Anaplan vs. Matillion

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.

Great: Need to query simpler APIs, or utilize well known services such as GSheets etc.? Matillion has got some of the best and easiest to use connectors out there. Not so great: Do you need have a competent CI/CD flow that you will be able to update / compare from Matillion as well as other sources at the same time? Good luck, you will need to be extra careful, as you might have to have a deeper dive into your servers Terminal each time you have a git conflict.

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.

• The user interface of your data pipelines makes it easier for people who aren’t as techy as data engineers to observe what's going on.
• Customer support is quick, not always as efficient as you would want it to be, but still.
• Nice documentation available.

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.

• Matillion is brilliant at importing data -- it would be amazing to have more ways to export data, from emailed exports to API pushes.
• Any Python that takes more than a few lines of code requires an external server to run it. It would be great to have more integration (perhaps in a connected virtual environment) to easily integrate customized code.
• Troubleshooting server logs requires quite a bit of technical expertise. More human readable detailed error handling would be greatly appreciated.

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

With the current experience of Matillion, we are likely to renew with the current feature option but will also look for improvement in various areas including scalability and dependability. 1. Connectors: It offers various connectors option but isn't full proof which we will be looking forward as we grow. 2. Scalability: As usage increase, we want Matillion system to be more stable.

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

We are able to bring on new resources and teach them how to use Matillion without having to invest a significant amount of time. We prefer looking for resources with any type of ETL skill-set and feel that they can learn Matillion without problem. In addition, the prebuilt objects cover more than 95% of our use cases and we do not have to build much from scratch.

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

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

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.

Overall, I've found Matillion to be responsive and considerate. I feel like they value us as a customer even when I know they have customers who spend more on the product than we do. That speaks to a motive higher than money. They want to make a good product and a good experience for their customers. If I have any complaint, it's that support sometimes feels community-oriented. It isn't always immediately clear to me that my support requests are going to a support engineer and not to the community at large. Usually, though, after a bit of conversation, it's clear that Matillion is watching and responding. And responses are generally quick in coming.

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.

We were able to control on access and built various enviroment for implementation

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

Fivetran offers a managed service and pre-configured schemas/models for data loading, which means much less administrative work for initial setup and ongoing maintenance. But it comes at a much higher price tag. So, knowing where your sweet spot is in the build vs. buy spectrum is essential to deciding which tool fits better. For the transformation part, dbt is purely (SQL-) code-based. So, it is mainly whether your developers prefer a GUI or code-based approach.

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

We're using Matillion on EC2 instances, and we have about 20 projects for our clients in the same instance. Sometimes, we're struggling to manage schedules for all projects because thread management is not visible, and we can't see the process at the instance level.

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

• Matillion has been the backbone of my company's analytical functionalities for 10+ years, so it has a good ROI.
• The price is ok for what our company built with it, but it starts to be less competitive if the tool is not used at its fullest.

Incentivized