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.
The tools generally fill different niches, Anaplan is the best for corporate and enterprise planning, OneStream's strengths are in Consolidations and working with large data sets by IT, and Pigment is a strong contender for finance teams at small organizations with less-defined …
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 …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan system/structure is not a far departure from Microsoft Excel which many people are most familiar with - this allowed for an easy transition during our first implementation as well as onboarding new users. Anaplan presents itself in a somewhat familiar structure while …
Anaplan is using hyper block, so calculation is faster. The implementation of Anaplan is also very straightforward, so COE team can quickly catchup on the solution. If additional functions are required after go-live, COE can also support the implementation by themselves. …
Managing spreadsheets in Excel or Google Sheets becomes too time consuming as the business and team grows so transitioning to a tool like Anaplan is a natural evolution. I have used Power BI as a complement to Anaplan in the past in order to make the data that was consolidated …
Anaplan is cloud based which automatically removes the pain and risk that comes along with emailing around different versions of spreadsheets. Concurrent users can interact with different parts of the model at the same time greatly improving time spent adding inputs to the …
Verified User
Strategist
Chose Anaplan
We selected Anaplan because of the breadth of their vision and their approach to tackle "planning" of all kinds and integrate planning processes into a true Connected Planning ecosystem. We found that their flexibility and ease of use ultimately provided a better avenue to …
Anaplan is leaps and bounds beyond Excel with versioning, multiple models linking to one data set giving one source of truth, and full audit history of changes available in the system. It enables you to fully trust the numbers you're seeing and working with and [give you] the …
Anaplan is an enterprise grade solution with a proven track record whereas Pigment is a new solution still evolving/improving constantly. The modeling capabilities and the power of the engine are stronger with Anaplan but Pigment offers an interesting alternative with more …
Verified User
Employee
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan is a cloud-based tool that can store billions of data records. It can be accessed by any web browser and even mobile devices and significantly reduces version control issues that users run into with Excel. Anaplan is extremely customizable and can cater to any planning …
Verified User
Partner
Chose 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 …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan has a clear advantage comparing to Excel when it comes to complex planning and forecasting, especially for bigger companies. Anaplan can perform much smoother but still is giving the same amount of flexibility.
SAC is much more analytical comparing to Anaplan. SAC can …
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan is easy to implement and use and provides a lot of flexibility over other tools. Solution in anaplan can be developed by a limited set of model builders and can easily implemented if build properly and understanding the business problem. Anaplan is a good tool for …
Customizability and ease of learning (not a coder, similar to Excel formulas). Not confined to the existing configurability of software's planning process/tables. Low IT involvement. Scenario and driver-based planning (can make inputs). Can be used for more than just Finance …
The only platform with the flexibility that matches Anaplan is Excel. However, excel is not scalable. There are also many great point solutions out there that can do one thing well, but I have not seen anything else that can do as much as Anaplan can, and do it well.
Anaplan to me is far easier to understand, more intuitive to use, the interface is quite more appealing and the overall experience is more pleasant, so to say. With HFM I feel like using a tool that was created ~20 years ago, and no matter how easy it is to use in some aspects, …
Anaplan has the best real-time, multi-dimensional calculation engine that I've worked with. This is core to creating a highly accurate forecast that provides the level of detail necessary to be useful to planners. Their addition of PlanIQ brings in the power of AI/ML to the …
Anaplan has greater flexibility and ease of use for any use cases, It connect different planning models with ease and making it is easy to adjust to changing business structures. It is able to handle large data, it is also helps complex planning and Analytics. It is well suited …
Verified User
Professional
Chose Anaplan
Anaplan is a way more efficient solution that SAP BW. Performance of Anaplan beats SAP definitely and people prefer to use Anaplan more than SAP. It's much easier to adopt Anaplan which is easy than SAP which needs some experience before using it efficiently. Generally Anaplan …
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Anaplan
Excel can be incredibly cumbersome, inefficient, prone to human error, and difficult to audit. Anaplan helps solve for this by providing an easy-to-use interface, connected planning modules, and security and tracking around the input and approval process. Anaplan is a much …
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.