Choosing an ERP system for a organization is one of the most consequential technology decisions an institution will make. These platforms touch every corner of campus life — student records, financial aid, HR, finance, and increasingly, the digital experience students expect from the moment they apply. Getting it right takes years. Getting it wrong costs more.
In 2026, four platforms dominate conversations in higher education IT: Ellucian Colleague, Ellucian Banner, Workday Student, and Oracle PeopleSoft. Each has a distinct history, a distinct user base, and a distinct set of tradeoffs. Here is an honest look at where each one stands and what institutions are weighing as they plan their next moves.
Ellucian Colleague
Colleague remains the platform of choice for many small to mid-size institutions — community colleges, regional universities, and liberal arts schools that need a fully integrated system without the complexity of a large enterprise deployment. Built originally on UniData, Colleague has evolved significantly over the past decade, and Ellucian has invested heavily in the Ellucian Experience interface, which brings a modern, widget-based front end over what is a deeply relational data architecture underneath.
The strengths of Colleague are well established. It integrates financial aid, student records, HR, and finance in a single database, reducing the need for extensive middleware. For institutions with smaller IT teams, that integration matters. Support staff can follow a student record across the entire lifecycle without jumping between systems.
Implementations are not without friction. Institutions upgrading from older versions of Colleague face real complexity in moving to cloud-hosted environments, and staff who have built years of institutional knowledge in Colleague’s forms-based interface sometimes struggle with the Experience layer. Custom programming in UniBasic — once a point of pride for long-tenured developers — has become a liability as institutions try to modernize and younger technical staff are harder to find who know the platform at that depth.
Still, for institutions that are running Colleague well, the platform is stable, deeply understood by experienced staff, and well-supported by Ellucian’s partner and consulting ecosystem. Many institutions working with Colleague have benefited from bringing in specialized implementation and support partners to help with upgrades, integrations, and staff training.
Ellucian Banner
Banner is Ellucian’s flagship for larger institutions — research universities, multi-campus systems, and organizations with complex financial and HR structures. Built on Oracle, Banner has a longer history of enterprise-scale deployments and a correspondingly larger footprint in the higher ed market. The Banner 9 cloud migration initiative has pushed many institutions through a significant infrastructure transition, moving from on-premise Oracle installations toward cloud-hosted environments.
Banner’s depth is both its greatest asset and its greatest challenge. The system can handle extraordinarily complex configurations — research funding structures, multi-entity HR arrangements, intricate financial aid packaging rules — in ways that simpler platforms cannot. For a major research university, that depth is non-negotiable.
The challenge is that Banner implementations require significant institutional commitment. Large Banner shops typically have dedicated Banner teams whose entire role is to keep the system running and evolving. When that institutional knowledge walks out the door, the impact is felt immediately. The Banner 9 transition also exposed how much custom code many institutions had accumulated over decades, and unwinding that during an upgrade is expensive and time-consuming.
Despite these pressures, Banner is not going anywhere. Ellucian continues to invest in the platform, and the installed base at large institutions represents an enormous amount of accumulated configuration and institutional process that institutions are not eager to throw away.
Workday Student
Workday entered the higher education market with significant momentum from its enterprise HR and finance success. Workday Student promised a cloud-native, unified platform that could replace the aging Banners and Colleagues of the world with something built for the modern era. Early adopters were enthusiastic, and Workday’s financial backing and product roadmap were compelling.
The reality of early Workday Student implementations proved more complicated. Several high-profile institutions experienced significant delays and cost overruns, and the platform’s maturity lagged behind what Workday’s enterprise HR customers had come to expect. Some institutions found that functionality they relied on in Banner or Colleague was not yet available or required extensive workarounds.
By 2026, Workday Student has matured considerably, and implementations are going more smoothly than they did five years ago. The platform’s greatest advantage remains the unified Workday ecosystem — institutions already running Workday HCM and Workday Financials find that adding Workday Student creates a genuinely integrated experience that is hard to replicate with best-of-breed approaches.
The decision to move to Workday Student is still a significant undertaking. Institutions should plan for a multi-year implementation timeline, significant change management work, and a period of adjustment as staff learn processes that work differently than what they knew before. It is a transformation project, not a plug-in replacement.
Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions
PeopleSoft Campus Solutions occupies an interesting position in 2026. Oracle continues to support the platform, and a significant number of large institutions are still running it. But the narrative around PeopleSoft has shifted from active investment to managed maintenance. Many institutions running PeopleSoft are also actively evaluating what comes next.
For institutions still on PeopleSoft, the immediate priorities are usually keeping current on patches, managing the complexity of integrations built over many years, and keeping experienced staff engaged. The PeopleSoft talent pool is narrowing as experienced developers and functional analysts retire or move on, making knowledge transfer a real concern.
Oracle’s strategy has leaned toward Oracle Cloud as its future direction, which leaves PeopleSoft customers watching carefully to understand the long-term support horizon. Most industry observers expect PeopleSoft to remain supported for at least another decade, but institutions are right to think now about what their migration path looks like.
Unit4, Jenzabar, and Other Options
Beyond the major four, a set of alternative platforms serves specific segments of the market. Unit4 Student Management has gained traction particularly outside the United States, with a modern architecture and a focus on usability. Jenzabar serves a significant number of smaller private institutions and community colleges with a platform that has evolved steadily over the years.
Salesforce Education Cloud has entered the conversation as institutions look to modernize student engagement and CRM capabilities, often starting with recruitment and retention before expanding into broader student success workflows. It is less a traditional SIS replacement and more a layer that works alongside existing ERP infrastructure.
The honest answer for most institutions considering alternatives is that the switching costs from a major ERP are enormous. Moving off Banner or Colleague is not just a technology project — it is a fundamental reshaping of how the institution operates. That reality keeps most institutions on their current platforms longer than they might prefer, and incremental improvement and optimization often deliver more near-term value than a full replacement.
What This Means for Your Institution
Whether your institution is managing a long-running Colleague deployment, planning a Banner upgrade, evaluating Workday Student, or working through what to do with an aging PeopleSoft installation, the underlying challenge is the same: these systems require deep expertise, careful change management, and experienced partners who understand both the technology and the higher education environment.
Beidat works with higher education institutions on ERP strategy, implementation support, staff training, and ongoing system optimization. If you are navigating one of these decisions or looking to strengthen your team’s capabilities on your current platform, we would be glad to talk through where you are and what options make sense for your situation.
