Likelihood to Recommend Anaplan is a great tool for complex modeling of the future. When you are planning your actions for the future, have multiple, disparate datasets to interact with, have dozens if not hundreds of stakeholders who must contribute and need to be guided via a streamlined workflow engine, require complex logic that can grow with your org, require real-time reporting, and you need it all in less than 6 months.
Read full review Zoho Analytics does a pretty decent job across all aspects. Still, on the dashboard part, Zoho Analytics is really good compared to other BI Analytical tools. It offers a wide range of dashboard options and allows users to customize them based on needs and requirements. On the other hand, for customer reports, it falls a little short.
Read full review Pros Anaplan can scale as your business grows, for example adding new regions into to your geographical hierarchy. Anaplan is flexible and can do anything you want it to, there are no tables pre-configured that you need to fix your business process into. Reading formulas in Anaplan is straight forward with a quick learning curve. Read full review 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. Read full review Cons Ability to decide if to apply the formula or a manual input on front end for each line item Real Time Data Transfer across models. Currently Data is transferred using Processes across different models. Having a functionality to access data from any model in real time would be great Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review 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
Read full review Usability Anaplan's usability is very good. Users can customize reports and make adjustments with very little training. They can quickly plan and collaborate very easily. Making large adjustments or creating complex functionality may require more experience or training but a lot of tasks can be completed by users with very little experience
Read full review I think Zoho Analytics is excellent for visualizing the data. I don't spend much time preparing the data or creating the charts, graphs, and reports, so I can't discuss that. I do know that our team spends a LOT less time working on the reports now than they used to. Zoho has saved them a great deal of time.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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 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.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review 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
Read full review In-Person Training 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.
Read full review Online Training 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
Larissa Lowe Director, Sales Operations Business Systems and COE
Read full review Implementation Rating The platform allows a flexible implementation mechanic to be put in place, since the possibilities and functionalities are vast and there are very few things the tool cannot do well. The solutions for the financial planning and the integrated business planning we put in place were easily adopted by the end users and their day-to-day work was made easier.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Compared to
OneStream and Venna Anaplan offers a more modern look and feel of the platform. It is better situated and maintained in regards of platform updates as it's a full SaaS software there are never any issues with the system version as it's always automatically up to date with no backward compatibility issues. Due to the flexible nature of the modelling engine, it is also better suited to perform larger multi-department use cases, like IBP (Integrated Business Planning)
Read full review Looker is more of a database. Build your own customization data sets and reporting. At the same time,
Looker 's forecasting tool seems more accurate. I like Zoho's visual analytics of the data more. Zoho is better for presenting the data to others, while
Looker is more raw data, drilling down into the numbers review.
Read full review Scalability 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 We are impressed by how Zoho Analytics scales to match our specific analytics needs. It is easy to customize it to adapt to our existing working infrastructure. There are seamless connectors that allow us to connect Zoho Analytics with all of our data sources, making it easy to collect data for analysis.
Read full review Return on Investment We've typically seen an average of 40% removal of time from processes using Anaplan an enabler Though difficult to quantify, we consistently find our processes less error prone than in the past. Essentially, we've removed a previously "hidden cost" of risk due to poor data quality that was buried in our processes. Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots Zoho Analytics Screenshots