Our organization has been using Slate for 3 years and we are still in love with the product. It might sound strange, but I look forward to coming into work just to use the software. It makes our jobs so much easier that it's released a lot of tension that was in the office with our previous vendor.

The balance between features, flexibility, and setup is unmatched by any other product I've used. The thing I most like about Slate is that it is so easy to use. I haven't used any other product that gets usability this spot on.

At the yearly Slate Summit when new features are announced, it can take awhile for them to be added to the software. However, this is really more that they have setup such high expectations on response to issues, that delayed release of a feature seeks like a big issue.

I'm not an IT person, so Slate has been challenging at times. Being an administrator, I've had to learn a lot about coding and SQL to really make the most of it. I've spent many, many hours troubleshooting issues and reading through their Knowledge Base to understand how everything works—and even then, I don't always get it right. Because of this huge learning curve, I've become the primary contact in admissions for all questions relating to Slate. While it makes sense that not everyone will have the time to devote to learning the ins and outs, I'd recommend having at least a few people who are tasked with thoroughly understanding the product so it doesn't become a burden. Overall, we're extremely satisfied with Slate and we're happy we went with it, but it hasn't always been easy.

Slate is by far the most comprehensive and powerful tool on the market for managing student information. As someone who specifically uses Slate for undergraduate admissions, I can say that our team would not be able to do the type of recruitment nor the sheer volume of recruitment that we're doing now without it. There are so many features that have helped to automate and streamline our processes—from application review and management to event management and email marketing campaigns. It can do just about anything you'd ever need it to, if you know how to set it up.

As someone who works heavily on the "back end" of the product setting everything up and managing our student data, I can say that Slate is only as powerful as your commitment to it. Because it's so customizable, that means your administrators are responsible for making Slate a useful and powerful tool for your team. There is little to nothing that comes set up out of the box and it's taken our small team of admissions and IT staff roughly 2 years to fully "implement" the product.

Overwhelming negative

The admission/enrollment piece is solid - we manage our scholarship program via this instance

Anything that has to do with advancement, development, fundraising, donations, constituent management, reporting, queries, communications, or money. Also, customer service is nonexistent

Slate is completely customizable, which seems daunting at first, but is incredibly freeing. It was do absolutely anything we need it to do for our office and has without a doubt allowed us to work both harder and smarter and increase numbers and results across the board.

Because it's completely customizable, the company leans hard into a community support network. This can be super helpful, but also frustrating when you need support and other schools aren't able to help. The company seems to be actively working to solve this though.

Overall we migrated from Salesforce and it has been smooth sailing! I couldn’t be happier and cannot even imagine us without Slate. Amazing work!

The most impactful feature on this software is the ease with pulling up data, queries and reports.

My least favorite thing is if a rule is broken it has a significant impact on the data. Although we have managed this issue better with having a small System team, it is something we keep an eye on constantly