Best Academic Advising Software

Civitas Learning is a student success platform that unifies data from an institution's SIS, LMS, CRM, and other systems into one place, applying predictive analytics to identify at-risk students and forecast outcomes such as retention and completion. Advisors get real-time alerts, shared notes, and AI-suggested next actions to guide outreach and coordinate campus-wide interventions.

The platform also includes scheduling and degree-planning tools that let students build course schedules aligned with predicted demand, plus initiative analytics to measure the return on student success programs. Civitas Learning, based in Austin, Texas, serves hundreds of colleges and universities but does not publish pricing; institutions must contact the company directly for a custom quote.

Slate is a cloud-based constituent relationship management (CRM) platform built by Technolutions, a company headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut. It is widely used among admissions offices and also offers modules for student success and advancement, serving more than 1,700 colleges and universities. Slate handles application management, communications, event registration, application review workflows, and applicant or student portals from a single interface.

Technolutions publishes its licensing tiers openly. Admissions licenses start at $30,000 per year for institutions with fewer than 1,500 submitted applications and scale up based on application volume, reaching $175,000 per year at the largest published tier before custom pricing applies above 100,000 applications. Advancement licenses are priced separately by undergraduate enrollment, and the company states it has not raised list prices in over 20 years.

Ellucian is a higher education technology company based in Reston, Virginia, that builds student information systems (SIS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software for colleges and universities. Its core products include Banner, Colleague, and the newer cloud native Ellucian Student platform, covering admissions, registration, financial aid, student records, and academic advising. The Ethos data platform connects these systems with other campus tools.

In 2026 Ellucian acquired Anthology's Enterprise Operations business, adding the Anthology Student SIS/ERP line to its portfolio following Anthology's bankruptcy restructuring. Ellucian serves thousands of institutions worldwide and offers both cloud and on premises deployment options, with pricing negotiated individually per institution rather than published.

Watermark provides a suite of higher education software tools focused on assessment, accreditation, faculty activity reporting, and course evaluations. Its Planning and Self-Study product centralizes institutional planning, assessment, and program review, while separate modules cover faculty success reporting, student learning evidence, and AI-assisted survey analysis for course evaluations.

Aimed at provosts, deans, institutional effectiveness offices, and CIOs, Watermark is used by more than 1,700 higher education institutions worldwide. The company, headquartered in Austin, Texas, does not publish pricing; costs are quoted individually based on which modules an institution selects and its size, so prospective customers must request a demo and custom quote.

Starfish is EAB's student success and retention product for academic advising and early alerts, sitting alongside Navigate360 as the higher education CRM, Enroll360 for enrolment management, Edify as the data platform and EAB's strategic advisory services.

Early alert is the mechanism this category rests on and its value is entirely about timing. A student who stops attending in week three is recoverable and the same student in week eleven usually is not, so collecting attendance and assessment signals from faculty while intervention is still possible is what separates a retention programme from a post-mortem.

The difficult part is never the software, it is getting faculty to raise flags at all. Academics have no contractual obligation to report that a student seems to be struggling and every incentive to assume somebody else has noticed, which is why the design of that one interaction determines whether the whole system works.

Sitting inside EAB rather than standing alone matters for how it is bought, since EAB sells research, advisory services and data platforms to the same institution, and a retention purchase there is usually part of a wider engagement rather than a software decision. Starfish is sold to community colleges separately from universities, which is right because their retention problems differ. Rates are not published.

Prentus is a career outcomes platform for education providers, covering AI career agents, outcome tracking, an advisor suite, job search tools, AI mock interviews, a free community and employer partnerships, sold to for-profit universities, online universities, community colleges and career training programmes.

Making the outcome the unit rather than the service is the positioning and it names a real accountability gap. A career services office traditionally reports appointments held and workshops run, which says nothing about whether graduates got jobs, and for institutions whose funding or accreditation depends on placement rates that distinction is the whole point.

Targeting for-profit and career training providers specifically follows from that, since those are exactly the institutions whose regulatory position and enrolment both depend on demonstrable employment outcomes, and where a claim about graduate placement carries legal weight rather than marketing weight.

AI mock interviews are the most defensible AI application here, because interview practice is limited by advisor time rather than by knowledge of what makes a good answer, so a student can rehearse ten times instead of once. Prentus publishes named comparisons against Handshake, Symplicity, 12Twenty and VMock and an ROI calculator. Rates are not published.

Navigate360 is EAB's higher education CRM for recruiting, retaining and engaging students and alumni, described as powered by responsible AI, sitting alongside Enroll360 for enrolment management, Edify as the data platform, Starfish for student success and EAB's research and advisory services.

Covering recruitment through to alumni on one record is the argument for a CRM in this sector rather than separate systems, and the case is stronger in higher education than almost anywhere else. The same person is a prospect, an applicant, a student, a graduate and eventually a donor over forty years, and every handover between those systems loses the history that makes the next conversation useful.

Naming responsible AI explicitly is worth taking seriously in this context rather than reading as boilerplate, because predictive models in student success decide who receives extra attention, and a model trained on historical outcomes will reproduce historical inequities unless somebody has deliberately checked that it does not.

Separating institution types into universities, community colleges, graduate and online programmes and K-12 reflects genuinely different problems rather than market segments, since a community college's retention challenge is students working full time and a selective university's is different in kind. EAB publishes Navigate360 material for markets beyond North America. Rates are not published.