Bublio compared with the alternatives
Three ways a school gets a stack of papers marked. This compares the approaches rather than named products, because a claim about somebody else's price list is out of date the week after it is written — and because the honest part of this page is the last section, not the table.
Every claim here was checked on 2026-08-02.
| Marking by handA teacher, a red pen and the answer key. | A dedicated scanner systemPurpose-built forms fed through a machine bought or leased for the job. | BublioSheets printed on your own printer, photographed with a phone. | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it costs | Nothing to buy. The cost is teacher hours, which is the largest cost of the three and the one that never appears on an invoice. | A machine, its forms, and usually a service arrangement to keep it working. Ask what the forms cost per sheet — that is the number that recurs. | A plan, plus ordinary paper and whatever your printer already costs to run. No hardware, and no special forms to order. |
| What it takes to start | Nothing. It is what your school already does. | Buying or leasing, somewhere to put it, and somebody trained to run it. Forms are ordered in advance, so a quiz on Thursday is planned in advance too. | An account and a printer. The first exam can be built, printed and marked the same morning. |
| How fast marking is | Minutes per paper, and the totalling afterwards. It is the same work every time, and it lands in the evening. | Very fast once a stack is at the machine. The stack has to get to the machine, which is a walk if it lives in one office. | Seconds a paper, wherever the papers are — at a desk, in a corridor, on a bus. Results appear as you photograph. |
| Changing your mind | Completely flexible. Any paper, any format, any last-minute change — at the cost of marking all of it yourself. | The form is the constraint. A different number of questions or options usually means a different form. | The sheet is generated for the exam, so the exam is not shaped around the sheet. Change the questions and reprint. |
| When something goes wrong | A mistake is found by a student or a parent, usually after the marks have gone home. | A machine fault stops everything until somebody comes out to it, and that is what the service arrangement is for. | An unclear mark is handed back to the teacher rather than guessed at, and a report from any screen arrives with what the app saw attached. |
When Bublio is not the right answer
- You mark tens of thousands of papers in one hall, on one day
- Photographing them one at a time is the wrong shape of work. A machine that eats a stack unattended is genuinely better at that, and we would say so on a call.
- Your exams are mostly written answers
- Bublio shows you each written answer with the photograph beside it, which is faster than a pile of paper — but a person still marks every one. The saving is small.
- An external body dictates the answer sheet
- Public examinations often specify the form and the scanner. Bublio prints its own sheet, so it cannot mark somebody else's.
- Nobody at the school has a phone they can use for work
- A laptop camera or a scanned PDF works, but the product is built around a phone. If that is a policy problem, it is a real one.
No competitor is named here. We are not in a position to describe somebody else's product accurately enough to be fair to it, and a comparison that gets that wrong is worth less than none.