Anaplan vs. Jedox vs. Zoho Analytics

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.

Best suited for financial consolidation and / or as a highly customized and compact EPM / BI solution (up to 100 CCU) with individual workflows, planning and reporting functionalities, with moderate number of users (no restrictions for any industry, all industries are covered well). It also has advanced reporting & data analysis requirements and provides an integration and reporting layer of imported data from different external systems (via ETL). It can help with migrating your legacy Excel-based business models to the Web. It is not well suited for Enterprise BI applications with expecting >500 CCU (users at the same time working with the system) - this may cause serious performance issues, as all data is kept in RAM. Jedox is also less suited for applications with heavy document management requirements (document management is not an out of the box functionality in Jedox and rather requires custom development through custom widgets etc.).

Zoho Analytics is the best way to consume data created by Zoho products . It's robust and quick build formula libraries and auto generated reports. A data source can be integrated and be ready for consumption within minutes. This gives a well developed baseline for organizing to develop advance analytics. It's mobile dashboards are very intuitive and useful for leaders who are on the move.

• 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.

• Using the Excel add-in means that our team was almost instantly productive, being able to use a familiar interface to present and manipulate data.
• Allows us to quickly do analysis and comparison of current and historic data.
• Really good to produce meaningful management reporting that can be adapted responsively to business requirements.
• Implementing Jedox in our budget cycle dramatically reduced the time and complexity of the process, while making it more transparent.

Incentivized

• Zoho Analytics’ predictive analytics capabilities can help forecast future trends, allowing for proactive planning and risk management.
• Performance Monitoring: We can track key performance indicators (KPIs) across departments, such as sales, marketing, finance, and HR. This aids in identifying bottlenecks and areas for improvement.
• Decision making regarding resource allocation.

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.

• Diversity. Jedox can be applied to many different use cases from small to large deployments and from budgeting to enterprise class BI solutions. But rarely is one tool able to fulfill all of these requirements in one organisation. This value proposition can be complicated for prospective users.
• Awareness. Jedox punches above its weight in capability and scalability, but not enough people have heard about it and therefore procurement processes can be drawn out as a result.

• I'm guessing it's out there somewhere but I really could have used a 'quick start guide' or guided start.
• Once I figured it out, it makes sense how to make sure the right data is provided in order to make dashboards quite flexible--- but without examples, I found it quite a challenge
• The initial organization of Analytics is NOT intuitive. Once in context, the organizational features make sense, but (at least initially) it would have been most useful if the organization of Analytics reports in Zoho Analytics had saved me a lot of time.

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

For a period of 5 years all our customers using Jedox have renewed their licenses.

I'd give this an 11 if I could! As our business moves forward we hope to use Zoho Analytics more then we do now. Creating better reports and dashboards for our management team to evaluate the health of our business and to provide more insightful reports for our customers. The possibilities are endless with this tool

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

To me Jedox deserves 10/10 because it is a consistent one-in-all platform with a modern look and feel. It is intuitive to use and allows you to make intuitive applications integrating traditional business intelligence with performance management functionality. It certainly has a short
learning curve, especially for those that are familiar with MS Excel. An example: I've lost count but Jedox it is available in more than 25 languages. Another: Jedox does not require programming skills... it is developed to be used by the business.

For an end user, Zoho Analytics is pretty easy to use and very easy to access the dashboard. Linking data from multiple sources is very convenient. Multiple people can work on preparing and publishing the dashboards simultaneously, which helps delegate tasks.

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

Jedox has
very few bugs. Reports are available through an Excel add-in, the web and/or
mobile device (IOS/Android). In my opinion, availability also means high
performance, not having to wait for the system to give you the required reports,
analysis, dashboards instantly.

ZOHO is a very reliable company/product. We never had any issues with downtime or inaccessibility to our data. Any type of maintenance that they had to perform was clearly communicated and never an issue. We use a lot of external hooks and we've never had any issues with getting ZOHO to communicate with any of those hooks.

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

Jedox is the fastest OLAP tool on the market. It can use GPU cards to increase performance even more

ZOHO has obviously invested a lot of time effort and money in to creating a reliable infrastructure with high availability. We've never had any issues with performance and all of our data crunching small to large has always been well within reason. We have come to appreciate the performance of ZOHO and will continue to use it for all of our data needs.

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.

Jedox support in general is a professional and fast responding team. An easy-to-use ticketing system is in place. Bug-related questions are solved fast (responses come usually in a few hours after the question), but some questions / tickets, that are not Jedox-related bugs (for example some advanced questions about Jedox functionality), may be forwarded to Application Management team for further processing and then it may take several days or even weeks to get a response here -> there is room for improvement here.

The support team is honestly not that great. At times, it seems as if members of our own team know more about the product than the support team. They must not have a lot of training or the turnaround is quick

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.

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

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.

The implementation of SSO, SAML Authentication, HTTPS, Server splitting (Frontend / Backend servers) could be more standardized and made more user friendly to set up (e.g. via setup guide). Otherwise the implementation of Jedox is quick and simple when compared to other similar technologies.

If your external data sources are previously organized and correlated (e.g.: in your datawarehouse or database) your implementation will be easier. Of cource some not previously predicted correlation would be necessary to be done during the implementation, but if your organization let it to be all done into Zoho Analytics, it will take more time from your team.

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

Calumo is similar product to Jedox. I have used it extensively in my previous role. It was a major contender when we evaluated a BI platform for NIDA. Calumo is a great product as well and it was a very close call. Where we found Jedox to be a better fit for NIDA was the ability to prepare dynamic reports with ease without the need to learn MDX which was used extensively by Calumo to make dynamic reports which expand or shrink based on the underlying data. Another major benefit we saw in Jedox was the whole ETL process could be managed within Jedox instead of doing it in SQL server which negates having a dedicated SQL specialist role when the scale expands.

Incentivized

Zoho Analytics has the best UI and user friendly to create reports and dashboard along with features like Zia Assistance that guide in creating reports and dashboard and also help in the forecasting of the data based on the past records.

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

Scalability is often another word for speed. Given enough data, enough users or enough calculations, the tool becomes slower and slower. You will find that Jedox has a very high performance that can even be increased by the use of grafical cards. Other thaen that it does not only offer BI (looking back based on historical ERP data) but also allows you to look forward through integrated budgetting, planning, forecasting, workflow and collaboration. Not easy to find a tool that can support so much business functionality. So, also pretty scalable in that respect.

As far as I know, Zoho Analytics has been able to fulfill every need we've had for it. Our reports have gotten better and more detailed with pretty much every new issue of our magazine. It just keeps getting better, and we keep feeding it more data to digest and present to us.

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

• Financial budgeting and Forecasting are done in a centralized fashion in Jedox now instead of a decentralized excel based approach. A lot of cost savings and improved reliability
• Easy to use self-help Dashboards and detailed reports
• Web-based reporting instead of excel based

Incentivized

• Analytics has been the foundation of my role. I manage 2000 accounts myself, so I need analytics to help me know whom to serve first.
• Analytics provides a lot of visualization options that I need to serve my customers.
• Analytics has excellent options for accountability with our training team to know where each account is in their customer journey.

Incentivized