TrustRadius Insights for Anaplan are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Highly scalable and flexible data integration and modeling capabilities: Reviewers have praised the Anaplan platform for its highly scalable and flexible data integration and modeling capabilities, allowing for easy evolution from simple calculations to complex formulas. Many users have highlighted this as a major strength of the platform.
Real-time data capabilities enabling informed decision-making: The real-time data capabilities of Anaplan have been widely praised by reviewers for enabling informed decision-making based on up-to-date information. Several users have mentioned that this feature has greatly contributed to their ability to make agile decisions in a fast-paced business environment.
User-friendly interface contributing to high end user adoption: The user-friendly interface of Anaplan has been consistently highlighted by reviewers as a key strength of the platform. Users appreciate the intuitive design, which resembles Excel and allows for quick task completion. This ease of use has contributed to high end user adoption and overall positive feedback from customers.
We use it internally for our forecasting & budgeting and we implement it for our clients for a wide range of use-cases, including supply chain, TPM, FP&A, consolidation, pricing, and more, across all industries.
Pros
Collaboration
Forecasting
Flexibility
Scenarios/what-if
Cons
The flexibility can be a risk (and a strength)
Likelihood to Recommend
Anything finance/FP&A and supply chain. Forecasting and optimization problems are solved very well using Anaplan, as well as use-cases that require a lot of users to work concurrently and/or collaborate on the same data.
We use Anaplan for a variety of use cases such as Headcount & Expense planning, revenue planning & have future use cases coming. Anaplan solves overall problem of moving business onto a central planning tool
Pros
Real Time Calulcations
Collaborative Platform
Enterprise Technology that Can Scale
Cons
AI capabilities
MAnagement Reporting
Excel Add-In
Likelihood to Recommend
Anaplan is excellent for large complex organizations since the tool can scale and is a business friendly technology that can handle complex dynamic use cases
VU
Verified User
Paraprofessional in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees)
My company uses Anaplan to achieve accurate workforce planning and forecasting. As a consultancy, we need to be able to plan for both current and future projects with the ability to move around resources with different skill sets and be adaptable when project extend or end early. This is not only important for staffing, but for also achieving and accurate financial forecast for our company. The flexibility of Anaplan allows our planning to be adaptable and accurate.
Pros
Flexibility: Any business case can be tackled in the tool (FPA, SPM, WFP)
Adaptability: You can align to changing business needs
Reporting: Different audiences (Exec board vs. boots on the ground planners) can get the reports they need
Cons
Long time to setup: When building from scratch, there is a learning curve
Sharing data between models can be difficult, even with ADO
Hierarchy structure needs clean data and can be very rigid
Likelihood to Recommend
I've implemented a number of projects for Anaplan for Sales Performance Management use cases. It is obviously built for financial planning, but it allows for a lot of flexibility for territory and quota, ICM, sales forecasting, and other important use cases. Territory and Quota is very powerful in the tool as it organize complex assignment structures into hierarchies for easier analysis and reporting.
Real time collaboration to improve data driven baseline forecast
real time calculation of suggested Replenishment Orders
Cons
Data visualisation is good but there is room for improvement
workspace data allowance is limited to 130gb and is easy to reach
model opening time and frozen time when an erroneous formula is entered
Likelihood to Recommend
Anaplan is great for modelling customised planning process that truly fir the business requirements. Is great for financial planning or demand planning, real time scenario planning, and bottom up planning with automatic data aggregations. Anaplan is a powerful in-memory real-time calculation engine, so it is advisable to load in Anaplan only the data that is truly necessary for the plan and avoid using it as data warehouse.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Professional Services (201-500 employees)
Our organization leverages Anaplan as the primary platform for all Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) functions.
Pros
Flexibility and User-Driven Modeling
Enterprise-Wide Connected Planning
Real-Time Scenario Modeling
Cons
Steep Learning Curve and the Need for Specialized Governance
Performance Constraints and Data Volume Management
Reporting and Visualization Capabilities
Likelihood to Recommend
Integrated Business Planning (IBP)Organizations needing to link Sales Forecasting directly to Supply Chain Capacity and Financial Outcomes (P&L/Balance Sheet).
Driver-Based Planning & BudgetingCompanies that budget based on operational metrics (drivers) rather than historical spending, such as number of salespeople, customer churn rate, or production hours.
VU
Verified User
Program Manager in Corporate (5001-10,000 employees)
We are implementing Anaplan to our customers. Most of the customers usually still rely on excels to do their planning, which there are a lot of silos due to the limitation of excels and computing power of local machine. Anaplan is an excellent platform to help company to streamline planning process in a specific function (e.g. Finance, Supply Chain, HR) by removing silos and providing real-time calculations. Also it enables organization to achieve connected planning in an organization by linking models in different function together on the same platform.
Pros
Financial Planning & Analysis
Flexible architecture in Anaplan enables users to plan at a higher granularity
Supply Chain Planning
Time dimensions allows statistical forecasting can be easily implemented
Staff Cost Planning
No rigid structure in the platform allows organization to define the planning hierarchy that fit the organization perfectly
Cons
Reporting capability
Would be great if there is an option to include properties of dimension into report
Need significant effort on handling of sparsity with concatenating dimensions
More flexible on conditional formatting, allow to configure the conditions with formula instead of a rigid line item
Likelihood to Recommend
I had an implementation on sales planning scenario in a large enterprise selling spirits in China. They have chosen Anaplan as the planning platform to replace the planning process in excel. In order to do budgeting / forecasting on sales, they have to pull all the existing sales contracts from their CRM system and project the sales based on contracts conditions, also planning renewal of the contract.
In the past, excel couldn't handle the large amount of data, where there are more than millions of contracts.
However, Anaplan is an excellent tool for them, thanks to the hyper-block technology, enabling them to perform real-time calculation on top of millions of transaction records.
They can now perform budgeting / forecasting at a more granular level in the past, thus increasing the forecast accuracy in the company.
We use Anaplan for Financial Planning and Forecasting, which includes 3 Statement Modeling, Workforce Planning, Tax Modeling and Cash Forecasting
Pros
Dynamic Financial Modeling & Forecasting
Scenario Analysis with What-if Capabilities
Real-time Collaboration
Cons
Visualization & Reporting Tools
Native Integration support
Lack of Template and Solution Marketplace
Likelihood to Recommend
Anaplan is well suited for enterprise-wide Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) by enabling real-time aggregation of budgets and forecasts from multiple business units and allowing real time scenario modeling for fast executive decision-making. Its collaborative features allow many stakeholders to contribute simultaneously, while built-in audit trails and granular permissions ensure transparency and compliance. Automated integrations with source systems keep data up-to-date, eliminating manual errors, allowing finance teams and executives to analyze financial impacts and streamline reporting processes.
We use Anaplan for Financial Planning. We are try to do the financial transformation within our organization using Anaplan. Anaplan is helping us standardize our financial reports by brining all the markets under a single screen that was earlier spread out to multiple excel sheets and every excel sheet had their own logic.
Pros
Financial consolidation
Financial Planning
customizing the logic as per the organizations need
Cons
Integration with other tools
Reporting
AI
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Anaplan is best suited for Financial planning. It is very good is financial reporting and consolidation. Anaplan is also good in Territory and Quota planning . However, in my experience, Anaplan is not very good in designing complex Supply chain planning. It can handle basic Supply chain operations planning and S&OP planning. But if we have to do the route optimization then Anaplan is not very good.
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)
We plan our sales performance and territory management with Anaplan. It has been great and suits our use-case well. We dynamically manage territories and Anaplan has improved our productivity by mostly eliminating our manual workload. We also track the territory potential in a certain market and business, and manage the workload of the reps associated with the territory. We do headcount planning so the coverage is adequate and ROI is maintained. We segment and prioritize accounts based on certain drivers. The sales cycle, which used to take months, has been reduced typically to days. The time to value is great, and they are making a lot of improvements to the product roadmap which we are looking forward to.
Pros
Scalability and flexibility are the cornerstone features of the product, which eliminate the errors associated with Excel based approaches
The calculation engine Hyperblock which processes large amounts of data in the cloud, is the foundation that powers the tool. The ability to customize for any type of planning be it sales, finance, supply chain, headcount etc helps in exploiting synergies of different orgs.
The new features like combined grids, ADO (Anaplan Data Orchestrator), geo-mapping etc will enhance an already great product and make it a serious competitor in the market.
Great product support backed by a large community of experts
Cons
More AI features are required for the increasingly competitive industry. The product roadmap is already focusing on it
The tool is costly and the pricing definitely needs to be standardized and made transparent for all customers.
The integration ability with other systems should be made easily. ADO is definitely a game-changer but it needs to be bi-directional.
Geo-mapping like features should be brought in to enhance the experience to end user, focus should be on UX and reporting which already works great but has a lot of scope to improve.
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend it for any type of planning like Sales, territory management, setting quotas, financial planning and consolidation, supply chain and workforce management. It should not be used for ETL purposes although it could handle some transformation. Integration capabilities need to be enhanced further. ADO solves some of it but it is new and needs to be bi-directional.
Anaplan is used mainly for Demand Planning and IFRS 16. Problem that Anaplan addresses is the complexity and volume of handling the demand planning in a global company. Anaplan allows demand managers to gather and create the demand forecast on a product level. Demand is then used in financial planning as well as manufacturing planning.
Pros
Large amount of data
Flexibility when changes are needed in the forecasting process
Flexibility in a way that it can be used to address different methods of forecasting demand
Cons
This could be fixed by a skilled developer and collaboration with end users. Not particularly a platform problem but nevertheless it is very common that the end user dashboards are not good
Model size is always a problem when working with large data sets. The limit in model size limits what can be done in the model
Although Anaplan is flexible, in reality it´s very time consuming to change certain things in the model (for example hierarchy level removal)
Likelihood to Recommend
Very suitable for any forecast process that is complex, industry/company specific and requires a lot of data. Especially good for Financial Planning, Sales Performance Management and Demand Planning. Anaplan really shines when you have all the mentioned things and you combine those to create a comprehensive planning solution. Anaplan has a lot of reporting functionalities but I would still use other tools for reporting (PowerBI for example).
VU
Verified User
Consultant in Professional Services (1001-5000 employees)
