Anaplan vs. QuotaPath

Anaplan is best suited for strategic planning initiatives in industries like CPG, Manufacturing, FS, Pharma. It can handle multiple use cases for each function in the company like Supply chain, Finance, Sales and more. It is one of the best tools I have seen in scenario modelling. It is not suitable for very detailed level planning, essentially execution level eg. Production scheduling.

Well suited for getting your sales team visibility on their efforts, it’s great for showing how and why commissions payout as they do with each deal. Adjustments can also be made very quickly on the backend if needed. It’s straightforward and quick to set up and doesn’t require much training, which is very good for smaller-end businesses and sales forces. It doesn’t work well with more nuanced deals that may age multiple pay points or for larger sales forces, and some custom CRMs will have trouble or be incompatible.

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.

• We don’t have to calculate commissions in Excel anymore! It takes a fraction of the time it used to calculate commissions. Saves about 1-2 days on month end close. I like that it is easy for me and reps to drill down and see the calculations of their payouts. Reps can see calcs all month long instead of having to wait until the end of the month, so acts as a motivator. Sales managers can manage their direct reports better.
• When I first started using QP, I was not thrilled with the quota attainment reporting for dollars, percent, and team management. I’m glad that they added leaderboards and are working on better reporting. I like the UX and UI of the whole software.
• I like being able to export the following easily to Excel – resolved payouts for all payouts, payouts by rep, and Ledger (ASC 606) info.
• Admins can request that reps acknowledge their plans through QP, which helps with compliance and ensures we are in agreement with calculations. I like that they are adding a docusign feature.
• You can easily adjust earnings if a correction is needed, even after the month is closed. Just make sure you reverse from the end of the process (i.e. undo in ledger, undo the resolved payout, delete the unresolved payout, un-approve the deal).

• 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.

• More workspace roles with the ability to customize what each user is able to do. Currently, there's only member and team manager. The team manager currently has too much power and we want to remove some of the things they're able to do like approve deals.
• When you sync a deal from the CRM, you can override the earnings but you cannot override the field value you're syncing over. It would be great if that was possible.
• When you want to exclude a deal, you have to go in the filters and add a rule to exclude the ID. It would be better if there's an option to reject deals in certain paths as an approver.

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 don't have buying decision but we have input on the software or solutions we use and this has been a game changer to review our commissions. Quota Path makes it very easy to ensure we are on target. Saves us a lot of time compared to using spreadsheets

Incentivized

Anaplan is interesting because it is at the same time easy to use and difficult to use. An end user can navigate a well-constructed app, being pointed in the right direction every time they feel a slight bit of confusion, and find everything they need in what feels like a straight line. Similarly, a model builder (developer of sorts) can have the exact same experience, but the journey is longer and more complicated. End users have great experiences with Anaplan, but sometimes model builders have a frustrating one. That is not to say model building is hard (because it truly is not), but things change, and when things change in complex systems, the effort required simply to investigate where a model builder needs to make an adjustment may frustrate them but also frustrate their non-technical bosses. However, the reality is that with complicated businesses, complicated business problems, come complicated solutions. It is actually a testament to Anaplan's capabilities that it has taken on the biggest problems at the biggest companies. It may be daunting to adjust it in those environments, but at least you know it did meet the needs there, which is more than most tools can say.

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.

I ran into some issues with setting up an MRR earning path. Their customer service team was readily available to assist, provide guidance and get their hands on our setup, which made getting this up and running much easier. Also (shame on me), I missed a couple of calls with my CSM, Daniel, but he never got frustrated with my absence. In fact, he was always able to reschedule and was flexible with my schedule — when we were able to connect, he was a major, major help.

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.

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

Xactly Incent was very difficult to configure. And UI wasn't very friendly. Spiff and CaptivateIQ had a good UI but the learning and coding required was going to be too much for the short window of time before implementation was due. QuotaPath was able to build our comp plans in less than a month so we could focus on the necessary configuration of data in Salesforce.

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

• 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

• Reduce commission calculations from a full day to minutes
• Provides both managers and reps with insight into their earnings
• Highly flexible plan structuring that allowed us to pay based on our objectives
• While saving money on the elimination of manual commission processing (+/12c days per year) I believe the real payback has been the way it has helped us to better incentivize and motivate our reps

Incentivized