Choosing the Right Tool for Curriculum Development and Management

I have built our curriculum in Excel, Google Sheets, Notion, and Monday. Here is what I learned.

For a decade I have watched schools try to manage their curriculum in tools that were never designed for the job. Excel because it is already on every computer. Google Sheets because the team wanted live collaboration. Notion because someone on social media said it was magic. Monday.com because the head of department wanted Gantt charts. Each tool has strengths. None of them are curriculum tools. Here is the honest comparison, plus the move that finally made the spreadsheets-and-glue era end for our team.

1. Excel — the data analysis powerhouse

Strengths: serious calculation power, real offline access, deep customisation through formulas and macros, and almost every teacher already knows it. If your curriculum management involves heavy student performance tracking, resource calculations, or statistical analysis, Excel will do the job.

Weaknesses: collaboration is clunky, version control becomes a nightmare with multiple editors, no project management features, and spreadsheets become visually overwhelming the moment a curriculum hits real scale. The fundamental issue: Excel is a general-purpose spreadsheet, not a curriculum tool. Every team that builds a curriculum in Excel ends up reinventing project management on top of a tool that was never designed for it.

Use it for: data analysis, budget tracking, complex calculations, offline work.

2. Google Sheets — the collaborative spreadsheet

Strengths: real-time collaboration is genuinely seamless, the cloud-based access is friction-free, version history is automatic, and integration with the rest of Google Workspace removes the file-shuffling problem. Free, fast, familiar.

Weaknesses: less powerful for serious data analysis than Excel, less robust offline, fewer customisation options, and the same fundamental issue — it is a spreadsheet, not a curriculum tool. Teams build elaborate sheet systems with tabs for units, sub-tabs for lessons, conditional formatting for completion status — and eventually realise they are programming a workflow tool inside a spreadsheet.

Use it for: collaborative document development, simple progress tracking, resource sharing, teams that want one source of truth without paying for a SaaS.

3. Notion — the all-in-one workspace

Strengths: combines note-taking, project management, databases, and wiki functionality in one place. Highly customisable. Built-in collaboration. Visually pleasant. Built-in project management features like task assignment, progress tracking, and Kanban boards.

Weaknesses: real learning curve compared to spreadsheets. Limited data analysis. Limited offline functionality. The sheer number of features and customisation options overwhelms new users — half of teams I have seen adopt Notion give up after a month because they cannot decide how to structure their workspace.

Use it for: curriculum databases, lesson and unit plans, student project management, collaborating on curriculum development, building a knowledge base.

4. Monday.com — the project management heavyweight

Strengths: serious project management features (task assignment, dependencies, Gantt charts), excellent collaboration, visual interface, automation, integrations with most other tools.

Weaknesses: not designed for content creation — it is a workflow tool, not a curriculum tool. Limited data analysis. Real cost at scale. Overkill for simple curriculum needs. Teams adopt Monday for the dashboards and then realise they still need a separate tool to actually write the curriculum.

Use it for: complex curriculum development projects, large teams coordinating across schools, tracking initiative progress, workflow automation.

The common problem all four share

None of them are designed for curriculum. Each one is a general-purpose tool that schools repurpose. The repurposing costs time — every team has to build their own templates, their own structure, their own conventions. Then someone leaves the team, and the conventions break. Then a new staff member joins and rebuilds them differently. The institutional curriculum becomes a story carried in three retired teachers' heads.

I have watched four schools go through this cycle. The tool changes every two years. The underlying problem — that you are using a general-purpose tool for a specific job — does not.

What I moved to

This year I moved our curriculum into KiwiBee's curriculum planner, which is designed for curriculum management specifically. Units, lessons, learning objectives, skills, assessments — all first-class entities in the model, not cells in a sheet. AI analytics across the whole curriculum surface coverage gaps and concept overlap without a teacher having to scan a giant spreadsheet. And the skills gradebook connects every assessment back to the underlying skills in the curriculum, which is the integration our spreadsheet era never delivered.

The trade-off: less customisation than Notion, less raw analysis than Excel, less project-management polish than Monday. But the design fits the job. We stopped reinventing curriculum management every term, and the team started spending its time actually teaching.

The honest answer to 'which tool should I use'

If you need data analysis, Excel. If you need live collaboration with a small team and a small curriculum, Google Sheets. If you need a flexible workspace and have a power user willing to set up the structure, Notion. If you need to manage a complex multi-team initiative, Monday. If you need a tool that already knows what a curriculum is, look at a purpose-built curriculum platform. The choice is between four general-purpose tools that need to be configured into shape, and one tool that already is the shape.

Where this fits in KiwiBee

If you don't want to glue a curriculum together from spreadsheets and Notion pages, KiwiBee includes a purpose-built curriculum planner, a skills gradebook that maps to your units, and AI analytics across the whole curriculum. Try it free at app.kiwibee.io.