Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
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Pricing
Planful
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Planful
Free Trial
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
Additional Details
Pricing is highly dependent on the complexity and scope of the implementation.
Mosaic was very rigid and not flexible for our needs. It was difficult to manage and not user friendly. Planful allows us to customize various fields that allows for more robust and efficient reporting. The user interface is easy to digest and use. The Planful team is also a …
We were recommended Planful and it was an easy decision!
Verified User
Manager
Chose Planful
Planful is one of the best solutions because of its easy of reporting capabilities that a business user can develop without consulting assistance. The other tools I have used require a more technical base knowledge.
This was the most cost effective for the features our business needed. Centage and Microsoft's PowerBI did not offer everything we wanted. One Stream was a good alternative but very expensive for what our business needed.
EPM tools are all pretty close in general functionality in that they are tables of your data with a finance focused UI stacked on top. The last 5% is what the difference. Planful has a very modern UI and does a great job of updating the system over time, including things like …
Planful was great for its price point. Although workday and hyperion are the more popular bunch, our use case is mostly met through Planful's functionality.
Previously we used Infor CPM and Alight Planning. Planful is head and shoulders above both of these systems. We have been extremely happy with it. It has cut our workload in half compared to the other two systems. There is little to nothing in the other two systems that we miss …
Personally I have only used essbase in my work. Planful has a much easier platform to use both to put together results and to load data compared to the financial reporting platforms that I have used. Planful also has better dedicated tools to create reports and build in a …
We decided to go with Planful because we thought they handled multi-site reporting better. The ability to apply dimension security to users is great for us with our field reporting structure. We also thought the drill-down capabilities and level-based reporting were perfect for …
We enjoy planful and have preferred it compared to similar products because of the personability, helpfulness form customer service, easy sign on, ability to customize reports, and run easy consolidation process.
Very well, the Hyperion module we were using was rather old, but the reporting capabilities of Planful are far ahead of anything in that version of Hyperion. All of our reporting in Hyperion was excel based so the web-based reporting and ease of use to customize reports was a …
Planful seems to do a better job of pulling things in a format that is more understandable to an accounting-minded person, whereas the other platforms seem more focused on operations. From a detail perspective, Planful provides more powerful and complete data, in my experience. …
There are still times that I find myself thinking that "I would have been done with this already" in Excel. Most (possibly all) the colleagues I know in our industry haven't outgrown using Excel yet... Overall, now that I feel I (mostly) "know what I'm doing" and am thru the learning stage the system I'm seeing benefit...however also feel like I haven't 'scratched the surface' of what it's capable of. Dynamic Planning, Predict/Signals, AI ...I feel we have a huge learning curve still ahead. I've explored Signals and AI Analyst and haven't been able to get reliable results to drive me to use it more...which leads me to believe we have core implementation related issues.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
