DataRails vs. Prophix vs. Vena

If the budgeting is done with Excel spreadsheets, and your company is small to medium in size, Prophix is the system for you! Additionally, if your company is also doing monthly forecasting in Excel, Prophix will save you time and reduce errors. There are also many other worthwhile features, such as Account Reconciliation and consolidations.

Incentivized

Vena is great for managing data and putting all of your information in one easy-to-locate spot. It also makes finding data faster and easier. It is also great for tracking project performance and budgeting. It is fairly user-friendly and easy to use from an admin side.

Incentivized

• Reporting - single report that can be opened by multiple users, each will see only aspect specific to them based on their security access.
• Budgeting - workflow driven budget data collection, visibility of its current status, ability to take action to ensure timely completion. Ability to snapshot budget data at a point in time. Ability to perform what-if scenarios.
• Forecasting - as above with added benefit of either reusing budget level of grain or forecasting at high level.
• Granular planning - ability to create unlimited number of subsidiary models to assist with the planning process. Non-financial data collected during budget/forecast process help with operation planning and variance analysis.

Incentivized

• Bringing all of our financial processes together in one place
• Helps Operations and Finance to see what is happening in real time at each site.
• It makes the budgeting process very easy for Operations to input and Finance to go in and check alongside at the same time.

Incentivized

• Prophix could improve on its dashboarding capability - it is very basic and we always present our graphs/visuals in Excel.
• We would love it if Prophix could improve its line item detail reports. They are not great right after downloading and require a lot of manipulation in Excel.
• It would be awesome if we could fully integrate our invoicing software with Prophix. This would allow us to view invoices within Prophix rather than having to go into another tool.

• Preparing forecasts under different scenarios can be challenging. Your input templates need to be set up to toggle between the various scenarios. We found that certain templates, particularly workforce were not able to easily switch between different scenarios.
• Connection to Bamboo - initial testing of this resulted in the history being deleted and only showing the current employees. For us it was important to have the history in Vena.
• No native connection to Tableau - while a CSV upload is a way around would be great to have this since you already have a Power BI connection.

Incentivized

The system works well for us, and meets all of our needs. All of our future plans can and will be achieved within Prophix, so there is no need to pursue another product. Prophix has continuously proven to improve their product over the years, which provides an even higher level of confidence in this tool, and future developments

Vena has been a huge win for us as an organization, as it vastly improved our budgeting process by removing manual consolidation that was incredibly time consuming, and it allows us to see a multi-year view of our organizational budget across all of our funding sources. We've seen Vena's platform grow over the years and we've not yet fully adopted some of them so it feels like there's still potential to get even more value out of the platform.

Incentivized

I have used other reporting software over the years and so far this has been the simplest to set up, the most flexible to use and we have not yet used Prophix to its full capacity. Over the next year or so I can see us extending our use of Prophix to include any number of other functions.

Incentivized

I would rate Vena's overall usability as an 8 out of 10. Vena offers a user-friendly interface, especially for those familiar with Excel, making it relatively easy to use. Most features are intuitive. However, some advanced functionalities may require more training or time to master, so it's not a perfect score. Overall, Vena provides a solid user experience that supports efficient financial planning.

Incentivized

The availability in Prophix is relatively good. We have occurred random outages in different versions that wipe out data, which can be brought back. Or we have ran into system wide slowness that impacts all users in the system, but we have been able to get more capacity to supply our performance.

Incentivized

Vena has been available and running. There are notifications well ahead of scheduled maintenance and so far, scheduled maintenance has been occurring during off hours and fortunately has not occurred during a time that is crucial for us to be actively using.

Incentivized

Prophix has always performed consistently. We are using on-premise so many factors can contribute to slower than desired performance, most having nothing to do with Prophix itself. If we move to the web-client cloud based solution I believe performance will even be better.

Incentivized

Vena Solutions pages load quickly and only a few times does it get a bit slow, only when there are many integrations and the reports are long. But in general it is always fast and honestly I am very satisfied with the speed in the generation of statistical reports and the pages

Incentivized

The Prophix staff is very helpful and quick to respond. I like that they teach me instead of doing it for me when possible, so I don't have to contact them as often! Never talked to anyone at Prophix that I didn't respect or think highly of! Very professional, great customer service!

Incentivized

They are very quick to respond when you submit a ticket and typically fix issues quickly as well. I only didn't give this a 10 because there is still an open issue with our Salesforce connection that we've been waiting on now for a few months.

Incentivized

Training is essential for this software to be successful for any company. We unfortunately had a bad implementation and training manager so I can say with confidence that if we had the CSM we have now - we would be light years ahead of our knowledge of the system. I highly suggest taking all training opportunities and not rushing the implementation training

Incentivized

Our initial in person training was a little rough b/c I felt like our trainer wanted to focus on maximizing Vena rather than understanding what we were needing for our organization. He was very responsive and added insights, but could have worked to understand our needs a little better.

Incentivized

We used our system and created a test cube to work with our own data. We ran through the different functions of Prophix and covered alot of material. We did two sessions a week, with homework tasks assigned. We were able to ask questions and cover any questions during the followup sessions.

Incentivized

The training was structured as a group training to learn the basics of creating a data model and mapping a template. While we had nearly 10 participants, I was the only actual implementer so we probably didn't actually need the training and could have just learned the initial skills from the implementation consultant. Two years later, when we hired a new team member, they completed several modules in Vena Academy (a self paced learning course) which allowed them to get up to speed on the basics with just a bit of supplemental guidance from me as our existing admin.

Incentivized

Prophix Consulting should bring, in house, chargeable expertise in Oracle EBS table access for Drill Across and provide reasonable limits on dimension member combinations so there are no unreasonable expectations about the application of multi dimensional cubes to detail, such as revenue by product and customer.

Incentivized

The Vena consultant had great knowledge of both the Vena solution and Excel and Excel functions. He was able to help suggest ways to build our templates that met our requirements using Excel functions we had not previously considered using. And we have been able to use the Excel information he provided in other ways outside of Vena. He was very patient and flexible as we learned the Vena tool and created templates

We felt Prophix was much more flexible than Briq and offered a more solid financial reporting and budgeting package. Briq is more custom built solution-focused. They build solutions to fit your specific needs. The primary reason we went with Prophix is that we wanted something we could tweak and design on our own after the initial build-out of the solution.

Incentivized

Vena is a strong fit for teams that want to keep working in Excel while adding structure, workflows, and a centralized database. Vena emphasizes its native Excel experience, along with planning templates, workflow automation, and integrations for budgeting/forecasting.


Planful is more positioned as an end-to-end financial performance platform, with a broader emphasis on planning, budgeting, forecasting, reporting, AI/ML-driven forecasting support, real-time collaboration, and enterprise-scale (including multi-entity/multi-currency environments). It also supports Microsoft 365 reporting via Spotlight. We selected Vena because it was a better fit for our current use case and team setup:

Our Operations and FP&A teams primarily use it for budgeting and forecasting, so the Excel-based workflow made adoption easier.


It was easier to implement and simpler for users to learn and operate day-to-day.


It fit well with our need to improve planning structure without forcing a major process change.

Incentivized

I gave Prophix a 10 on scalability because we currently deploy the solution to department heads across our entire organization and never have any issues with those individuals using or accessing the system to look at their financial information within premade templates . They currently enter budgets and review reports within the system currently. The only issue is they cannot typically use the ad hoc functionality because that would require higher level licenses that cost more and it is not worth it to give them more costly licenses since they really aren't working in the system quite like the robust finance users

Incentivized

Vena solutios is a software that provides robust tools that help different departments in their statistics and we can visualize a lot of promising and visually attractive data. Vena Solutions' level of scalability is high and sustainable over time thanks to the fabulous technical support that is ready to help us at all times

Incentivized

• Prophix has made it possible to move away from some Excel reporting we were doing, which allows for 50% quicker reporting on a monthly basis.
• Although it has saved us time, an improved PowerPoint feature that automatically updates our decks would save an additional 75% on top of what we already do.
• Our Board Reporting has improved by 10 hours by moving our reports fully into Prophix.

• Automated monthly financial statements saves us 3 hours a month.
• Moving reporting away from IT has begun to save hours of IT involvement, which will only grow as we shift more reports to Vena. This frees up IT to work on more important IT initiatives.
• Using budget templates saved hours of copy and paste time when gathering inputs from each department.

Incentivized