Academic CubeSat projects offer students and researchers hands-on engineering experience and can deliver cutting-edge research data. The CubeSat projects are highly multidisciplinary and require teamwork skills as well as engineering expertise. A challenge for academic CubeSat projects is the high turnover of graduating students, which makes knowledge management complicated. Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) offers functionality that can address many of the challenges academic CubeSat teams experience. This paper presents a trade-off study using the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) to select an MBSE software for use by students. Literature on academic application of formal trade-off studies in student teams is limited. The case study described here shows how tangible and intangible factors are addressed using the AHP method, and a discussion of the process and results is provided.