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

(1-8 of 8)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ellucian Banner is an integrated ERP system that was used for financial reporting, accounts payable, and human resources at my organization. The product provides a large amount of functionality including entering journal entries and using queries and reports for financial analysis. This product addresses the need for a system for financial reporting at my organization. The program also has a built-in accounts payable module and HR module.
  • Detailed reports
  • Simple Interface
  • Ease of use for journal entries
  • Limited functionality
  • Reports are not easily customizable
  • Basic compared to other ERP software
Ellucian Banner is well suited for smaller institutions where a basic ERP system that is cost-effective will work well. Banner has enough functionality for a small institution and will meet the financial reporting needs. However, this program has limited functionality which may not be the most appropriate option for a larger institution. For example, Ellucian Banner does not have easily customizable reports, which may cause issues when performing financial analysis
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ellucian Banner contains all of our student data, which for a university is basically its lifeblood. Faculty and students use it for tasks including registration & advising; staff use it for financial and academic services. It also serves as a data source for near-real-time reporting. It handles financial aid, many communications (like financial aid award letter or enrollment verification documents, or transcripts), and admissions workflows. In addition, it interfaces to many other subsidiary programs that only handle a subset of business processes.
  • 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.
It really is a market leader for higher education, but it's showing its age. So core features work well, because they're running COBOL routines that are years or decades old: well-polished, perhaps, but never cutting edge. I don't particularly like the software or the company, but it's dominant in the market segment where they operate.
November 22, 2021

Banner Student Review

Ken Turner | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Banner Student is being used across campus. We create programs for banner with our databases. One of the problems is banner the upgrade plan of banner. The banner upgrade process is to frequent. It seems like we are upgrading monthly. Banner is a good product for higher education, simply because of the format the data is in and the ease of pulling data from banner.
  • 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.
Banner allows students easy access to their information. The interface of banner has gotten better since I started using it but still needs work. It could use some improvement in upgrading frequency and improvement of documentation on the website. The overall performance has gotten better from years past.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Ellucian Banner is used across our whole organization for course registration, holds, degree changes, graduation, honors, financing, billing, library, course entry, and transcripts. All departments use the Ellucian Banner system to enter holds for various students: provisional students, housing, advising, probation, athletic, library, advising obligations, admission obligations, financial, and registration. Banner allows Academic Advisors and Registrar’s Office to override prerequisite test score errors for registration purposes; furthermore, it permits departments to few and place holds on various students, or to override various holds. Several departments place holds; therefore, having the ability to view the holds, permits departments to better assist our students. Academic Advisors use Ellucian Banner daily to ensure catalog dates are correct, advising, course overrides and create graduation entry the students major, minor, and honors. Advisors are also permitted to view transcripts and previous degrees and course work from students which is a great benefit to properly advise our students. Ellucian Banner 9 is great program to work with and screens our simple and easy to read.
  • 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.
I can only provide scenarios for where Ellucian Banner is suited because I use it daily and it suits all our needs for the University I work for. The college I am housed in, we each have a hefty load of around 400-600 students; therefore, Ellucian Banner is gold in my book. We also use another program in adjacent to this program; however, the other program gets all of its information from Ellucian Banner. During advising, I can inform the students of various holds, midterm grades, missing admission requirements, etc. The ease of processing major changes and minors, I absolutely love in Ellucian Banner 9. I am unable to provide information where it is least appropriate. My opinion after work in two large Universities, I have found with Ellucian Banner 9 it is the easiest program to use. I was really worried about Ellucian Banner 9 update; however, I am sorry I doubted it.
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Banner is being used organization-wide by students and employees. We purchased it hoping it would be a reliable means to store student, HR, and finance data; these being the business problems it would address. Banner's poor product design, however, may (in fact) cause more business problems than it solves. Ellucian's popularity in higher education and their market presence seems to be an artifact of times past. Their software can do what they claim it can do only after exhaustive environmental customizations and the purchase of additional products not listed or mentioned in the initial quotes. Additionally, Banner represents a sprawling on-premises hardware footprint because of it's fragmented feature set and the need for 3rd party or "Ellucian partner" applications. Banner documentation is often poorly written and impossibly complicated due to the poor design of the functions to which it speaks.
  • 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.
I would warn other colleges to stay away from this solution entirely. Ellucian is irresponsible. If you buy in you will most likely be stuck because of the tremendously insufficient data export capabilities of Banner. There is really no possibility of trying it out for a few years and finding another solution if it doesn't work out, I shouldn't have to say it but being stuck with all your software eggs in one basket with no other options is a very bad idea for universities who need to adapt to a changing educational landscape.

EDIT: As I write this, my review is the sole Banner review that has not been incentivized (see the 'review source' button); above and below are glistening reviews likely cherry picked and invited to send in a review for $$ or gift cards. I was motivated to write my review by the pain those in my organization have experienced using, maintaining, and supporting Banner.

Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is being used across the entire organization from the administrative side and the student side. Students have access to information about their financial aid, class schedules, personal information, and employment information. It is our ERP of record and it is used to coordinate student success across our different offices and departments.
  • 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
As a student user, it is a little hard to use when you first get started, but now it is our go to place for information at the university. I can look up grades, schedule classes, change personal information, and see my paystubs all in one place instead of having to visit 20 different systems.
November 29, 2018

Banner Student User

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Banner Student is used in departments that offer classes and work with students. I use Banner Student in a number of ways, creating the classes that students register for, and also register students. Overrides are required with some of our classes. We also use Banner Student to tag classes for student surveys. Overall Banner Student is user friendly once you get go through the training.
  • 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.
I like Banner Student, it is easy to use and I feel it is a very powerful tool that is necessary for Colleges.
November 14, 2018

Banner review

Pearce Muncy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Banner is used at our university to help manage student and faculty data.
  • 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
Well suited: students and acuity for scheduling and data management. Not well suited: scheduling and marketing material gathering
Return to navigation