Anaplan is a scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in complex business environments so that enterprises can outpace their competition and the market. By building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, the Anaplan platform surfaces key insights.
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Planful
Score 8.1 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
Anaplan vs Oracle Hyperion - Anaplan is far better calculation engine and way more modern. However, Anaplan still struggles to provide reporting, especially adhoc reporting in excel based off a data model.
Anaplan vs Pigment - Anaplan is a more proven product, however, Pigment …
Anaplan is easier to implement, easier to use, easier to maintain than these tools. It scales easily with the business. Workflows are easy to implement. It is easy to drill down and understand how the tool obtained a specific result, giving confidence in its calculations. …
Easy of use is Anaplan's main advantage. As Anaplan is code-less configuration, and the logic for model building is by far the simplest, it would make the learning curve less steep. This is very important when we are showing our clients that, their complicated planning scenario …
Anaplan is one of the only tools flexible to handle bespoke commission calculations. In addition to Sales Performance Management, Anaplan can be used to support other business functions, such as workforce planning or financial planning & analysis. Anaplan provides the …
Anaplan is a proven tool for scalable applications and is flexible to support multiple use cases. Its support is established and the user community is strong. Resources to support the product are readily available.
Anaplan is more powerful than Pigment considering that it is an Enterprise class system and is able to manage bigger data sets. Anaplan allows for advanced scenario modeling and formula capabilities along with custom reporting functionalities. Anaplan has proven its …
Anaplan and these other tools are very similar. I cannot say that I selected Anaplan over them as I have worked with and been involved with setting up a number of tools for clients. They all have their advantages and Anaplan is a very strong tool in the cloud planning space.
can be implemented across multiple use cases- also Anaplan is an enterprise solution. Had good reviews in market and also used by other competitors in industry
Both platforms are excellent but come with some challenges. They are often complex to configure and offer limited customization options. Their user interfaces are not very intuitive, and their reporting capabilities are somewhat restricted. The total cost of ownership is …
In my professional experience, I've exclusively worked with Anaplan. The tool's impressive features made learning it an ongoing, engaging process. Its continuous updates and capabilities kept me consistently learning and adapting, so I never felt the need to switch to a …
The tools generally fill different niches, Anaplan is the best for corporate and enterprise planning, OneStream's strengths are in Consolidations and working with large data sets by IT, and Pigment is a strong contender for finance teams at small organizations with less-defined …
Compared to OneStream and Venna Anaplan offers a more modern look and feel of the platform. It is better situated and maintained in regards of platform updates as it's a full SaaS software there are never any issues with the system version as it's always automatically up to …
Anaplan is using hyper block, so calculation is faster. The implementation of Anaplan is also very straightforward, so COE team can quickly catchup on the solution. If additional functions are required after go-live, COE can also support the implementation by themselves. …
Managing spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets becomes too time consuming as the business and team grows so transitioning to a tool like Anaplan is a natural evolution. I have used Power BI as a complement to Anaplan in the past in order to make the data that was consolidated …
Anaplan is cloud based which automatically removes the pain and risk that comes along with emailing around different versions of spreadsheets. Concurrent users can interact with different parts of the model at the same time greatly improving time spent adding inputs to the …
We selected Anaplan because of the breadth of their vision and their approach to tackle "planning" of all kinds and integrate planning processes into a true Connected Planning ecosystem. We found that their flexibility and ease of use ultimately provided a better avenue to …
We enjoy planful and have preferred it compared to similar products because of the personability, helpfulness form customer service, easy sign on, ability to customize reports, and run easy consolidation process.
Most financial folks user-friendly less technical support needed; most efficient and automated; data host in US; most automated with both the core application and excel spotlight in sync, you can view and sync in web or excel. Process time is fast.
Prior to joining the company, we tried to implement Vena but were unsuccessful. There we're a few reasons it didn't work out, but a lot of it related to the implementation team they provided. In just the first week with Planful, we achieved more progress than we did in several …
Planful's user interface is much more user-friendly than OneSteam. I wasn't as heavy of a Onestream user as Planful so can't fully compare. I am Power User and building system for Planful whereas I was purely end user for Onestream.
We liked the Excel-based interface and Planful's reporting capabilities. The dashboarding feature also offers a visual look at KPIs without purchasing another software, saving the company money.
Previously we used Infor CPM and Alight Planning. Planful is head and shoulders above both of these systems. We have been extremely happy with it. It has cut our workload in half compared to the other two systems. There is little to nothing in the other two systems that we miss …
Planful scored high in multiple areas (such planning, reporting, Workforce controlling) and based on our assessment criteria Planful receive the highest value/cost ratio. At the same time, we were confident that Planful was able to scale together with the business and manage …
Before my arrival at the company, we attempted to implement Vena but were unsuccessful. We got further with Planful in the first week than in several months with Vena.
Workforce Planning in Planful is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Reporting in Planful is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Similarity to Excel is a plus compared to Adaptive Insights. Adaptive Insights can budget/forecast weekly or daily rather easily, which is a huge …
Planful is winning in user experience. More intuitive design and very user friendly. I do expect more flexibility in terms of system confirgurations like higher hierarchy limit
Planful was a more cost effective approach vs our previous platform (Adaptive) and is able to be managed fully within the FP&A team (no IT resources or outside consultants post-implementation)
Planful seems to do a better job of pulling things in a format that is more understandable to an accounting-minded person, whereas the other platforms seem more focused on operations. From a detail perspective, Planful provides more powerful and complete data, in my experience. …
Planful seems to have the best price to performance option against the tools listed. Some of the more premium options on the market have outdated UIs and dont get updated as frequently and other in the same price category dont seem to have the same level of options and "ease" …
Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.
Reporting and Spotlight have changed the game for us. Spotlight has brought dynamic reporting to our team and the rest of the office as well. With dynamic planning, we've spent more time doing analysis instead of running and creating the reports. Recently, we've spent less time analyzing and more time formatting, and Spotlight has brought the analysis back to FP&A.
Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅
Anaplan is already an established market leader in enterprise planning area. Its flexibility to build multi-dimensional models, real time scenario plannings are proven to be the best features and successfully implemented by global organizations. Anaplan's ambitious product team is ensuring to roll out new features regularly based on customer/ partner feedback. e.g their new improved polaris environment has strong potential to build very large models without worrying about sparsity. The integration with other tools/technologies is being easier (e.g. cloudworks). Hence, considering Anaplan as a platform that has proved to be successful tool in enterprise level planning, its focus on regular feature enhancements and future release roadmaps I believe this platform has potential to evolve further along with our business processes and requirements
Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.
Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.
The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.
There are very few outages. Maintenance is scheduled on two or three Saturdays per month, so as not to affect businesses. When there is an outage, users are kept informed of progress to restore the platform and typically this takes no more than an hour. Anaplan customer support is very responsive if we ever have questions about platform issues
I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.
Generally, pages load quickly and reports complete within a reasonable timeframe. However, when working with large or complex datasets or during times of multiple active users, performance can sometimes be impacted. That said, much of the performance depends on how the model is built and whether best practices have been followed. Optimized models tend to perform much better, so the experience can be somewhat subjective based on the setup.
Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.
Support quality has dropped since Thoma Bravo has taken over. I think some serious re-focus needs to happen here -- part of the beauty of being in the Anaplan community was how involved you felt in it before. Before I didn't dread sending a support ticket, now I am starting to.
Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support
In my opinion, in-person training is always the best if you have the option to do so. This allows real-time interactions with the instructions, whereas the online training I took required me to write-down questions, email them, and wait for responses. This slows down the process, as you can imagine. That said, in-person training is an extra cost and it likely isn't needed for everyone. I would suggest selecting a small number of people to take in-person training and then having them act as mentors to the rest of your team. That way, as the rest of the team takes the online training, they have a resource to help them in real time.
We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.
Learning made easy . One of the best trainings i have attended. Training was very detailed training by the trainer, which helped me understand the basics of the model building. Level 1 training was easy and instructor was most helpful here. Level 2 training was challenging but was able to go thru due to understanding of the basics.
This training is much more robust now than it was when we first implemented our Planful environment. Many times we can do a little research in the "help" portal and do not even need to reach out to support. They are continuously improving the training and information available to users.
Agile methodology and breaking the work down into sprints was very helpful. Implementation required a deeper dive into our data than expected for the consultants to be able to construct the data model. But once it was in place, the focus on knowledge transfer enabled us to be able to use the product effectively after the team rolled off.
Most of the issues in the implementation were self inflicted, the team at Top Down was great and did a good job managing hours and teaching our team how to best handle the system. The implementation went longer than expected as they always do but the GL and erp link was up and running quickly so we could build reporting
Anaplan is one of the only tools flexible to handle bespoke commission calculations. In addition to Sales Performance Management, Anaplan can be used to support other business functions, such as workforce planning or financial planning & analysis. Anaplan provides the scalability needed for an enterprise-level solution. While taking longer to implement, it also can provide a greater ROI.
Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a dedicated software that is built to report on rather than building from scratch in an excel environment
We have managed to leverage Anaplan for financial planning and forecasting across the business. It is now used by almost every department, with more than 50 users (but I know of companies that have hundreds of users) and still the platform is quick and reliable. It is easy to make changes to divisions and departments or add users and apply different user settings - the core part of the model is not affected and end users can continue their work without any disruption
From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.
Reduction in time spent by sales ops team in processing compensation by almost 20 %
Ability to drill down into each compensation calculation to understand the details of how the comp is calculated. This has provided more transparency / traceability to end users
we are able to release updates to the system faster as it is easier to maintain and sync
