
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.
Access your university from your pc
I have used this system when I was a professor assistant and student
Pros
This product provides a learning management system which makes the jobs easier for students and the professors. Students can easly check their duties and see their activities on this system and professors can easily manage their classes easily.
Cons
If there are a lot of students dont buy this software, during the peak times it makes lots of bottleneck and managing the problem is not that easy always some problem appears if some administrative user did something wrong. The money you pay and the service you have dont compensate each other
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.
Easy to use
We use this as our database for all alumni and friends.
Pros
It's easy to use and my favorite thing about this software is that I can enter very little info to do a search to find who I'm looking for. The possibilities are endless!
Cons
When it shows a listing of all the proposals a person has received, I have to pull each one up because there isn't anything about the listing that identifies specific ones. It's a minor irritation
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.
Improves education experience
Pros
I like how it allows users to view academic information easily. For higher education this software is greatly beneficial.
Cons
I do not like how there are times where the software is glitchy or will sign out if inactive for too long.
Use this for University student records, receiving payments, accounts Payables, P/R and financials.
With angst and time we get what we need from it.
Pros
Contains a lot of integrated and complex data. From Human Resources, Student Records and Services, Payroll, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable all in one softward
Cons
so NOT intuitive or user friendly. We have to have a whole IT department just overseeing the functionality of this software. Users are frustrated in each area - Payroll, Accounts Payables, Student Services... no one seems to feel the software was created for their unique purposes. We keep trying to find the department that loves it...
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.
Can't begin to describe how horrible
The navigation makes absolutely no sense, it's is extremely hard to just register for classes and find your way to the proper information. Absolutely unintuitive and simply extremely ugly. It looks like it's built in the 90ies.
Pros
Absolutely nothing, besides it just being horribly ugly the UX and Usability is utterly terrible.
Cons
As professional in tech I decided to enroll in some part time college classes for enrichment and I was appalled at the software system both schools had for students. Both systems for some reason look and navigate completely different but I found out are still made by the same company. Both is so complicated to use (again both totally different though students need to perform the same tasks) and I'm not sure why people (both school but especially the software company) think this acceptable is beyond me.
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.

It's hard to be vanilla
We were in desperate need of an SIS and for the most part, it does serve our needs.
Pros
I like that we have a consortium we can share ideas and code with and have a single voice to Ellucian.
Cons
Banner INB is very clunky to use - even if you are good at using software in general. It is not a very intuitive product; however, the company is moving in the right direction.
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