Anaplan vs. Clari

I've implemented a number of projects for Anaplan for Sales Performance Management use cases. It is obviously built for financial planning, but it allows for a lot of flexibility for territory and quota, ICM, sales forecasting, and other important use cases. Territory and Quota is very powerful in the tool as it organize complex assignment structures into hierarchies for easier analysis and reporting.

We use Clari as the primary way to manage our sales business, our opportunities, and our forecasting. Clari provides a very clean, digestible, and easy to manipulate format to view and manage all of the Salesforce information. The fact that Clari is able to provide an easily customizable set of columns and groups, coupled with the ability to write back to Salesforce is fantastic. Anyone in a mature sales organization will find Clari highly effective at helping manage their funnel of opportunities and their business.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Creates call summary and add them in created tags to help us to targeted monitoring.
• Help us create battlecards that agents can use on live calls.
• Help us create library and playbook of good and bad calls for training.
• Help us provide a call overview by team.

Incentivized

• Some end users don't spend the required amount of time to familiar themselves with Anaplan.
• Auditability, while good in theory, can be lacking and clunky when needed.
• Model building can become convoluted over time, leading to confusion over the specific use of line items.

• Sometimes we'll update everything and it won't save so GTM teams have to do it again. Not sure if it's whenever we do platform updates.
• As a manager I'm not able to reorder my teams names in the rows. I have to ask our Admin to sort A-Z which is time wasted

Incentivized

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

I will renew my Clari Subscription for many reasons. 1. Streamlines Sales - Clari automates many manual tasks like note-taking and transcripts. This frees my sales team so they can focus on closing deals. 2. Increased customer retention - Clari helps me identify potential churn risks and take proactive measures. 3. AI-Driven Insights

Incentivized

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

Clari's UI does not resonate with new users. The backend query updating takes quite long time to update. Lots of fixes are needed without answers or solutions offered by the Clari team. If set up correctly with clear recommendations from the Clari team, all the previous issues may be resolved, however the usability is tied closely to set up.

Incentivized

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

During the last 5 years, we have never faced unplanned outages

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The system is usually fast and loads quickly. Occasional slowness is observed during processing heavy uploads or downloads.

Incentivized

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.

Clari is very willing to jump in and build out use cases. They will work to do anything for you. That said, their follow up is not great. We have had to reach out for follow up several times on a project, which is still not complete. I wish they taught us how to complete what we want, rather than doing it in house for us

Incentivized

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 had one session of in-person training conducted in our office.

Incentivized

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

Clari has good training materials, videos, and documentation.

Incentivized

One key insight from implementing Anaplan is that success comes from focusing on designing the process, not just building the model. Anaplan is extremely flexible—there are very few planning scenarios it cannot support—but that flexibility means the project needs strong governance, clear ownership of requirements, and a well-defined data model. When those foundations are in place, implementations are fast, iterations are easy, and users can quickly see value.
In our projects, both Financial Planning and Integrated Business Planning models were adopted smoothly because we involved business users early, kept the model design intuitive, and leveraged Anaplan’s Excel-like syntax and user-friendly dashboards. The result was more efficient day-to-day work, reduced manual tasks, and increased collaboration across teams. In short: when you combine Anaplan’s flexibility with a structured implementation approach, adoption and value realization happen quickly.

No more the better there is a plan and technical support the business needs and functionalities can be created for the company to use it like that

Incentivized

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 capabilities and stability across various use cases and across bigger enterprises when compared to Pigment which is still in earlier phases of its development

At the time of selection, Clari was a more mature product than Xactly Forecasting. We did not want to experience growing pains with Xactly. Pipeline Inspection from SFDC was just becoming available. We had already selected Clari before we learned about Pipeline Inspection.

Incentivized

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

Clari is worth the investment with its advanced forecasting and pipeline management. They have a unified revenue platform that serves as a single source of truth for revenue data.

Incentivized

• Anaplan's implementation led to a significant reduction in planning cycle errors and bugs, streamlining processes and improving overall accuracy in data inputs
• Standardizing the planning process and enabling cross-functional collaboration through Anaplan enhanced our ability to adapt swiftly to changing business needs, resulting in improved agility in decision-making
• The platform's capabilities, especially in Demand Planning and Supply Chain, positively impacted our ROI by optimizing resource allocation and solving complex business problems efficiently across multiple functions

• I no longer spend hours reconciling spreadsheets or guessing which opportunities are real - Clari shows me exactly where to focus to drive results.
• I have consistently hit my quota the last 3 quarters thanks to Clari's precision and detailed insights.

Incentivized