Likelihood to Recommend Anaplan is great for enterprise clients that want to pursue a path of connected planning. If designed correctly, a data hub can be your central data repository which acts a shared dataset across your organization. From Marketing and Sales, to HR and Finance - Anaplan will be the one source of truth as individuals contribute to the business process.
Read full review Board is a useful tool with a great set of features. We migrated from human apps to board and we find it relatively fast in search results and better-managed threads and forums. There are some areas, such as UI and interactions which could be improved but overall a great product. The learning section is also pretty good.
Read full review Pros Anaplan has a very fast calculation engine which is able to model across multiple dimensions in real time across huge data sets. This helps in calculating complex scenarios instantaneously Easy to maintain by business teams which reduces dependency on IT teams within the organization and also on external consultants Advanced Tenant controls which allows administrators to manage security and access across various models Read full review The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate You don't need programming knowledge to create dashboards which is a great flex for non-technical users You can seamlessly convert large, raw, and complex data to meaningful reports to visualize better and plan to act accordingly The financial forecasting that Board provides post-analysis is truly reliable Read full review Cons I would like there to be additional visualization improvements/features for reports Additional technical support resources would be great to quickly resolve bugs I would like for improvements around the ability to have a lot of dimensions in a table of data and the speed around processing those calcs. Read full review Board BI tool has a steep learning curve and can be challenging for a new user to reach to board's full capacity. We have to use a windows scheduler to schedule data import tasks; it would be great if Board could provide its own scheduler. Read full review Likelihood to Renew Anaplan is a very strong multi-dimensional modeling tool that provides a calculation engine to empower a complex planning process. It is fairly easy to learn for those with experience in similar tools, or excel. It forces structure and auditability that spread sheets do not have, along with extensive security capabilities
Read full review Board is a fantastic product for swift BI solution delivery when compared with its peers. Ease of use, support and integration with Microsoft Office Addin open a wide horizon of opportunities for further enhancements to solutions. Easy bespoke app development capabilities make it a winner for us. BOARD is just like a white canvas, it lets you explore your creative side while designing and delivering a solution
Gaurav Suri Finance Business Partner - Business Intelligence Developer
Read full review Usability Anaplan is very usable from a user perspective. Anaplan's level 1 and level 2 training courses are great resources and I highly recommend any power users of the platform consider completing both. These courses showcase, and therefore unlock an understanding of the platform which allows for quick and easy, agile, and iterative front end design
Read full review From a user perspective, Board is quite simple to use. You can evaluate the presentation of the data, the navigation, the configuration of the users, the selection of the data etc ... It would have a better rating if it were even more intuitive as regards the construction of a project, starting from the database, to the info-cubes, to entities, to data acquisition procedures from other servers.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Performance Everything is calculated in memory in the cloud. It's nearly instantaneous updates when you make changes. The only time things get a little slow is when you have a massive model with very intricate calculations...but "slow" for Anaplan is not what I would call "slow" for something like
Hyperion . We used to have
Hyperion calcs that ran for 60 mins before you could use data. The equivalent would be 60 seconds in Anaplan.
Read full review very fast and no integration problems
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The only time I needed assistance was due to a problem in the prints: the colors of the brochures as they were on the screen were not reproduced in the print, but a series of standard colors were reproduced. This fact made colored numbers on a colored background illegible. From the assistance they confirmed that it was a problem of version 10.2 that occurred when leaving the brochures with the default colors proposed by Board. To obtain the desired colors, they had to be personalized ... I didn't like the solution very much and the technician who recommended it didn't like me either, but they would have solved the problem with the following versions. In any case, the assistance was quick and effective even if not exactly efficient.
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Board is fairly simple and straight forward. Advance training on workflows and procedures is a good one but the training content only touches through the interesting areas. training content needs to cover a few areas more in-depth
Gaurav Suri Finance Business Partner - Business Intelligence Developer
Read full review Online Training Anaplan training materials are clear, simple, easy to understand and to follow. Visuals are excellent. The vendor is good at updating training materials in a timely manner and encouraging users and administrators to keep coming back to Academy site for refresher courses or new feature courses. I really like their interactive diagrams
Larissa Lowe Director, Sales Operations Business Systems and COE
Read full review Implementation Rating The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.
Read full review The problem of user profiling in our context is certainly quite complex. The complexity is given by the fact that the company is divided territorially into logistic points of sale, but at the same time they are virtually divided into divisions (or specific implementation areas) and points of sale of competence. The same operator can have access to data at different logistic sales points, sales points of competence and divisions.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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 date with no backward compatibility issues. Due to the flexible nature of the modelling engine, it is also better suited to perform larger multi-department use cases, like IBP (Integrated Business Planning)
Read full review Board has been more complete when compared to
Anaplan . Although I didn't participate in the buying decision of any of those products I have used both and by far Board just has more features. It's more than a CPM, it's BI and CPM put together. If I had to make a choice now it would be Board.
Read full review Scalability 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
Read full review Return on Investment We've typically seen an average of 40% removal of time from processes using Anaplan an enabler Though difficult to quantify, we consistently find our processes less error prone than in the past. Essentially, we've removed a previously "hidden cost" of risk due to poor data quality that was buried in our processes. Read full review Board facilitates proactive decision making - it gives all the insights of the company's needs, which includes predictive analytics and manipulation of data to make different types of reports. Easy to use for non-programmer and integration with other software is seamless. It has [the] ability to handle large amounts of data. It facilitates advanced decision-making. Read full review ScreenShots