OpenText Magellan vs. Planful

If you do not have a large budget and are a large organization, I would steer clear of Actuate. If you are looking to do very complex washboarding, I would not use them. Your developers have to be very skilled to work with this. Plan to bring in consultants if necessary to help your process. Adhoc reporting is weak. If your pricing is user based and you expand, this could be very expensive.

Planful is initially easy to setup and if a company is already using a mid layer to transform and standardise GL data, management reports can be set up in days, not weeks or months. Budgeting template setup does get some getting used to but the training provided by Planful is sufficient to get going and learn along the way. Building custom reports is straightforward and the interface is user-friendly, therefore the accounting team can get going without the need for technical specialists getting involved. Budget and forecasting is flexible and drivers of revenue and cost can be created in Planful and customised by Unit or Geography.

• The report outputs can vary across different types such as HTML, PDF, and Excel
• Their open source offering is very sufficient
• There are great boards and blogs for developers and engineers to expand and use their features.
• The people from the company that I've worked with are professional and courteous.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• It aggregates data from different sources well, allowing me to report on a wide variety of metrics that interrelate.
• I can build detailed reports so that my monthly and weekly reporting is done more efficiently
• I like the tools that I am using to create dedicated models for forecasting and budgeting purposes

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• The documentation on all the available features, but most importantly on the scripting side, can be improved
• The standard look & feel of some basic options, like parameter selection or sorting and filtering, looks dated and can't be customized
• The server portal needs to provide better tools
• More integration is needed with other OpenText products

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• Dashboarding could be more flexible and easier to use.
• Dynamic Reporting has room for flexibility with nesting, dimension names showing up instead of “All,” and overall flexibility.
• Make Analyze view in Spotlight more intuitive.
• A high-level onboarding guide to understanding the different components of Planful, data flows, and tips & tricks.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

I am no longer working for the company that was using Actuate but I believe they would continue to use it because the stitching costs would be to high. It would require a complete rewrite of the reports and the never version of Actuate (BIRT) even required an almost complete report rewrite

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.

Incentivized

Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

It is quite intuitive to use. It is fit specifically for doing sentiment, emotion, and intention analysis as well as text classification and text summarization. I would have given 10 if it is fit for the purpose of doing image processing and analysis as well. There is a huge market to analyze video and image data.

Incentivized

Independently Invited by TrustRadius

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

The tool is extremely adaptable, and it enables very quick querying to give us opportunity to gain live insights into the business. Given its adaptability, we are also able to create scenario analyses very quickly in rapidly changing environments. The formatting also enables us to provide this information in a very consumable manner.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.

Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.

Always there on the front and backend for us and the client.

Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support

My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment. Planful also offers training and certifications on their training hub. I have completed a couple of the certifications. The courses are easy to follow along with and very informative. Additionally, Planful schedules webinars pretty regularly. They'll email their customers and allow you to register to participate live. They also record these sessions so you can refer back to them at a later date or if you are unable to attend at the time the webinar is offered, you can register anyway and get access to the recording. Their training has improved year over year!

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

Planful provides a lot of online training support. There's so many options for training. Admin Learning Courses, User Learning Courses. Plus they have several webinars devoted to the tool and the new features they release. New Releases can be practiced in a Sandbox Environment prior to going live in Production

Incentivized

Invited by TrustRadius (TR) on Vendor's Behalf

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

It is vastly superior to these in many ways, for complex reporting it is a much more sophisticated solution. Visualizations are very good. Javascript extensibility is very powerful, others don't support this or as well. Pentaho and MS are both OLAP oriented. Pentaho is moving more toward big data, which was not our primary focus. Others are stuck in the Crystal Reports Band metaphor.

Prior to joining the company, we tried to implement Vena but were unsuccessful. There we're a few reasons it didn't work out, but a lot of it related to the implementation team they provided. In just the first week with Planful, we achieved more progress than we did in several months with Vena.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info

• Actuate can handle 50 to 60 sub reports inside a report very well.
• Dynamically creating the datasource, chart, graph, reports are the main advantages. We can do any level of drilling, and can create a performance matrix dashboard efficiently.

• Has allowed users to view a real-time P&L in a way they weren't able to do with Qlik.
• Budget to Actual analysis has become much more streamlined and actionable
• Long-range plan process has been significantly streamlined and a lot of time has been cut out of the process.

Incentivized

Invited by the Vendor

A de minimis incentive was given to thank the reviewer for their time. The incentive was not used to bias or drive a particular response, nor was the incentive contingent on a positive endorsement. More Info