain competitiveness.

What should a university portal contain?

University portals can offer a wide range of different features and functionalities. A basic university portal gives students and staff access to information regarding:

• Teaching staff.
• Courses.
• Resource bookings.
• Student-life.
• Pastoral resources.
• Academic and enrolment requirements.

Where possible, a higher education portal should also allow students and staff to manipulate this data. This can mean registering for courses, contacting teaching staff, booking resources, or any other admin task.

Our open-source university portal template

With our open-source, low-code platform, you can build fully customized and functional portal apps in minutes.

Like all Budibase apps, our template offers:

• Customizable design.
• Student service and admin workflows.
• Automations.
• Intuitive UI.
• Custom permissions.
• External database support.
• Responsive design.
• Flexible hosting & deployment.
• Third-party integrations.
• Efficient and cost-effective processes.

Use our template to quickly and easily deploy a feature-packed portal for your students and staff.

Centralize information

Portals are the most effective way to provide key information for staff and students, in a single, convenient location. This greatly simplifies the process of finding key information about taking action.

Our portal template offers a clean and simple UI. Users can quickly find information relating to staff, students, courses, resource booking, and more. Empower users to take control over their own admin needs.

We’ve also implemented searchability across key app screens. From contact details to course requirements, users can find the exact information they need in seconds.

Self-service admin

Portal apps are built around self-service admin functionality. Students and staff alike can carry out key tasks, without the need to contact administrators. This reduces the admin burden on your internal teams.

Our template is built around four datasets, for students, staff, courses, and room booking. Each of these can be accessed, queried, and manipulated by users with different permission levels.

For example, staff can quickly edit their personal information or student registrations. Students and staff can both book study spaces, while administrators can view, approve, or modify any data set.

Staff and student look-up

Our university portal template features built-in directories for student and staff information. Directory pages are fully searchable, so users can find and contact the right people, in seconds.

Search functionality is fully customizable. Give your users the power to search for colleagues and students, using any data field.

We’ve even provided integrated contact options from each directory listing page. Users can automatically email staff and students from any individual listings page, using the mailto command.

Resource management

Resource management is a major challenge for universities and colleges. With thousands of service users, and a wide variety of different resources, this can create a large admin workload.

Our template is built to simplify universities’ resource management. We’ve provided a simple form interface to allow staff and students to book study rooms. These bookings can then be altered or declined by admin staff.

The same format can be used for any other kind of resource, including study materials, equipment rental, pastoral care, and more. With Budibase, you’re in control of how you develop your portal’s functionality.

Tiered permissions

Naturally, different kinds of users will use your portal differently. Students, teaching staff, and administrators have very different requirements when using a university portal. This requires strict access control.

Our template uses three permission levels, to maximize both security and user experiences. Students, teaching staff, and administrators can only access the exact features and data that they require.

This prevents unauthorized access to personal data, as well as ensuring that each tier of users has a fully streamlined UI.

Process automation

Our open-source university portal template is built for process automation. Use any action within our portal template, to trigger Budibase’s vast library of built-in automations. We’ve also included a JavaScript editor, to add complex custom functionalities.

Budibase also offers a wide range of integration options. Use Zapier, Webhooks, and more to trigger automations in third-party tools.

Connect our university portal template to communications tools, CRMs, scheduling apps, or any other education management systems.

Check out our free school admin panel template .

Responsive UI

Like all Budibase tools, our template is fully mobile responsive. Empower staff and students to take your portal with them, wherever they go. All design elements automatically scale and resize to fit perfectly on different devices.

Mobile responsiveness is crucial for your adoption rates. University portals are supposed to cut admin costs, but this only works when your staff and students actually use your portal.

Our template is designed for maximum usability, with intuitive, and effective user interfaces.

Why build an open-source university portal with Budibase?

At Budibase, we’re building the world’s largest suite of admin tools. Say goodbye to expensive custom developments, or subscription fees for off-the-shelf tools.

Build a university portal with our low-code platform, and you’ll enjoy:

• Open-source design.
• Scalability.
• Fast deployment.
• Access control.
• Self-hosting.
• Advanced security.
• In-app automation.
• Integrations.
• Conditional UIs.
• External database support.
• Total customization.
• Built-in JavaScript editor.
• Auto-generated screens.

Our open-source, low-code builder

Budibase is the fast and cost-effective way to build custom, open-source software tools. With our low-code platform library of templates , you can build advanced internal tools in minutes. Even better, Budibase is free, forever.

We don’t charge additional fees for adding users or building multiple apps. We even offer free SSO across all of your Budibase tools.

We do, however, offer premium support and SLAs for larger organizations. Check out our pricing page for more information.

Connect to existing data

Budibase makes it easy to connect your university portal to existing datasets. Connect to databases using MySQL, Postgresql, MongoDB, Airtable, S3, CouchDB, and more. Access, query, and manipulate data from a range of exciting sources, using our portal template.

We also offer direct CSV uploads, and a proprietary, internal database, for incredibly fast builds and deployments.

Integrate with external tools

Budibase tools sit perfectly alongside your existing software stack. We support third-party app integrations , using Zapier, Webhooks, and more. With a full suite of integration options, Budibase is the smart way to add feature-rich UIs to your existing tools.

Streamline workflows, and provide amazing student experiences by integrating your portal with existing student information systems or teacher portals.

Complete customization

Our open-source, low-code platform offers complete customization, at a fraction of the cost of traditional development. At Budibase, we empower organizations to create the perfect internal tools for their needs.

With a range of built-in themes and autogenerated themes, you can customize any element of our template, in seconds. Add additional features, alter designs, or tweak data fields to create your perfect university portal.

Optional self-hosting

With Budibase, you’re in control of how you deploy and host your internal tools. Choose self-hosting for maximum control and security. Deploy our template to your own infrastructure, using Kubernetes, Docker, Digital Ocean, and more.

We also offer managed infrastructure, as well as our new Budibase Cloud platform. Budibase offers unrivaled flexibility for deployment and hosting.

Security

Our open-source university portal template offers industry-leading security and data protection. With optional self-hosting and fully customizable access control, you can implement the exact security standards for your needs.

For higher education institutions, data protection is essential. Data breaches can quickly lead to costly fines and reputational damage. Budibase is the smart way to secure your staff and students’ data.

Scalability

Budibase is built for scalability. We don’t restrict the number of users, apps, or functions you can implement. With our intuitive low-code platform, you can quickly deploy new features, without the need for service interruptions or excessive downtime.

With total scalability, Budibase is the best way for universities and colleges to build future-proof school management software.

Start using Budibase today

With our free open-source university portal template, you can build a deployable, feature-rich admin platform, in minutes. Use our template as a stand-alone app, or as a modern interface for legacy tools.

Simply click below to get started today.