Planful vs. Workday Adaptive Planning

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Planful
Score 8.5 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.N/A
Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 8.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.N/A
Pricing
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
Considered Both Products
Planful
Chose Planful
Planful was a more cost effective approach vs our previous platform (Adaptive) and is able to be managed fully within the FP&A team (no IT resources or outside consultants post-implementation)
Chose Planful
We felt the platform was more user-friendly and had better functionality for our purposes. Since we already had Planful instance within our company, we already had in-house expertise on the Planful system, which gave us some consistency in tools.
Chose Planful
Planful seems to have the best price to performance option against the tools listed. Some of the more premium options on the market have outdated UIs and dont get updated as frequently and other in the same price category dont seem to have the same level of options and "ease" …
Chose Planful
Ease of use, integrations, price, and excel compatibility were the driving factors behind getting off of Adaptive and selecting Planful over these other competitors
Chose Planful
Planful is lightyears better than Adaptive in the way it allows you to customize and do things on your own. It doesn't use it's own formula language so it's very intuitive for average Excel users.
Chose Planful
Very similar; Planful looks cleaner, Adaptive seems less painful.
Chose Planful
Planful (formerly Host Analytics) can be quick to implement and does not require an army to administer. It's multi-dimensional technology also allows for a lot more flexibility in it's design and use. It's reporting suite is the most intuitive that I have seen in the industry. …
Chose Planful
We selected Host Analytics due to (i) strong out of the box feature set, (ii) best excel integration among cloud tools, (iii) no model size limit, (iv) simple pricing, (v) solid customer references
Chose Planful
Overall we thought that Host fit our company better than Adaptive. We thought the tools that it had to offer were better. In addition, we liked the sales pitch better than Adaptive.
Chose Planful
Vena was a close second in our selection process. We liked the smaller price tag and faster start up time. It s use of Excel was attractive. However, we did not feel that it would be able to grow with us. It was only good for the short run.
Adaptive had some good features. …
Chose Planful
Being a small company with limited cash flow, my goal was to evaluate what functions that are important and how much that we have to pay for them and last how easy it is to maintain without owning internal IT staff. I have evaluated Hyperion, Adaptive, Vena, and Host. …
Chose Planful
Host Analytics was more robust than Adaptive Planning. Since it is built around Excel, our users did not have to learn a new "language" as they would have with Prophix and it is more nimble and easier to support than SAP.
Chose Planful
Cheaper than Hyperion and a better platform that the other cloud systems. We also looked at some Excel based budgeting systems but they all fell well short of our requirements.
Chose Planful
I was not part of the selection committee. I can comment that it was compared against Adaptive Planning and Cognos.
Chose Planful

I know we narrowed our choices to three software products, but it was about 18 months ago, so I don't remember who the other twp were.

We had been using Adaptive Insights, and that was the software we replaced. For us, as a grant based organization, the structure was too rigid, …

Chose Planful

Host user interface was more "user friendly" so we felt it would be easier to train our users and they would actually use the system, especially as compared to SAP business Objects.

Host is cloud based, Prophix was not.

Host Functionality as compared to Adaptive we felt was better.

Chose Planful
We demoed Adaptive Insights about a year ago and at that time it seemed Host Analytics was slicker and easier to use than Adaptive. However, in a recent release of Adaptive Insights, the software has jumped well ahead of Host in UX. I have not seen Adaptive's day to day …
Workday Adaptive Planning
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive seemed to be the most user-friendly, easy to implement, and cost-effective solution.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
My decision came down to Adaptive vs Host Analytics. Host made the claim that because their sheets were just like excel, you wouldn't need to learn any new commands. Rather, I thought that was a downside. I didn't want another glorified version of excel, I was looking for …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I prefer Adaptive Planning in comparison to Planful and Data Rails. It feels like is has been easier to use with a quicker learning curve. The other systems were more intimidating for the nonfinance users, like the budget owners who would only need it for reporting or inputting …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
All of the systems have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Workday Adaptive Planning as a system is further along in overall functionality and is a more user-friendly system compared to other EPM systems on the market.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive is much more flexible and powerful for our needs. It provides a wealth of reporting tools and capabilities that Cognos simply didn't or couldn't provide. The ability to have a team of one completely implement and manage the solution for a company is not unreasonable …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Insights is well-positioned against the new tier of SaaS players as well as the larger, legacy, on-premise financial planning solutions such as Hyperion and IBM Cognos TM1. Its got an approachable user interface and relatively easy to use models and forecast …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
When we were evaluating the software solutions we wanted:
1) A product that would efficiently consolidate our annual budget.
2) Something that would be easily adopted by the entire company.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive provided the best solution for the price given how we wanted to deploy the solution. For our size business they appear to the be best in class solution. Host Analytics appeared to provide the same functionality, but was for a more distributed budgeting and …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
To be honest - Host Analytics seemed relatively similar to Adaptive. However, Adaptive was our number one choice because:

- The Adaptive suite looked a lot better. It seemed smarter and "sharper" and the data visualisation was better.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
We look hard at Host Analytics and softly at Longview and Prophix. Adaptive's advantages was ease of use, offered a full solution and pricing. We wanted to roll this out to the entire organization and felt Adaptive met those needs best and could grow with the company.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive has a much better interface and usability compared to all these systems. It is also less complex, easy to configure and install, and easy to teach. Adaptive is more affordable, both short and long term.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Suite gave us what we needed and fit our use case perfectly. We did short list Host Analytics and they were neck and neck with Adaptive and it was a win/win for us and we would have been successful with either tool. My familiarity with Adaptive, the simplicity of …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Way easier to use
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
We had meetings with several industry leaders and Adaptive was our choice in the end. We liked IBM and also liked Host Analytics for different reasons. In the end it was the combination of cloud, Excel add-in, Office Connect, Discovery, and cost that would ultimately end up …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
We evaluated Host along with Adaptive, and chose Adaptive. We felt Adaptive was a better solution for our needs, which was primarily forecasting, and we thought Adaptive better handled our significant dimensionality all while maintaining a more user friendly interface. Our …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive was more flexible, able to be maintained without heavy IT involvement, cost effective, had no additional hardware requirements, and since it is a cloud platform, updates are automatic.
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning

Cognos - capabilities are very similar. Cognos does allow a "push-down" (e.g. current rollup of Outside Services is $600k, enter $1mm at the highest level and the additional $400k is spread to the lowest level based on the existing spread).

We also looked at A3 Solutions, Budget …

Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I've implemented Host Analytics at a previous company. We performed an extensive vendor selection process and Adaptive Insights came out on top. Adaptive Insights allowing us to use a demo helped prove the functionality of the software. Since we've started implementation there …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I have used Oracle, Host Analytics, and Axiom. Adaptive Planning is far and away superior to Host Analytics on every stand point. Adaptive Planning is a much easier version to use over Oracle and Axiom on a budgeting and planning only standpoint. When we chose Adaptive we only …
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Host Analytics which we also reviewed in-depth (saw demos, had department heads and users to sit in on demos, talked to vendor supplied references with both companies, asked same list of standard questions) Adaptive planning was:
Top Pros
Top Cons
TrustRadius Insights
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
Highlights

TrustRadius
Research Team Insight
Published

Planful, formerly Host Analytics, and Workday Adaptive Planning are both Corporate Performance Management software with strong focuses on budgeting and financial management. While the products historically catered to slightly different markets, they have become more directly comparable in recent years. 

Planful serves midsize companies and enterprises, and is designed with scalability across that size range in mind. Historically, Adaptive Planning, formerly Adaptive Insights, catered more to growing midsize companies that had outscaled Excel-based financial processes. However, with Workday’s acquisition of the platform, Adaptive Planning has been expanding into the enterprise market more heavily as well. 

Features

Planful and Workday Adaptive Insights both offer robust CPM features for scaling organizations. 

Planful stands out for its easy deployment and prebuilt capabilities. Reviewers highlight the platform’s out-of-the-box feature set that does not rely on heavy customization. Planful also adjusts well to mid-flight dynamic budgeting. This capability gives large organizations and enterprises more financial maneuverability. 

Workday excels in its relative user-friendliness, especially among professionals that are not used to working in CPM tools. For instance, reviewers frequently highlight Adaptive Planning’s Office Connect capability, which allows users more versed in Excel-based corporate performance management to more easily transition to the Workday platform. The user interface is also more friendly and accessible for users. 

Limitations

There also some limitations or drawbacks to Planful and Workday Adaptive Insights worth evaluating. 

Planful has been criticized for its reporting and data visualizations. While dynamic budgeting is well supported, Planful lacks equivalent dynamic and customizable reporting features. Reviewers frequently describe using 3rd party visualization tools in conjunction with Planful. 

Workday also struggles some with reporting flexibility. Reviewers specifically criticize the web-based reporting functionality, which does not feel on par with the Office Connect-enabled reporting abilities. The processes and functions in Office Connect are also not identical to Excel, which requires some lingering learning curve when transitioning to the platform. 

Pricing

Planful pricing is available by quote from the vendor. 

Workday Adaptive Planning offers two packages, each priced by quote from the vendor. The Standard package includes all the core features and capabilities, while the Enterprise package adds on unlimited storage, additional automation, and sandboxing. Workday also offers 3 license types, a Full Seat, or admins, which cost the most, Contributors, which are standard users, and Viewers, which can access data but not make changes. 

Features
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.8
32 Ratings
3% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.3
1 Ratings
14% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.414 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Customizable dashboards7.428 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.626 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.9
59 Ratings
5% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
4% below category average
Drill-down analysis8.657 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.258 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration7.854 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.5
47 Ratings
9% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
2% below category average
Publish to Web7.112 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF7.843 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Versioning6.027 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling9.230 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Planful
6.3
22 Ratings
19% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
7.7
1 Ratings
1% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)6.215 Ratings7.01 Ratings
Predictive Analytics6.518 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Planful
9.1
58 Ratings
4% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.0
1 Ratings
3% above category average
Multi-User Support (named login)9.652 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.950 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.951 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control8.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.943 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.4
25 Ratings
8% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.5
1 Ratings
6% above category average
Responsive Design for Web Access7.423 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile7.515 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Mobile Application00 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting
Comparison of Budgeting, Planning, and Forecasting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
8.7
106 Ratings
4% above category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.7
174 Ratings
4% above category average
Long-term financial planning8.793 Ratings8.5160 Ratings
Financial budgeting9.0105 Ratings9.0171 Ratings
Forecasting8.798 Ratings8.7166 Ratings
Scenario modeling8.085 Ratings8.9157 Ratings
Management reporting9.1102 Ratings8.4171 Ratings
Consolidation and Close
Comparison of Consolidation and Close features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.6
79 Ratings
6% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
7.6
140 Ratings
6% below category average
Financial data consolidation9.671 Ratings7.8105 Ratings
Journal entries and reports8.454 Ratings7.967 Ratings
Multi-currency management8.047 Ratings6.880 Ratings
Intercompany Eliminations7.646 Ratings7.659 Ratings
Minority Ownership4.523 Ratings7.935 Ratings
Local and consolidated reporting7.557 Ratings8.593 Ratings
Detailed Audit Trails7.856 Ratings6.9116 Ratings
Financial Reporting and Compliance
Comparison of Financial Reporting and Compliance features of Product A and Product B
Planful
8.1
106 Ratings
2% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.5
162 Ratings
3% above category average
Financial Statement Reporting8.589 Ratings8.7143 Ratings
Management Reporting9.199 Ratings8.5157 Ratings
Excel-based Reporting8.398 Ratings8.1156 Ratings
Automated board and financial reporting7.672 Ratings8.6135 Ratings
XBRL support for regulatory filing7.13 Ratings8.625 Ratings
Analytics and Reporting
Comparison of Analytics and Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.2
61 Ratings
11% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
7.7
132 Ratings
4% below category average
Personalized dashboards7.553 Ratings7.1114 Ratings
Color-coded scorecards7.231 Ratings7.394 Ratings
KPIs8.540 Ratings8.1107 Ratings
Cost and profitability analysis9.441 Ratings7.6111 Ratings
Key Performance Indicator setting7.431 Ratings7.995 Ratings
Benchmarking with external data3.18 Ratings8.366 Ratings
Integration
Comparison of Integration features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.8
97 Ratings
7% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.3
152 Ratings
0% below category average
Flat file integration9.669 Ratings8.8118 Ratings
Excel data integration7.789 Ratings8.1146 Ratings
Direct links to 3rd-party data sources5.964 Ratings8.1112 Ratings
Best Alternatives
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
Small Businesses
IBM Planning Analytics
IBM Planning Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
IBM Planning Analytics
IBM Planning Analytics
Score 8.4 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Centage
Centage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Centage
Centage
Score 9.6 out of 10
Enterprises
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Score 8.2 out of 10
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
Score 8.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
Likelihood to Recommend
8.7
(115 ratings)
8.9
(203 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(18 ratings)
7.7
(43 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(17 ratings)
9.0
(109 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(4 ratings)
7.3
(11 ratings)
Performance
7.7
(2 ratings)
9.1
(5 ratings)
Support Rating
7.8
(18 ratings)
8.1
(33 ratings)
In-Person Training
6.4
(2 ratings)
8.2
(2 ratings)
Online Training
8.2
(1 ratings)
7.3
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
2.3
(7 ratings)
9.4
(27 ratings)
Configurability
8.2
(2 ratings)
8.2
(5 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
7.3
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.5
(1 ratings)
8.2
(8 ratings)
Product Scalability
8.2
(2 ratings)
8.6
(12 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
8.2
(1 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
7.8
(3 ratings)
8.2
(4 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
6.4
(4 ratings)
User Testimonials
PlanfulWorkday Adaptive Planning
Likelihood to Recommend
Planful
Planful makes it very easy to roll forward forecasts and conduct scenario analyses. I'm also a big fan of their reporting and how easy it is to distribute a report burst to satisfy all the needs and questions of our SLT. Lastly, their latest developments in the AI space make it easy to quickly identify outlier projections.
Read full review
Workday
Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.
Read full review
Pros
Planful
  • Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
  • Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
  • Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅
Read full review
Workday
  • It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
  • It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
  • It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Read full review
Cons
Planful
  • Multiple currency calculations/ consolidations support IFRS accounting
  • Ability to inactivate old data dimensions
  • Reporting - Need ability to expand all/collapse all lines easily
  • Reporting - Formula exceptions added to a report do not update when information is revised.
  • Automatic Sandbox refreshes initiated by Planful - When Planful does an automatic refresh of the sandbox environment, it copies any Boomi/integration connections.
  • Limited to 8 data dimensions in core application
  • Add more API connectors to make data integration easier
  • ability to transfer sandbox tests to production environment
Read full review
Workday
  • Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
  • Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
  • List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Planful
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.
Read full review
Workday
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
Read full review
Usability
Planful
Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed
Read full review
Workday
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Planful
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.
Read full review
Workday
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
Read full review
Performance
Planful
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.
Read full review
Workday
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
Read full review
Support Rating
Planful
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
Read full review
Workday
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
Read full review
In-Person Training
Planful
We got little training on the tool after implementation. Did a lot of "trial by fire" learning about Planful. I don't think RSM really provided us all the details we needed to understand the tool and to know what we needed to train on. I don't know we knew enough about the tool to even ask the right questions and then they left and we used Planful support a lot.
Read full review
Workday
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
Read full review
Online Training
Planful
A few years ago I participated in a lot of their online learning. Their references have grown over the years and continue to get better and better. We use it throughout the year to update the information we hold internally for documentation and to educate ourselves on all of the new release notes and features within Planful.
Read full review
Workday
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Planful
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.
Read full review
Workday
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Planful
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. When using a platform for financial planning and budgeting, the details are critical and the ability to match the GL structure and pull full P&L data has been a big improvement from Qlik, which we used previously.
Read full review
Workday
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Planful
No answers on this topic
Workday
Good read only seat access
Read full review
Scalability
Planful
I give this rating simply because I have first-hand knowledge of the scalability of Planful when working across departments in our company that use different financial systems. We have one team on InEight and another using SAP. When we implemented it, we only customized the system to accommodate one of these financial platforms, but when we considered expanding the use of Planful to other departments, we were able to make the necessary adjustments to accommodate our needs.
Read full review
Workday
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
Read full review
Professional Services
Planful
No answers on this topic
Workday
This is now available in house at Workday which is convenient.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Planful
  • We have saved a large amount of time on reports that we previously manually compiled in Excel via MS Dynamics. Planful was linked to Dynamics through automatically scheduled DLR's, reports were created, and now our manual processes are as simple as accessing and refreshing a report.
  • Dashboards have improved our budgeting process specifically with our production leaders as they can visualize their P&L's, their current actuals, current budget, and see where they are forecasting with their proposed budget for the next year
  • With the use of templates, structured planning, and the Simulation Engine, it has added a lot of value and automation to our annual budget process, allowing for plug-and-play type data loading and viewing various scenarios easily
Read full review
Workday
  • Adaptive Insights has had a positive impact on organizational expansion. With our break-even analysis we have created, what would once take place in a notebook or Excel, we have created templates and can run a conservative estimate on revenue and costs quite quickly. We have cut back on research and time on expansion by months this way, to mere hours.
  • One negative impact is the costs with implementing connections between our other ERP systems with Adaptive Insights. Currently, we would like to have near real-time data, but cannot due to the costs. Currently, I am tasked with uploading from multiple systems and this can be time consuming, especially during a close.
  • Overall, positively we have had an excellent experience. The ease of the functionality and the easy learning curve have enabled everyone on my team to have an enjoyable experience.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Planful Screenshots

Screenshot of Planful Planform DashboardScreenshot of Planful for FinanceScreenshot of Planful for MarketingScreenshot of ReportsScreenshot of Capacity Planning TemplateScreenshot of Integrations

Workday Adaptive Planning Screenshots

Screenshot of Adaptive Planning balance sheets.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning expense variance analysis report.Screenshot of Adaptive Discovery visuals with drill-down capabilities.Screenshot of Adaptive Planning in-sheet visualizations (waterfall chart)Screenshot of Sparklines are used to visualize trends and make adjustments visually