
Very stable software used by best higher ed. institutes
Pros
It is a high-end software. Very stable. It integrates with the Microsoft LDAP. We have been using it for student and employee account management in term of course registration, tax forms, billing, salaries, student employment, grading, transcripts. It has very secure and solid database which is essential for the above mentioned matters.
Cons
Managing it requires training. It is not easy to administer. The price is very high compared to competing software in the higher education sector.
Not a good integrated solution
Negative, frankly. While helpful and polite, the team seems too inexperienced to be of much help. In fact, Ellucian seems to cause most of the problems themselves through self-inflicted wounds. Each update or patch implements some new ‘improvement’ that breaks most workflows and processes built for the previous version. As such, the hope to get a slight improvement ends up costing weeks of manpower to fix everything else in the test environment over and over again.
Pros
Ideally, when functional, the functionality between Ellucian products can be helpful. We use Banner and eRecruit CRM. We expected the CRM/ERP integration to be the best selling point when choosing the CRM application.
Cons
Despite being the same company, the products are not as seemless as we felt it should be. It took well over a year of implementation of the eRecruit CRM to customize it to fit with the Banner ERP. Even then, we still find issues where things are not being converted from one to the other well. One example, on the CRM, GB is the country abrieviation for the UK (Great Britain), but in the ERP, this is shown as Gabon. I’ve wasted so much time programming and converting little things like this that I find it hard to believe they were released by the same company.
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.

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.
The Colleague Self-Service offerings are causing excitement with our students.
It is our school ERP.
Pros
The Colleague Self-Service Faculty view offers rosters, midterm and final grade entry. Our faculty are so impressed with this new functionality they would fight to keep from losing it.
Cons
Ellucian is difficult to get to respond to issues. I have been working with the Ellucian Cloud testing and it has taken months to accomplish what should have taken days.
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.
Reliable and secure
Pros
I like that it is reliable and secure yet it allows me to save my password to log on. Some sites are so secure they do not allow it and it makes it frustrating to sign in and out multiple times.
Cons
There are times when the system is down due to maintenance. That is only because my university will perform updates at times.
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.
Better that other similar products
Pros
the ability to see all the course work, history, current, gpa's, holds, etc at one place
Cons
still isn't always correct, some courses show up in places where they don't belong
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.
Not very user friendly and when told the system will do something, it actually will not.
Pros
It is hard to say because we have had issues with getting the system to do what we need it to, but I do like that it will create a positive pay file for manual checks.
Cons
It won't do some of the basic things for financials that I as an accounts payable person feel that the system should do.
Great Higher Education Tool
Pros
I liked the fact that it could house both student and faculty information at the same time. In addition, it allowed you to input information for instructors and move them around if necessary. We used the Banner by Ellucian software and it was useful for our needs
Cons
Nothing to note. It is good for meeting the needs of an institution.
Ellucian builds products then takes away support
Terrible. Would not recommend for free, let alone the price we pay.
Pros
We use Banner part of Ellucian. It is effective to get large amounts of information into the system. It is effective is being our online filing cabinet.
Cons
The program is very difficult to use, to navigate through. It is impossible to use on mobile, literally impossible.
sun gard delivered banner interface for student system
Pros
it has a way to store the entire student data for higher education schools. There are several forms that have all the student information from registration to courses to personal information to highschool to grades to degrees.
Cons
It can get confusing to learn the forms. It takes time getting used to. Once we know the forms its not as bad
Ellucian
Pros
I am a new user and I really enjoy that the product is very user friendly. If you have used any computer software in the past you should be able to adjust to using this.
Cons
The navigation shortcuts and codes were difficult to get accustomed to. Some lack of consistency.

Ellucian for Community College
In the beginning I had to constantly keep my list of instructions handy if I wanted to enter a requisition for a purchase order, now its easy because I've done so many. Practice makes perfect!!!!
Pros
I liked how you can add features, customize it for the needs of the institution. I work for a small college and we don't need all the extra features that the larger colleges might implement.
Cons
It can be a little difficult to navigate for the beginner. Unless the user knows what they want there is a chance of getting lost. Ive been using the software for about 4 years now and i sometimes get lost or have to search for specific information. There is no menu with a list of options. So I guess what I'm saying is that it would be nice if it was more user friendly, easier to navigate.

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.
University Accounting
Overall we are very satisfied with Ellucian. It provides our business and finance team books that are used for easy reporting and a clean UI interface.
Pros
I have been a user of Ellucian banner for over six years and have been through countless updates. The product keeps improving where I think things are already good, and is quick to address current issues. Our organization loves the fact that we can use a web based version as well. Additionally, the UI is very clean and I can understand what is affecting our balance sheet, income statement, ect., all at a quick glance. Finally, the reports that are generated from Ellucian are very helpful and make it so I can create accurate reconciliations.
Cons
The one problem we run into with Ellucian is that training to use the product is difficult. Many screens have specific acronyms to access them, which is hard for people to remember. However, they have introduced a search function that allows you to use words and it acts more like a google search, which is helpful to find what you need.
Colleague as an ERP
Colleague is an overall great product. Ellucian has been working hard to improve Colleague's features and functionality, especially on the Self-Service platform. This work has kept them at the front edge of innovation with responsive design that allows your constituents serve themselves from any device. This takes pressure off of administrative staff so they can focus on quality support to your students.
Ellucian does a good job at being connected to their customers and understanding the constantly changing needs in the academic world. They hold focus groups, beta testing groups to allow the engaged community of customers to provide input, and it shows in the quality of the newer products they have created.
Pros
Mobile friendly self service
Integration through Ellucian XE
Active user community on Ellucian's eCommunities social media platform
Cons
Reporting. Expect to spend money on a reporting tool.
I work with one module for the software and they have a great network for help.
The Ellucian software is very helpful in keeping our school on track and making it easier for the student to navigate Admissions to registration to financial aid to graduation.
Pros
Very functional and customizable to your school. We get the opportunity to let the company know what we want in the software and they usually update to meet the various schools needs. Very aware of all federal guidelines and requirements.
Cons
Training for use of the module or processes would be nice when something new is implemented. Several screens and options are usually available with short descriptions.
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.
Difficult to use | Difficult to maintain | Expensive | Releases are poorly tested by Ellucian QA
-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.
Overall good customer service.
Pros
The community that is always ready to help each other. You can reach out to hundreds of users and get answers.
Cons
Upgrades can be very time consuming and complex, the reporting is not up to standard and some user functionality is not easy.
Unfortunately...It' what we've got...
Pros
I guess the only good thing I can say about this software is that it works (kind of) most of the time.
Cons
This software is the least user friendly software I have ever used. I understand that databases are boring, but this software (until the last update) looked like it was from 1996. Nothing about this is intuitive for the general user. For ease of use I would have given it zero stars, but I was unable.
User-friendly but a new experience.
Good experience but takes time.
Pros
It was super easy to use when we didn't run into freezing issues. Allows us to pull up any student information that we need and found a way to troubleshoot successfully.
Cons
Sometimes it seems that there are way too many extra steps for no reason. Although it was easy to use, there is a learning curve to master.
Ellucian Banner has provided our students and staff with a single application that manages aspects of course registration, work, bills, payments, grades, academic status.
Single sign on module was extremely helpful