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 8.3 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.
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Pricing
Accuera
Anaplan
Planful
Editions & Modules
Basic
$149
one-time fee
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Accuera
Anaplan
Planful
Free Trial
No
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Required
Additional Details
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Pricing is highly dependent on the complexity and scope of the implementation.
Anaplan is an evolution of classic EPM tools like SAP BPC. It is simply a much easier system to maintain and roll-out. Dashboards are very user friendly and the Excel add-in is just as powerful. Anaplan excels at connected planning where all models are connected and rolled up …
Anaplan is not a point solution. Instead of having multiple systems that each do one business process (and can only do that business process in one way), Anaplan can do many different business processes for multiple business units. Sales, Finance, HR and other parts of the …
Jedox has limited the standard dimensions to 6 only in the financial workspace. If you need any other custom dimension, it has to be defined in analytical workspace. However, data interchange between Financial Workspace and Analytical workspaces are not real-time and rely on …
Essbase/HFM were hosted on-prem and required regular maintenance from the vendor. The tools were good at the simple tasks of consolidation and relatively simple allocation/calculations. Anaplan is a cloud-hosted platform that can be accessed almost anywhere with an internet …
Creating financial forecasts in Anaplan was a big improvement over doing the same activity in Microsoft Excel. The main difference is that Anaplan makes it easier to build models based on large amounts of data and to forecast concurrently with many users across your …
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 …
Planful solved our problem (avoid manual data entry) with competitive pricing. Data rails and Anaplan were expensive for a pre-revenue biopharma company.
Mosaic was very rigid and not flexible for our needs. It was difficult to manage and not user friendly. Planful allows us to customize various fields that allows for more robust and efficient reporting. The user interface is easy to digest and use. The Planful team is also a …
Planful is one of the best solutions because of its easy of reporting capabilities that a business user can develop without consulting assistance. The other tools I have used require a more technical base knowledge.
This was the most cost effective for the features our business needed. Centage and Microsoft's PowerBI did not offer everything we wanted. One Stream was a good alternative but very expensive for what our business needed.
EPM tools are all pretty close in general functionality in that they are tables of your data with a finance focused UI stacked on top. The last 5% is what the difference. Planful has a very modern UI and does a great job of updating the system over time, including things like …
Planful was great for its price point. Although workday and hyperion are the more popular bunch, our use case is mostly met through Planful's functionality.
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 …
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.
With its versions and native time features Anaplan is well suited for all activities around planning in time and scenarios. Tasks involving calculating across multiple dimensions make Anaplan shine - the easiness to build complex calculation and present results on customizable pages. With its access restrictions it's well suited also for working with sensitive data (employee and customers personal data).
There are still times that I find myself thinking that "I would have been done with this already" in Excel. Most (possibly all) the colleagues I know in our industry haven't outgrown using Excel yet... Overall, now that I feel I (mostly) "know what I'm doing" and am thru the learning stage the system I'm seeing benefit...however also feel like I haven't 'scratched the surface' of what it's capable of. Dynamic Planning, Predict/Signals, AI ...I feel we have a huge learning curve still ahead. I've explored Signals and AI Analyst and haven't been able to get reliable results to drive me to use it more...which leads me to believe we have core implementation related issues.
Anaplan removes the time consuming process of integrating the results of individual spreadsheets.
Anaplan facilitates the standardization of assumptions across all sub-processes
Anaplan provides full transparency of the calculations and source inputs
Anaplan allows us to automate certain planning processes that would have been impossible when relying on the computational capabilities of an individual computer.
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! 😅
Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item
Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great
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.
As a user it is a very simple tool, but at the same time with a very mature and powerful calculation engine. It is very easy to switch from excel or traditional tools with added capabilities of multi dimensionality and real time calculation engine to see quick insights needed to create plans and scenarios
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.
Unless a model is poorly constructed, the platform can accommodate tens or even hundreds of users without any impact on model performance. Dashboard pages load quickly, reports can be exported to Excel or pdf quickly, and integrations with other systems can be scheduled for quiet times of the day. Adding new use cases to the platform should also have minimal impact on performance if done in a careful way and following best practice principles
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.
My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment. Planful also offers training and certifications on their training hub. I have completed a couple of the certifications. The courses are easy to follow along with and very informative. Additionally, Planful schedules webinars pretty regularly. They'll email their customers and allow you to register to participate live. They also record these sessions so you can refer back to them at a later date or if you are unable to attend at the time the webinar is offered, you can register anyway and get access to the recording. Their training has improved year over year!
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.
Planful provides a lot of online training support. There's so many options for training. Admin Learning Courses, User Learning Courses. Plus they have several webinars devoted to the tool and the new features they release. New Releases can be practiced in a Sandbox Environment prior to going live in Production
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 not a point solution. Instead of having multiple systems that each do one business process (and can only do that business process in one way), Anaplan can do many different business processes for multiple business units. Sales, Finance, HR and other parts of the business can go to one place to get their work done.
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.
You will see greater accuracy within your forecasts by leveraging Anaplan to look at historical values while including projections such as seasonality.
You will save time, resulting in team members spending more time on value-add opportunities.
You will have happy end users that have access to self-service reports, removing any bottlenecks through the workflow.
