It was a one-stop shop! We had all of our information on paper and excel documents.

The learning curve, and the language of the software is not intuitive.

Campus Café has been extremely responsive to questions and issues through their help desk. They are improving their Knowledge Base constantly. Users are getting comfortable with the system quickly, and with ease, and the system is allowing us to improve efficiency of our processes in many offices. Implementation in general went far better than we could have imagined (we managed it in around 12 months during the COVID chaos). My only thought is that some sort of optional change-management services that could be purchased at an additional cost to implementation could be beneficial to some institutions.

This software was appropriately targeted to schools our size (~1000 students), without the overcomplexity and technicality of more extensive software systems such as Colleague. The "Finders" (think fairly robust, saveable filters that are understandable to many users) are a huge plus to the system - they have made data available to many non-technical constituents who need it on a daily basis, without every data pull requiring a SQL script, or a "View" to be created by a technically inclined employee. The user interface is fairly clean and intuitive for the most part, and training has been very simple to accomplish for most of the end users - particularly for students and faculty. "Activities" (think custom fields with triggering functionality, email/text functionality) have become a way for us to creatively work through some business processes, without a large amount of overhead required to implement. We have been able to construct degree audits for almost all unusual requirements in nearly all our majors well ahead of when we thought we would be able to, yielding in an extremely usable and readable advising/administrative tool, which we never were able to implement in our prior system for a variety of reasons. They are very responsive to building out new functionality in the system, and do so at a reasonable cost. We had them build a Google Workspace integration which auto-provisions applicant and student accounts for us!!!

As a result of the willingness of the company to address individual institutions' needs, sometimes the UI lacks consistency across the pages, and there are some quirks to functionality of a few areas. Permissions are less than ideal with this system, since only one permission group can be added to each single user - layering of permission sets is not possible. This has resulted in us having to build many permission groups, which requires a decent amount of testing and time. The interface for managing permissions is also very clunky and sometimes confusing, requiring double negative logic to understand what a permission is doing. The Financial Aid area of the system still has some growing to do at this point, before we will be able to move to it. We hope that will be possible within the next 12-24 months, however. There have been a few technical quirks to the system, but the vast majority of these have been addressed in a more than satisfactory manner.

Overall, compared to our homegrown system, I’d say Campus Cafe is worth it! Our work is now more streamlined and time we spend on projects and validation of record accuracy has been cut in half! I would recommend Campus Cafe for institutions that are similar to our size (population of 500 or less).

Reports are easily accessible and customizable! This is such a great feature for the Registration Department as we need accurate statistics immediately. The ability to also customize webpages, email notifications, triggers, courses as needed gave us the power to be more flexible and creative with how we focus our energy and time.

There have been a few glitches in the system even after working through setup. An example of this is syncing Campus Cafe with Canvas LMS- students who withdraw or drop would sometimes sync with Canvas and other times it would not. So there was that inconsistency.

Overall, we are pleased with our switch to Campus Cafe. The leadership and development team are attentive too are needs and have been very aggressive in shoring up any deficiencies we've identified. There are very customer-centric and are intent on creating the best product possible.

Has many of the automation features of more expensive platforms. Integrates very well with platforms we were already using. Has the best feature-to-price ratio of any platform we looked at.

We never intended to use the GL functionality, so it was not a problem for us, but it does appear to be rather limited. The Advancement/Donor module is rudimentary for functional. Lack of a parent portal is perhaps its greatest weakness.

Campus Cafe Cloud service has enabled us to work in a more virtual environment and to move to a paperless student records system.

Campus Cafe modules cover major components needed for Higher Education all in one program. (Admissions, Financial Aid, Student Information System, Accounting, Development, and Alumni)

Campus Cafe is a growing software company that has improved over the 8+ years that we have used the software. Keeping up with changes and ongoing training needs is challenging at times. However, customer support is very responsive to our questions.