User Reviews Overview
About Ellucian
Ellucian is a cloud-based software provider that helps higher education institutions with professional solutions to create a connected campus. Designed for universities of all sizes, the platform provides solutions for departments...
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- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Banner is a fantastic data management tool.
Pros
It's a rock-solid application that you can count on. That in and of itself is a huge deal. It works, has minimal bugs, and is the backbone of how we manage our data.
When other applications are having a problem or we have a data integrity question, we often say "What is it in Banner?" because we know it will be correct there.
Cons
It can be a little scary at first to new users, which I can speak to from experience. But the new interface is definitely helping with that.
I would also love to see Ellucian develop a proper higher-education CRM tool. We had to go with another vendor because we needed something more comprehensive than what Banner could offer (Application Reviewing, Events Management, etc).
I think Ellucian is missing out on a huge financial opportunity and could take a massive chunk out of the Higher Ed CRM market if they were to develop one.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Mixed Reviews
They are an established Higher Education software that is on the cutting edge with a lot of what they offer. The partnerships they offer with vendors seems to fall short in some cases. The support they offer for the products is generally good. But depending on the application may depend on how quickly they respond to support questions/issues.
Pros
Offers a variety of different software solutions that integrates with its ERP (Banner or Colleague). Along with a variety of ancillary applications that integrate with the ERP.
Cons
Cost would be by far the biggest issue. The second would be that as of late the company has a tendency to tout its upcoming or just released products will work but in reality it is being built and developed as the sales people speak. To be fair their established software generally works well and no complaints.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Difficult to use | Difficult to maintain | Expensive | Releases are poorly tested by Ellucian...
-Business users in all departments find Banner difficult to use
-Database engineers find Banner difficult to maintain
-IT staff finds Banner difficult to support
Banner is obsolete in the technological age we live; there are cloud finance, HCM, CRM, and student information applications which integrate well with each-other and outperform banner in nearly every category.
Pros
Customer support Is friendly and responsive.
Cons
-There is a Massive maintenance overhead
-There is a need for business users to constantly watch the community for systemic issue and bug alerts
-Documentation is intentionally over-complicated to encourage the purchase of Ellucian consulting
-Implementation is more complicated than competitor applications due to the age of the product
-Data is stored un-uniformly in 'shotgun' style in the database making migration away from banner very difficult.
-There is no dashboard -- the entire user interface is a very weak showing
-Self service is impossible to leverage for reliable company-wide / student-wide document delivery.
-Almost no reporting capabilities are built-in; admins must instead write database queries for end users.
Top Ellucian Alternatives
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Provide more support for end users!
The underlying system is robust and stable, but difficult to manage, especially in terms of data entry and updates. Making changes can have unanticipated ripple effects.
Pros
The end user product has good visual flow and is designed to protect student data.
Cons
This is not an intuitive system, especially to users making a transition from the company's older product which was not visually or logically similar at all. Support materials are not adequate on the web site, unless you are a (paying) implementation team member.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Ellucians
The ability to update our Customer Relationship Management system with exported data-sets.
Pros
Since this uses Oracle and SQL, I like having the ability to write reports for assistance in extracting data from the data tables we use.
Cons
The software has many different modules and the last version of software released helped out with a more intuitive interface.
- Industry: Transportation/Trucking/Railroad
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
The Industry Standard but why?
This product is very commonly used and it feels like they rely on this fact to put in minimal efforts towards innovation. If you have a different option, I would recommend investigating that.
Pros
This product is very commonly used in industry. The online support community around this product is very active and is very helpful when you encounter issues, bugs, odd behavior, etc. (which is often). It is based on a relational database so query writing is easy enough.
Cons
Software patches and updates from Ellucian are notorious for breaking various modules, connections between modules, etc. The UI is a very outdated model and tends to be very unfriendly for those who are not tech savvy. Customer service from Ellucian leaves a lot to be desired.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 201–500 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
A mess of a company and a patchwork of modules
Covers general SIS/ERP for a college but causes more frustrations than solutions
Pros
Ellucian Banner is comprehensive in that it can cover most of the core functions of a college/university. But that's about it.
Cons
Ellucian hasn't advanced the products in years. Every attempt for updates have been met with upgrade issues, compatibility problems, and user frustration. New products are rare and generally poor, whether they use COTS or homegrown applications.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 201–500 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Ellucian Banner SIS -- Solid Product In Use for Nearly 20 years
Been using Banner since 2004 (and SIS since 2005). I serve as the manager of the IT team that supports the student offices that use the product.
Pros
I commend Ellucian for recent updates they have made to the look and feel of the product. I find it now easier to use and easier to support (no more Java needed for the admin side!).
Cons
The number of Financial Aid releases is challenging. Plus, when we apply them we need to take our Banner Admin pages offline temporarily. It would be better if the Financial Aid releases were isolated so that we could apply them without taking all of Banner down.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Decent, but like use improvement.
I think it could be a great software for higher education/universities. However, there are flaws and it’s not the most user friendly.
Pros
Ellucian has a lot of different capabilities and options for multiple departments to use. I like that all offices across campus can see the same information for students once it is updated by another user. It’s a one stop shop for those who work at the university, instead of each department using their own software system.
Cons
Very complicated codes to search for pages, it takes a long time to memorize them and the training for ellucian wasn’t the greatest. We struggled to get questions answered in a timely manner or correctly.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
University Integration
The integration and partnership of Ellucian and Chrome River has been much needed.
Pros
Ellucian continues to find new ways to assist the universities with the many needs of the ever increasing technology needs.
Cons
Not always do you get the best "training" support, but they will always find a solution.
- Industry: Education Management
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Banner Human Resources Module
This product is for higher education institutions. Ellucian is behind many competitors in this space however, it has realized this and is making positive changes in the right places.
Pros
Customer service is very good. The vendor is always willing to listen and help where they can. In addition, there is a customer portal which allows the customer to communicate with one another on issues or ideas.
Cons
My dislike is the current roadmap is very slow to achieve goals. Often release dates will be pushed out and this causes much frustration within the business that has planned to upgrade certain services.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Not a registrar’s best friend
Ten years ago I moved from a non-Banner school to a Banner school. The transition to Ellucian’s Banner was a disappointment after using my previous institution’s software.
Pros
Ellucian’s Banner Student has the basic student records functions included. It will force higher ed administrators to change their business processes to fit the software.
Cons
I did not like the tool set (queries, printing, data loads) that come with the product.
- Industry: Education Management
- Company size: 201–500 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Needs to improve signficantly.
Pros
It has a lot of great functions and features (when they work). Makes it easy to upload contacts into the CRM and it has a lot of customizable options.
Cons
It can very unreliable and dealing with support has been time consuming. The layout of the CRM is also unescarailly complex and is very difficult to learn for new users, it can costly to setup training of the CRM tool with our support team as well.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 201–500 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Use HR module on daily basis
Pros
the support for Ellucian is awesome. It took a while to learn how to use Colleague but once I learned my area, it was very useful.
Cons
it's not intuitive. I wish there was a training that new employees could go to in their area to learn about the Colleague product to help understand how the change I make affects others.
- Industry: Fund-Raising
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Overall good CRM for non-profit/fundraising
Pros
Online platform available - the ability to store a lot of information in many different ways, and report customization.
Cons
A little clunky in how many clicks it takes to find the information you are looking for.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
It does what it's supposed to
Pros
Ellucian allows us to build a functional interface for students and faculty alike.
Cons
It breaks. A lot. Can't tell you how many times I've been doing something fairly simple and suddenly Ellucian stops working or says a page can't be displayed.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Ellucian
Pros
I like that you can see a lot of different types of information and don't necessarily need additional software to get the job done.
Cons
It can be difficult to navigate through the different windows until you are really well versed.
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Great software!!! Easy to use and always updating?
Pros
Lots of stuff! Love the new self service!! The innovation of Ellucian is amazing!!! They are helpful !!
Cons
Sometimes the cost are high for new products and innovations, but I understand they allot of work is done on their behalf.
- Industry: Education Management
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Great Program, has everything I need to get my job done.
Ability to store a lot of information
Pros
I like the search capability and ease to look up any entity. I also like the ability to have all the information on an entity in one place.
Cons
Sometimes there is a lot of duplicate information, I wish there was a way to minimize that or to catch it before some information gets entered twice.
- Industry: Education Management
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Ellucian
Pros
My workplace uses Ellucian's Banner 9 for a Learning Management System. It's great to use codes to view different records.
Cons
Elluican's Banner 9 feels like it wasn't created with input from working professionals who actually use Banner 9. The navigation is clunky and slow. The interface isn't intuitive. I would never recommend this service to my worst enemy. Don't walk away from Ellucian, RUN!
- Industry: Education Management
- Company size: Self Employed
- Used Daily for 1+ year
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Review Source
Great suite, odd language
Pros
Great suite for information storage and processing.
Cons
Odd language for how to navigate. Too difficult for novice users.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 1,001–5,000 Employees
- Used Daily for 6-12 months
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Review Source
Started out as a great idea, but functionality is horrible.
Pros
Visually appealing and the user interface is easy to use and navigate through tabs. A nice face lift from the older interface.
Cons
The program is so slow. When you're trying to do multiple processes a day, the waiting adds up. Sometimes I will wait a whole minute to wait for a process to execute, very frustrating.
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 201–500 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Ellucian in higher ed
I love the product & love using it but wish there was more consistency in if it will work or not.
Pros
It is awesome to use for allowing students to track degree progress. It is simple for them to log on & see what is still needed.
Cons
There are a lot of bugs with this program. There is a high chance it is not working when you log on to use it.
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
This software can be confusing to use if you are a first time user.
Pros
Once you get familiar with this software, it can be user friendly. There are allot of things to learn but once you have mastered them you can achieve some great results on the web.
Cons
It is difficult to use as there is so much to learn and know. My institution is constantly holding training's to help people
- Industry: Higher Education
- Company size: 501–1,000 Employees
- Used Weekly for 1+ year
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Review Source
Quality Updates with Ellucian
Pros
I like the user interface of Ellucian! It's easily navigable and very functional in every way. I work in Education and Ellucian is really helpful when inputting various forms of information into the system. It's quick and easy to use with every click you make.
Cons
I wish the keyboard shortcuts for Ellucian were easy to find.
