
It’s the time of year when we present our update on the evolution of the SIS market share for the U.S. and Canada. Since the pandemic hit, there have been no major differences. However, we would like to give you additional information on specific data.
Over the years, we have amassed data on more than 4,700 active North American institutions to create this graph. Our team has added 350 institutions to our database for this year alone.
The four SIS vendors with the most significant market share are still below the 80% mark. This situation confirms a trend we noticed last year. Jenzabar lost 1% for the second year in a row, while Populi saw a slight increase in its market share (now at 7%). Another change compared to last year is Workday’s market share revision. It is now at 1% (a comparable share to 2020).

Download a PDF version of the evolution graphs:
- Evolution of the HigherEd SIS Market Share, 2000-2022
- Evolution of the HigherEd SIS Market Share, 2000-2021
- Evolution of the HigherEd SIS Market Share, 2000-2020
We have modified Workday’s market share because Workday has signed several contracts indicating an SIS implementation. Still, these implementations were never finalized. Due to various difficulties, institutions have backed off, paused the implementation or selected another solution. We have discussed this situation in a previous blog post.
Populi looks to be a preferred choice for smaller institutions (it has about 10% in the smallest enrollment category (1-2,499)). Although it continues to earn market shares globally, it doesn’t make any gains in bigger enrollment bands.
New SIS Implementations Expected to Resume Soon

In previous posts, we mentioned that institutions were waiting on commitments from SIS companies to select a new solution. We expect market shares to change over the next five years as revised offerings become available. Schools would also move from the reflection stage to active RFPs and procurements.
Since 2018, we have seen a downward trend in new implementations (this excludes upgrades) for the HigherEd SIS submarket. Nonetheless, based on our predictions, we might see more implementations in the next two to three years. We believe that the few homegrown systems that are still active, will continue to be slowly decommissioned to one of the hosted solutions. This solution switch is to avoid the maintenance cost of an internal system.
With the pandemic came the urge to implement several solutions to support online learning and evaluation. When updated SIS products hit the market, many schools assumed they would quickly move to their new SIS systems. But, similar to other business sectors, qualified implementation consultants were and are in high demand. Now that most pandemic-oriented implementations are behind us, we should soon see a return to normalcy in SIS implementations.