Anaplan is a transformative way to see, plan, and run your business. Using its proprietary Hyperblock™ technology, Anaplan lets you contextualize real-time performance, and forecast future outcomes for faster, confident decisions. Anaplan enables connected strategy and planning across your enterprise to move your business forward. Based in San Francisco, Anaplan has over 200 partners and more than 2,000 customers worldwide.
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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.
Anaplan provided a much more flexible backend that allows for modeling out any use case.
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan is much more advanced and robust tool compared to its competitors
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan works well where you have a requirement for complete flexibility, such as in business structure, or in calculation methodology that is bespoke. You can tailor the system to your exact requirements, whereas some products come with pre-built modules that you might …
We selected Anaplan for its intuitive design and our desire to get away from excel. It also enabled us a sandbox of usability to tailor the experience directly to our needs. Other systems compartmentalized areas into one format and did not allow us as much customization.
Planful offers a great solution, however, they have significantly underperformed on their annual growth rate. The solution has a lot to offer, however, it is split across two solutions and is not True connected planning. OneStream is growing on a fast trajectory and has an …
Verified User
Director
Chose Anaplan
Flexibility in modeling capability sets Anaplan apart from other competitors. You are tied to cookie cutter solution, which needed to be customized for others. Once customized, it does not change as business changes. It requires them to come in and changes. We needed a …
Anaplan is one of the better cloud-based EPM solutions out there. While it doesn't come with a lot of features/modules out of the box, once you get it up and running it's really powerful. There is a steeper learning curve than some other EPM tools out there which are …
I have used all of the above tools in previous companies. I have seen the limitations and what makes each tool shine. I have seen exactly why Anaplan beat the competition, and why the tool is critical for any FP&A team. From the things I mentioned previously, there is no reason …
I've used Anaplan, Host Analytics, and Adaptive Insights. Anaplan is by far the superior tool. Anaplan has much more flexibility, a slicker UI, is light years faster, and is much more user friendly.
Adaptive Planning and Host Analytics. Anaplan was selected due to its flexibility and ability to do multi-dimensional modeling in a simple and straightforward manner.
We had Adaptive before Anaplan and did not like the service at all. Host Analytics was more of a lift and shift from Excel which we didn't want. The look and feel was also too familiar with Adaptive.
Anaplan provided a whiteboard that allowed us to set up our unique business as we saw fit. Other programs had built-in forecasting modules that we needed to adapt to. Our company is retail but also collections so flexibility was the key when making the final decision. Plus, …
Overall better, quicker process. Lack of space in Anaplan is a pain point as compared to Host where we have been able to keep prior years worth of data with no problem.
Host is a lot more user friendly to build out models. We do all of our model building in-house whereas when my company was using Anaplan, we were required to hire outside consultants to build out or even modify various models that we needed built. Host allows for a lot more …
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Planful
I have very very very little experience (approximately 1 hour) with Anaplan.
We decided on Planful because while all of these products had some of what we need, and maybe a bit more advanced, none had all of the items on our wish list except for Planful. We are very happy with our decision because the importance of having all of the company data …
Planful (formerly Host Analytics) can be quick to implement and does not require an army to administer. It's multi-dimensional technology also allows for a lot more flexibility in it's design and use. It's reporting suite is the most intuitive that I have seen in the industry. …
We selected Host Analytics due to (i) strong out of the box feature set, (ii) best excel integration among cloud tools, (iii) no model size limit, (iv) simple pricing, (v) solid customer references
Anaplan is well-suited for complex, planning processes involving multiple areas of the business. For companies that want to put the software development into the business user's hands vs running up IT development costs. Great for scenario and driver-based planning. Data Hub allows for all data to be pulled into a single source of truth within Anaplan and allows for faster development of additional models utilizing existing data hub data. Anaplan can be expensive for mid-sized companies to use with only one use case. Designed for enterprise planning.
Scenarios where it would be well-suited: - Creating actual versus planned dashboards for budgetary and FP&A purposes - Exporting or creating reports to examine vendor details, KPIs by a certain parameter, etc. Scenarios where it is less appropriate: - Creating very very intricate charts and graphs - I use Tableau for this if I want to easily interact with charts and tables - Linking it to a database and making it more "alive" - for instance, in Tableau, I connect that to a database. I can't tell you how many times I've wished that I could do this with Planful.
Anaplan is great at unifying enterprise data and facilitates a very fast way of updating data from source systems which reduces (or eliminates) inherent risks associated with traditional MS Excel based reporting.
Anaplan enables forecasting processes to be streamlined and be collaborative making it easier for users to share data and insights that assists in improving communication and decision making across an organisation.
Anaplan can scale easily so that businesses can start with one use case and then easily add more users as other parts of the business decide to allow Anaplan to be used to solve their business problems.
Multi-user reporting. You can make individual filters, but if you need different people to compare different versions, then you have to complicate the architecture and waste cloud space (not always efficient). This limits your analysis capabilities.
There is a lack of some visualizations. The addition of the bubble chart was very timely, but even years later Donat differs from Pie only in the presence of a "hole". It is impossible to make two Donat in each other for comparison. Sometimes there is not enough flexibility in text formats.
The basic integration tool Anaplan Connect has no visual interface and it is difficult to get adequate load logs with it. Its configuration is chosen from the general logic of the ease of working with Anaplan. You will probably need help from IT to set up the integration, access certificate, and so on.
User security control could be more centralized on the platform, where you may need to navigate to multiple screens to ensure the access granted is what it should be, depending on your system setup.
Dynamic planning (while certainly powerful and can help fulfill special use cases) does have more of a learning curve vs. other areas of Planful, especially if you are not using it frequently. That being said, Planful does have training and resources to help acquire that knowledge.
Out-of-the-box intercompany reporting in the consolidation module can be tricky depending on how balances are booked in local source systems. Building reports using the intercompany dimension can be challenging depending on your specific company (entity) structure, but it can be done with some testing and validation.
In any line of work, a tool that is flexible and would allow different departments of your company to easily interact and exchange valuable insights, is highly anticipated and needed. For me, what Anaplan provides to a business, be it a smaller one or an enterprise customer, is an easily scaling, agile planning and modeling platform that can meet almost any need and give a high-end solution to the problems any company faces on a daily basis.
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.
There is a dependency in this rating - in that I find Anaplan extremely easy to use, but I've spent the necessary time developing a strong understanding of the platform. Once you understand how to use it, the platform is flexible, easy to use, and fun to use.
Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed
In nearly 3 years, I have only had 1 issue of being unable to access my model for an unplanned maintenance. Even planned maintenance windows are handled during low traffic hours on the weekend.
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.
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.
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.
1. Anaplan has separate 24/7 customer support channel to help with queries, 2. Customer Partner from Anaplan to support vendor with their queries like license purchase, use case implementation support, customer advocacy 3. Anaplan Learning Platform to help learning new product features free of cost and Yearly Anaplan connect across globe to share success stories of various companies.
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
The in-person training is simply not worth the cost. After a few weeks of playing in Anaplan, I went to the basic training and knew more than the person teaching it. a year down the road, I was the first person to complete the advance training, and again could have been teaching the class better than the person running the session. Spend some time on your own trying out different things and you will get all the understanding you need to be successful.
I have made a point to attend the Planful Perform conference and it, by far, offers so much more information than "other conferences". Planful does an amazing job including their customers (other users) in their conference to ensure their customers are getting the most out of the information provided. It is truly a wonderful LEARNING experience for their customers!
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
A few years ago I participated in a lot of their online learning. Their references have grown over the years and continue to get better and better. We use it throughout the year to update the information we hold internally for documentation and to educate ourselves on all of the new release notes and features within Planful.
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.
After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.
Anaplan is a market leader but Pigment is the new kid on the block. Pigment is cheaper than Anaplan. Pigment has more flexible feautures. Pigment is aimed at medium enterprises. Pigment doesn't have the scalabiluty that Anaplan has proven it has. Overall Anaplan is my tool of choice but if Pigment makes improvements there could be some competition
Planful is nice for the reporting option. SAP Concur doesn't so much have an option where you can see physical reports. You can easily report on the tool and send reimbursement requests and such, but you have to use multiple tools if you use Concur and want to see any sort of account history and/or detailed report information.
It's going to handle most of what you can throw at it. The problem lies in the sparsity of some datasets. When you have over 5ish dimensions of sparse data, the size of the model gets bloated for not much value. In several cases, I have had to adapt my model to account for sparsity in a way that minimized use of space, but also made interacting with the data more cumbersome.
I give this rating simply because I have first-hand knowledge of the scalability of Planful when working across departments in our company that use different financial systems. We have one team on InEight and another using SAP. When we implemented it, we only customized the system to accommodate one of these financial platforms, but when we considered expanding the use of Planful to other departments, we were able to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate our needs.
We've been able to perform allocations relatively quickly in the platform where we didn't have enough resources on the systems team. This allowed us to view our business at a finer granularity and make decisions to support our long-term growth.
Having our forecast in Anaplan has saved us countless hours originally spent in Excel and emails. The workbooks were extremely large and now it's all consolidated into 1 platform for the whole planning organization to view.
We have saved a large amount of time on reports that we previously manually compiled in Excel via MS Dynamics. Planful was linked to Dynamics through automatically scheduled DLR's, reports were created, and now our manual processes are as simple as accessing and refreshing a report.
Dashboards have improved our budgeting process specifically with our production leaders as they can visualize their P&L's, their current actuals, current budget, and see where they are forecasting with their proposed budget for the next year
With the use of templates, structured planning, and the Simulation Engine, it has added a lot of value and automation to our annual budget process, allowing for plug-and-play type data loading and viewing various scenarios easily
