Skip to main content
TrustRadius
Ellucian Banner

Ellucian Banner

Overview

What is Ellucian Banner?

Ellucian offers Banner educational ERP, including its student management system emphasizing control and reporting of process-oriented facets of education such as grading and attendance.

Read more
Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Banner is a comprehensive software solution that is widely used across organizations, particularly in the higher education sector. Its …
Continue reading
Read all reviews

Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 12 features
  • Online Registration Management (7)
    8.7
    87%
  • Class Scheduling (7)
    8.5
    85%
  • Student Data Security (7)
    8.4
    84%
  • Integrations with 3rd-Party Education Technology (8)
    7.7
    77%

Reviewer Pros & Cons

View all pros & cons
Return to navigation

Features

Student and Faculty Administration

Aspects of student management that entail faculty or administration's management of student data and related regulatory requirements.

8.3
Avg 8.5
Return to navigation

Product Details

What is Ellucian Banner?

Ellucian banner is an ERP tool used for school management, at the K-12 and college levels.

Ellucian Banner Student: Manage critical student information and deliver services to keep them on track. Student can register on their own device and get a comprehensive view to help them, as well as their advisors, stay on top of attendance and grading.

Ellucian Banner Human Resources: A self-service platform that manages employee experience including employment, benefits, and leave plans. Also enables building out talent management and succession planning strategies

Ellucian Banner Finance: Institutional financial management that supports operations, budgeting, procurement, accounts payable, researching, and accounting. Ellucian Banner Finance can make actionable insights from real-time updates on data, and find efficiencies or cost savings when procuring goods and service across your institution.

Ellucian Banner Financial Aid:Institutional financial management for automation of financial aid processes. Funds are distributed accurately and data can be shared with students and staff.

Ellucian Banner Features

  • Supported: Ellucian Banner Student
  • Supported: Ellucian Banner Human Resources
  • Supported: Ellucian Banner Financial Aid
  • Supported: Ellucian Banner Finance

Ellucian Banner Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

Frequently Asked Questions

Ellucian offers Banner educational ERP, including its student management system emphasizing control and reporting of process-oriented facets of education such as grading and attendance.

Reviewers rate State and National-level Reporting highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Ellucian Banner are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
Return to navigation

Comparisons

View all alternatives
Return to navigation

Reviews and Ratings

(58)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Banner is a comprehensive software solution that is widely used across organizations, particularly in the higher education sector. Its primary purpose is to manage student functions such as registration, class scheduling, grades, and GPAs. Users can easily access information on specific students or classes, making it an invaluable tool for academic advisors, registrar's offices, and faculty members.

With Banner, universities can create programs and databases, allowing for seamless integration and data retrieval between departments. It helps keep everything organized and flowing smoothly, from managing student accounts and financial aid to tracking course enrollment trends and adding new class sections as needed. Moreover, Banner Student provides simple and easy data access, improving work efficiency for all departments involved in managing student and faculty data.

Beyond academic functions, Banner also serves as a central hub for various administrative tasks. It supports financial reporting, accounts payable, human resources management, alumni records, addresses, giving history, and faculty information. Additionally, Banner ensures compliance with educational privacy and financial aid regulations.

While Banner is widely praised for its functionality and ease of use, some users have experienced challenges with its design complexity. Extensive customizations and additional purchases may be required to tailor the system to specific organizational needs. Nonetheless, many users appreciate the ability to add program changes within Banner itself, such as implementing automated accounts payable systems.

Overall, Banner is an indispensable tool for institutions of higher education that rely on it to manage student data effectively across multiple departments. Its user-friendly interface and extensive capabilities make it a reliable solution for streamlining administrative processes and maintaining accurate records.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-21 of 21)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Student Registration
  • Student Portal
  • Faculty Portal
  • Automated Student Admission
  • Defenelty the user interface needs to be enhanced alot to be more appealing
  • Application upgrades needs to be managed easily
  • Students would like to see more notifications regarding there progress and courses
  • More communications methods to be intergreated like SMS, whatsapp
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • The user experience is pretty clean
  • The user experience has a lot of resources
  • The support team is fairly good about getting back to you
  • The data can be hard to report
  • The major delays are handled quickly but some upgrades are slower
  • The team seems to change a lot
Sarah Daggett | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • "Quick Flows" allow me to create a chain of pages that automatically flow from one to the other. This is very helpful when I have to do the same thing repeatedly. It saves on typing and having to think about where I'm going next.
  • Validation tables show all values that can be used in a particular field. This can be very helpful when needing to reference, add, or clean up values.
  • In CAPP, using attributes to easily code changes in a student's curriculum is a dream. It's a great way to avoid having to make custom changes to a student's area, which means that changes made to the base area will always copy forward. I only use attributes when a change is common, so that I'm not multiplying attribute unnecessarily.
  • The Banner 8 to Banner 9 (aka Banner Pages) transition was really rough. The speed of the system dropped by at least half. It has gotten better, but it's still not what it was.
  • Banner Pages seems to preference mouse users. As someone who works with a lot of data, I loved how smoothly Banner 8 allowed a person to get around with just their keyboard. With the version change, some of the keystrokes changed, which I adapted to, but then pages were changed or added that don't have as many keyboard-friendly options. This seems short-sighted.
  • There are parts of Banner logic that seem unnecessarily clunky. For instance, we have two different types of non-matriculated students that have two different credit ranges allowed. Credit ranges are controlled in a page called SFAMHRS. It seems to me that if both groups shared the non-matriculated type number, but one group had a unique student attribute and the other didn't that that would be enough to differentiate which range they get. Unfortunately, it's not. We have to code BOTH groups in SFAMHRS AND each individual student in SGSADD with an attribute because Banner pretty much ignores the one with the attribute if the other doesn't have one too.
  • One of the reasons why the Banner 8 to Banner Pages transition was so hard and why the speed of the system dropped was because Ellucian decided to try to make it more "pretty". I'm a pragmatist when it comes to a database. I need fields that are easy to find and navigate. I really couldn't care less what the form looks like. In that preferencing of aesthetics, I believe significant function was lost.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Class sections are displayed in an easy to read format.
  • We can run reports by instructor, location or level (grad or undergrad).
  • All university functions are located in one software.
  • Degree progress could be improved.
  • Printing function needs improvement.
  • Direct option for smoother data entry.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It stores data and manages users well.
  • It interoperates with other Ellucian products well.
  • It offer good role-based security, which supports compliance.
  • Important Oracle features like Data Guard and data encryption are well-supported.
  • It still runs on COBOL: the code base is getting stale.
  • The company's web portal is based on stale software stack, with little visible development.
  • Updates are slow and often interlocked with seemingly-unrelated modules.
  • Print output formatting is nearly nonexistent, requiring use of an expensive post-processor.
November 22, 2021

Banner Student Review

Ken Turner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Ease of querying data from the Oracle database.
  • Allows users to get data fast and effective.
  • Also, is a very good source of data for the student to pull his or her information.
  • Definitely, upgrading frequency.
  • Also, better documentation on the Ellucian website.
  • I would say also, addressing bugs within the program instead of doing a full upgrade.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Banner does a good job creating snapshots of students' current, future, and career-based educational history. It applies coursework to pre-built educational audits to assist students in tracking progress toward a degree.
  • Banner is good at being up-to-date with policies for educational privacy, financial aid awards, and other areas of regulation on the industry of higher education.
  • Banner is highly collaborative. Changes made to a student's schedule that affect a student's full-time status will update the student's billing and financial aid eligibility in real-time.
  • Banner is term-based, which means that an inexperienced user could have issues navigating the data. It works largely on an SQL framework, storing data in tables, and reporting it out with a GUI that builds the queries with clicks instead of defining terms and composing SQL code, but being in the wrong academic term could return an outdated educational program or coursework that is not reflective of the student's current goals.
  • Banner's administrative platform, Internet-Native Banner, is far clunkier than the more slick, student-facing front end - Self-Service banner. INB speaks directly to the tables where data is stored but does not have a robust assistance feature. Without good training, the learning curve is fairly steep toward becoming a casually effective user.
  • Banner's reporting tools are lacking. It is good at recording and storing data, but there are very few prefabricated reports that are able to provide a level of customization via the user-defined parameters that can return valuable data to be used for analysis. A user should be well versed in basic SQL and a reporting tool such as Argos or Access to query the data contained within Banner's tables.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Registration: Advisors can quickly register students and override prerequisite errors.
  • Record keeping: Update catalog years, change majors, and/or minors.
  • Graduation entry: Process or create graduation applications.
  • Holds: Permits Academic Advisors to view student holds.
  • One thing I miss from the previous version of Ellucian Banner, is the control + page down. I struggle with alt + page down.
  • I love the Ellucian Banner favorites; however, it is a little difficult to navigate.
  • I can honestly only think of 2 things that could be improved. I use Ellucian Banner daily.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
  • Banner holds our data in an Oracle database well enough.
  • The self-service page design is comparable to other software solutions with similar offerings; the self service back-end and upkeep is a different story.
  • The most basic function of the software (inputting data and extracting data)is laborious at best in Banner. You must learn a special Banner-specific language to use the software. Most of the programmatic functionality of Banner was created in the early '90s and has not changed. Built-in reporting is virtually non-existent and wholly insufficient even for a small to medium sized school like ours. Ellucian must re-invent their product (banner) if they wish to survive the modern technological landscape.
  • Bugs and dysfunction around every corner in Banner's interface. Banner cannot keep up with the bugs in their own software and have developed problems into their product. For example, imagine your Bursar needs a report showing how much different students have paid in a given semester, in order to do this she must navigate through four different pages to find a specialized form each named a nonsensical code, type in the term code (this is the only value for which you are permitted to search), and wait up to 20 minutes while a poorly programmed back-end procedure looks at every student ever enrolled until it finds the students who meet the criteria (the only way to access this data); additionally, the screen that is used to run this function is not capable of showing a status for the job so the Bursar must call a database or system administrator to examine a log file on the server to determine the status of the job.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Sync information well across multiple platforms: Banner speaks well with SRM and other reporting systems.
  • Integrate information for various needs, including school transcripts, grades, tuition, finances, graduation reporting, etc.
  • The coding is cumbersome and sometimes difficult to navigate.
  • The interface is outdated and clunky.
  • Which one do I press? Execute or enter? I don't know so it's a hit or miss, trial and error. This is one example of other command keys that are not helpful and not explained well.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Central database
  • Customizable
  • Powerful
  • Easy to use
  • Custom reports and data integrations
  • Creates easy channels of communications across multiple departments across campus
  • Save hours of phone calls by providing transparency to students and parents
  • Hard to learn
  • Hard to implement
  • Items are sometimes hidden
  • Not extremely functional on mobile devices
  • Does not connect with all of our campus systems
  • Quite expensive in terms of an ERP
Bartholomew Kallgren | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Collect student data
  • Provides a detailed record of each inquiry
  • Ease of access for end-users when you know the codes
  • Learning the codes can be cumbersome
  • There is no auto spelling and grammar check in the free text field. For example, there is no auto spelling and grammar check between “&" and "and” so searches can be a headache.
  • The GUI can use some improvements for ease of use
Stephanie Brown | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy to identify what form you should be using.
  • Fast and browser centered, reducing connection times and increasing accessibility.
  • Cross referencing of forms helps identify better ways to do your tasks.
  • Students have complained of issues with registering; I believe this to be a connectivity or compatibility issue.
  • Names of forms are gibberish or worse.
  • No auto sign out
November 29, 2018

Banner Student User

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • It is easy to add classes. Also easy to make certain changes to classes.
  • Banner Student help users to schedule classrooms and will alert you when you have scheduled more than one class in a classroom.
  • Banner Student also warns you about faculty schedules.
  • This issue has been addressed with Banner Student 9, they have made access to Banner easier.
Amanda Carpenter | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • I think it's great to use if you are tracking grades for certain classes, especially if you'd like to see how students do, comparing midterm to final grades. If you have the permissions, you can see both.
  • It's also good to track students individually. You can look up a certain semester, and see how they did in that particular time frame, but you can also see their cumulative gpa, or even look up their entire course history.
  • It can be cumbersome. It's definitely improved, but it can be slow as you have to fill in only some information and then wait for the rest to populate before you can do anything else.
  • I think the acronyms for different functions are not intuitive or easy to remember.
November 14, 2018

Banner review

Pearce Muncy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
  • Easy user interface
  • Customizable within our own web portals with functional links
  • Exports easily to our advancement database
  • Better hands-on support
  • More training documentation
  • Mobile interface friendliness
Return to navigation