Frontline Education Alternative When You Need Better Feedback

If you're searching for a Frontline Education alternative, let's start with an honest question: what specifically isn't working for you?

Because Frontline does a lot of things well. Their platform manages the full HR lifecycle for K-12 — hiring, absence management, professional development tracking, and yes, teacher evaluation workflows. For large districts that need compliance tracking, form routing, and completion dashboards, Frontline is the market standard for good reason.

But if what's not working is the quality of feedback your teachers receive from the evaluation process — if evaluations feel generic, if write-ups take hours, if teachers file their feedback and forget it — that's not a Frontline problem. That's a problem Frontline was never designed to solve.

You might not need a Frontline alternative. You might need a Frontline complement.

Table of Contents

• What Frontline Does Well
• The Gap: Process Management vs. Feedback Quality
• What Trellis Does That Frontline Doesn't
• How They Work Together
• Side-by-Side Comparison
• Who Should Consider Adding Trellis

What Frontline Does Well

Let's give credit where it's due. Frontline Education has built a comprehensive platform that solves real problems for school districts:

HR ecosystem integration. Frontline connects evaluation data to hiring, professional development, absence management, and employee records. For a district that wants one vendor for HR, that's genuinely valuable. When everything lives in one system, data flows between modules without manual transfer.

Compliance tracking. Frontline excels at ensuring evaluations happen on schedule. Dashboard views show which evaluations are completed, which are in progress, and which are overdue. District leaders can monitor compliance across all schools from a single screen.

Form routing and approvals. Evaluation documents route through approval chains automatically — from observer to principal to reviewer. This workflow management prevents bottlenecks and ensures documentation meets district requirements.

Framework support. Frontline accommodates multiple evaluation frameworks including Danielson, Marzano, and state-specific rubrics. Schools can customize rubric language and scoring criteria.

Reporting. District-level reporting on evaluation scores, completion rates, and trends helps central office leaders track their evaluation program's health.

If your district uses Frontline and these capabilities work for you, keep using them. This isn't about replacing what works.

The Gap: Process Management vs. Feedback Quality

Here's the gap that no process management tool fills — including Frontline:

When an administrator sits down to write teacher evaluation feedback, Frontline provides a text box. A blank field where the administrator types their narrative feedback from scratch, using whatever words come to mind after a long day, with no assistance, no longitudinal context, and no quality assurance.

The result is predictable:

• Feedback takes 1-2 hours to write because the administrator starts from a blank page every time
• Quality varies wildly depending on the administrator's writing ability, available time, and energy level
• Feedback is disconnected from prior observations because pulling up and re-reading old evaluations takes effort nobody has
• Teachers receive generic comments because specificity is the first casualty of time pressure

Frontline manages the process beautifully. It gets the evaluation form to the right person, tracks its completion, and stores the final document. But it has no influence on what goes inside that form — the actual feedback that determines whether the evaluation helps a teacher grow.

This is the gap. And it's the gap Trellis was built to fill.

What Trellis Does That Frontline Doesn't

Trellis is a teacher development platform focused entirely on the part of evaluation that Frontline doesn't address: the quality of feedback teachers receive.

AI-powered feedback generation. Input your raw observation notes — typed or audio-recorded — and Trellis produces structured, personalized, growth-oriented feedback in about 15 minutes instead of 1-2 hours. The feedback is grounded in what you actually observed, not generated from templates.

Longitudinal teacher profiles. Trellis maintains a development history for each teacher across all observations. When you write feedback for a teacher's third observation, Trellis automatically references prior growth areas, notes progress, and connects new feedback to the ongoing story. This is the continuity that makes evaluation feel like coaching.

Three tiers of enhancement. Choose the level of AI assistance that fits each situation:

• Clean & Format: Organizes your notes into structured feedback while preserving your voice
• Enhance & Structure: Adds framework alignment, evidence connections, and growth-oriented framing
• Full Analysis: Produces comprehensive feedback with longitudinal connections, pattern analysis, and detailed next steps

Framework alignment. Feedback naturally incorporates language and expectations from Danielson, Marzano, or your custom framework — without reading like a rubric checklist.

Audio input. Record your observations verbally and Trellis transcribes and transforms them into written feedback. Particularly useful for administrators who think better out loud.

Elli AI assistant. Query your observation data conversationally: "Which teachers are showing growth in classroom management?" or "What feedback did I give Ms. Johnson last time?" Elli makes your evaluation data accessible and useful.

How They Work Together

Trellis and Frontline are complementary tools that address different parts of the evaluation process:

Evaluation Step	Tool
Schedule observations	Frontline
Assign evaluators	Frontline
Conduct classroom observation	You (in person)
Take observation notes	Your preferred method
Generate quality feedback	Trellis
Review and approve feedback	You + Trellis
Enter feedback into evaluation form	Frontline
Route for approval	Frontline
Track completion	Frontline
Maintain longitudinal teacher profiles	Trellis
Generate compliance reports	Frontline
Query observation data for coaching insights	Trellis (Elli)

The workflow is straightforward: after an observation, input your notes into Trellis, review and refine the generated feedback, then copy it into your Frontline evaluation form. Frontline handles the rest — routing, approval, storage, and compliance tracking.

You don't need to abandon your Frontline investment. You need to add the layer that makes the feedback flowing through Frontline actually worth reading.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Capability	Frontline Education	Trellis
Primary function	Evaluation process management	Feedback quality enhancement
Observation scheduling	Yes	No
Compliance tracking	Yes	No
Form routing/approvals	Yes	No
HR system integration	Yes (full suite)	No
Feedback writing assistance	No	Yes (AI-powered)
Longitudinal teacher profiles	Limited	Yes (automatic)
Audio observation input	No	Yes
AI-powered feedback generation	No	Yes
Framework alignment in feedback	Manual (rubric selection)	Automatic (natural language)
Time to write feedback	1-2 hours (no change)	~15 minutes
Cross-observation pattern analysis	Limited reporting	Yes (Elli AI)
Pricing	Custom (district-level)	$1,500/admin/yr or $4,500/school/yr
FERPA compliance	Yes	Yes

Who Should Consider Adding Trellis

Adding Trellis to your Frontline setup makes sense if:

• Administrators spend 1-2 hours per evaluation write-up and feedback quality is suffering because of time pressure
• Teacher feedback is generic — you could swap teacher names between evaluations and the feedback would still read the same
• Evaluations feel disconnected — each observation starts from scratch with no reference to prior feedback or growth goals
• You want evaluations to feel like coaching — not just compliance documentation
• Your district is growing and needs feedback quality to scale with new administrators who are still developing their evaluation skills
• Teacher engagement with evaluation is low — they check the rating and file the document without reading the feedback

Adding Trellis probably isn't necessary if:

• Your primary pain point is scheduling, compliance tracking, or form management (Frontline already handles these well)
• Your administrators consistently write specific, personalized, longitudinal feedback (though even strong writers report that Trellis saves time)
• You're looking for a single platform to replace Frontline entirely (Trellis doesn't manage process — just feedback quality)

See how Trellis complements your Frontline investment →