Jenzabar SONIS vs. Veracross

My main reason for not giving SONIS a 10 is the customer service. Over the years as the company has gotten larger the customer service has gotten slower. Depending on the issue I have had to wait for some unreasonable amounts of time for resolution. Uptime is fantastic, so please expect your servers to be well taken care of and things to run smoothly (if you go with Jenzabar for hosting). But sometimes things go wrong and a report will not function as you expect it to, and sometimes those fixes take a while to happen. For the most part, when things are working, they work very very well and we are happy little staffers.

Incentivized

Veracross is good for classroom training sessions management and conducting seminars. It keeps the record of trainers, trainees, sessions of training, etc, and helps organize trainings in a systematic manner. It helps improve the operational efficiency of the overall training and learnings of the new colleagues where they can be assigned projects/assignments and keep a track of the same.

Incentivized

• Jenzabar SONIS provides tools for working with individuals from their first request for information through submitting an application, being accepted for admission, enrolling in courses, taking and completing courses, and graduating from the school. The available tools not only provide a way to manage the data, but also for ongoing communication between the school and the prospect/student/graduate.
• Jenzabar SONIS allows a school the flexibility of enrolling students in individual courses, like you might have in adult education departments, or in programs and courses like you would find for students working on a degree. This flexibility made Jenzabar SONIS a valuable tool for us because we had not only certificate-seeking students but also a large Community Education Department and could use the same software for both.
• Jenzabar SONIS has the tools to record attendance and grades directly into a gradebook or to import final grades. This allowed us to continue to use our LMS for those teachers who wanted the resources available in that system while letting teachers who just needed a place to store grades to enter them directly into SONIS.
• The ability to attach pdfs to courses and individual records allowed us to scan many of our cumulative files from our archive and attach them to the alumni records in Jenzabar SONIS. This gave us more accessible, secure storage for our historical records and made it much easier to produce transcripts for alumni.

Incentivized

• Student and family data is easy to keep up to date. And there is so much data that you can keep track of. It is so helpful to have all data in one place so we don’t have a human error in transfers g to another system.
• Recording donations is very easy and you can attach backup documents very easy which is great during our yearly audit. All records are in the system and can be pulled at anytime.
• Easy for parents to sign in to view and edit their own information as well as view student reports.

Incentivized

• I wish they would hire more Customer Support.

Incentivized

• Normally it has everything I need for my work, today I was able to make a video call and chat from my cell phone and this adds more positive points to Veracross.

We will continue to use Veracross for the simple fact that we have one database across all of the departments in our school. Veracross continues to listen to customer feedback and improve and enhance the system.

LOVE the Technical Response Team - the first line of help at Veracross. I can quickly submit a ticket and receive a response knowing that they have looked in our system and know what we are trying to do! Our account manager is also amazing! So nice to have a person within the company who knows our school and our needs!

We changed databases in 2011 because the company we were with was going to quit supporting our software. We evaluated a number of different SISs available at the time and felt Jenzabar SONIS provided the best tools for our school. Most of the others were either geared more for adult education, individual course offerings or for schools that primarily had degree-seeking students. We needed something that could address both needs.We felt Jenzabar SONIS did that best of the ones we reviewed.

Incentivized

Veracross had so many unique features that stood against other similar software and learning management systems which compelled us to buy it over the rest. Features like the ability to create our own customized reports according to tutor/parent specifications help us to offer exactly what is needed while constant Email reminders make sure that we never miss a single email. Also, the ability to take attendance from any device makes everyone's schedules more flexible. Considering all these features it was our aim to buy this software and test it out for our company.

• Facilitates grade input by faculty.
• Facilitates course enrollment by students.
• Facilitates viewing student records and determining progress to program completion.

Incentivized

• tasks that used to take 30 minutes can take as little as 30 seconds (I'm not exaggerating)
• it's a complex platform so there is signficant investment in both training and data preparation (for conversion)
• it's really expensive (but over time will pay for itself with systems we can sunset and attrition that we don't need to replace)

Incentivized