Anaplan vs. Tableau Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Anaplan
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
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.N/A
Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
$12
Per User Per Month
Pricing
AnaplanTableau Server
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Viewer
$12.00
Per User Per Month
Explorer
$35.00
Per User Per Month
Creator
$70.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AnaplanTableau Server
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeOptionalNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AnaplanTableau Server
Considered Both Products
Anaplan
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan can reduce modeling time from months to days. Our teams are able to now forecast multiple different scenarios quickly instead of having to tell our executive team that it will take us weeks to months to model out a specific scenario that they have questions on. We are …
Chose Anaplan
Modeling and what I call the "brains" is much better in Anaplan. You can create several different model types that can all feed into a single budget or plan.

What Anaplan really lacks is the ad-hoc ability that is in Hyperion. You can't identify your dimensions and find the data …
Tableau Server

No answer on this topic

Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
AnaplanTableau Server
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
7.7
182 Ratings
3% below category average
Tableau Server
9.3
95 Ratings
13% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports6.41 Ratings9.129 Ratings
Customizable dashboards9.0182 Ratings9.494 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings9.381 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
9.1
2 Ratings
10% above category average
Tableau Server
8.9
95 Ratings
9% above category average
Drill-down analysis9.12 Ratings8.795 Ratings
Formatting capabilities9.12 Ratings8.593 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration9.12 Ratings9.589 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.959 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
8.8
189 Ratings
7% above category average
Tableau Server
7.9
91 Ratings
6% below category average
Publish to Web9.11 Ratings9.685 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.8188 Ratings9.384 Ratings
Report Versioning9.2163 Ratings8.270 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.33 Ratings7.577 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings5.19 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
8.2
2 Ratings
8% above category average
Tableau Server
8.5
90 Ratings
5% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)9.12 Ratings8.886 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization9.12 Ratings8.885 Ratings
Predictive Analytics6.42 Ratings7.864 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
9.2
192 Ratings
6% above category average
Tableau Server
7.5
95 Ratings
14% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)9.12 Ratings7.593 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model9.5192 Ratings7.590 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.12 Ratings7.592 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control9.445 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.12 Ratings7.562 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
8.0
182 Ratings
0% above category average
Tableau Server
7.7
79 Ratings
3% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access8.7173 Ratings7.377 Ratings
Mobile Application8.2162 Ratings7.261 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile8.3169 Ratings7.968 Ratings
Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting
Comparison of Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
9.1
294 Ratings
9% above category average
Tableau Server
-
Ratings
Long-term financial planning9.4268 Ratings00 Ratings
Financial budgeting9.6273 Ratings00 Ratings
Forecasting9.3282 Ratings00 Ratings
Scenario modeling9.2284 Ratings00 Ratings
Management reporting8.3283 Ratings00 Ratings
Consolidation and Close
Comparison of Consolidation and Close features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
7.2
249 Ratings
11% below category average
Tableau Server
-
Ratings
Financial data consolidation8.7229 Ratings00 Ratings
Journal entries and reports7.2187 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-currency management6.211 Ratings00 Ratings
Intercompany Eliminations6.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Minority Ownership6.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Local and consolidated reporting8.5216 Ratings00 Ratings
Detailed Audit Trails8.2229 Ratings00 Ratings
Financial Reporting and Compliance
Comparison of Financial Reporting and Compliance features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
8.6
266 Ratings
5% above category average
Tableau Server
-
Ratings
Financial Statement Reporting8.8245 Ratings00 Ratings
Management Reporting8.4257 Ratings00 Ratings
Excel-based Reporting8.1236 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated board and financial reporting9.013 Ratings00 Ratings
Analytics and Reporting
Comparison of Analytics and Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
9.0
285 Ratings
11% above category average
Tableau Server
-
Ratings
Personalized dashboards8.6280 Ratings00 Ratings
Color-coded scorecards8.8264 Ratings00 Ratings
KPIs9.119 Ratings00 Ratings
Cost and profitability analysis9.2242 Ratings00 Ratings
Key Performance Indicator setting9.4253 Ratings00 Ratings
Benchmarking with external data9.113 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration
Comparison of Integration features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
8.8
291 Ratings
6% above category average
Tableau Server
-
Ratings
Flat file integration9.5281 Ratings00 Ratings
Excel data integration8.4263 Ratings00 Ratings
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources8.6242 Ratings00 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Anaplan
-
Ratings
Tableau Server
7.2
46 Ratings
10% below category average
REST API00 Ratings9.040 Ratings
Javascript API00 Ratings9.137 Ratings
iFrames00 Ratings9.140 Ratings
Java API00 Ratings5.57 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)00 Ratings6.19 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)00 Ratings4.67 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AnaplanTableau Server
Small Businesses
IBM Planning Analytics
IBM Planning Analytics
Score 8.3 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Centage
Centage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Score 8.1 out of 10
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AnaplanTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
9.3
(303 ratings)
7.2
(111 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(25 ratings)
10.0
(20 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(16 ratings)
5.4
(17 ratings)
Availability
8.7
(6 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Performance
9.0
(6 ratings)
8.1
(8 ratings)
Support Rating
7.7
(18 ratings)
3.3
(18 ratings)
In-Person Training
8.4
(4 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(4 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.5
(21 ratings)
9.1
(13 ratings)
Configurability
9.0
(4 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
9.1
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
9.4
(6 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.3
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
4.7
(3 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AnaplanTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
Anaplan
Anaplan revolutionizes the planning process by standardizing it, creating transparency in data, particularly in showcasing results to the management team. By replacing Excel-centric planning methods, Anaplan not only opens the door to handling larger datasets but also enables a more intricate level of data granularity at an accelerated pace. What sets it apart is its capacity to facilitate a seamless collaboration within a cross-functional model, accommodating diverse departments and business functions in a dynamic, real-time environment.
Read full review
Tableau
Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
Read full review
Pros
Anaplan
  • Forcing structure and auditability to processes that used to exist in spreadsheets
  • Strong calculation engine that can account for many dimensions
  • Formula Syntax that is not overly complicated and can be learned by the business in order to have ownership of their models internally
Read full review
Tableau
  • It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
  • Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
  • Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
Read full review
Cons
Anaplan
  • The "new" UX front-end offers a lot of modern and intuitive features, but it lacks the ability to view multiple "tabs" of dashboards and reports. The "classic" dashboard had this feature but now with the UX, you need to be really smart about how to design a single page where the users won't get "lost".
  • Lacks the ability to "wrap text" (similar to excel) and auto-size grid rows
Read full review
Tableau
  • Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
  • Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Anaplan
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.
Read full review
Tableau
It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
Read full review
Usability
Anaplan
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.
Read full review
Tableau
Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
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Reliability and Availability
Anaplan
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
Read full review
Tableau
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
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Performance
Anaplan
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.
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Tableau
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
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Support Rating
Anaplan
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.
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Tableau
We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
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In-Person Training
Anaplan
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.
Read full review
Tableau
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
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Online Training
Anaplan
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
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Tableau
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
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Implementation Rating
Anaplan
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.
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Tableau
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
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Alternatives Considered
Anaplan
Anaplan is what I would consider a modeling platform. It excels at taking a forecasting or planning process and systematizing it - and allowing for whatever nuances and granularity you need to perform that modeling. It is not positioned as "data collection" platform - which are typically designed to take data uploads from Excel to calculate basic opex and revenue models. It's much more customizable and flexible.
Read full review
Tableau
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Read full review
Scalability
Anaplan
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
Read full review
Tableau
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Anaplan
  • Speeding up the process of closing and updating the current month forecast
  • Reduced work on the preparation of reports and presentations. We used different Anaplan approaches with varying success, but the overall result was there.
  • It's hard to gauge, but the overall increase in process and algorithm transparency, along with data protection, has given an excellent platform for scaling up the company's processes.
Read full review
Tableau
  • Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
  • There are some significant setup for the server product.
  • Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.
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ScreenShots

Anaplan Screenshots

Screenshot of Platform: The Anaplan platform is a unified cloud-based solution that connects people, data and plans to enable complex scenario modeling and drive growthScreenshot of OpEx Planning: Review revenue-target-setting goals by brand, season, and capacity all on one, unified, highly-visual dashboardScreenshot of Supply Planning: Break down costs across assembly production to project profitability and align your supply chain to market opportunitiesScreenshot of Territory and Quota Planning: Keep track of sales goals and quotas across territories and industries to optimize sales performanceScreenshot of Headcount Planning: Easily align workforce plans with your strategic plans and quickly see where the best qualified talent resides to fit your organization’s staffing needsScreenshot of Marketing: Eliminate spreadsheets to drive efficiency across planning and manage budget against planned activity

Tableau Server Screenshots

Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 2.Screenshot of Tableau Server permissions view.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 2.