Anaplan Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 8.5 out of 10

Score

8.5 out of 10

Community insights

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.

Reviews

356 Reviews

Anaplan - Data Crunching

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 8, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is now our primary forecasting tool. We use it to forecast different flavors of our P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash flow. We use it to do our workforce planning as well as a bottoms up revenue and billings forecast. We are using the system to report as well. We take the information out of Anaplan and send it to users who do not have access to the system.

Pros

The data crunching is very powerful. I have never worked in a system that can crunch data this well.
The tools it provides to accomplish what you need are very strong. I like the flexibility.
Live updating of numbers is very nice.

Cons

The text editor for writing formulas is terrible. I write all of my formulas in notepad ++. I shouldn't have to work outside the system to engineering the system. Please allow me to indent if statements, and provide more context into formulas. This needs massive improvement and makes working in the system incredibly clumsy.
The documentation on formulas isn't great.
Formatting is very limited in the system.
Dashboard text boxes need more options. Being able to input width and height numbers to control the size would be very helpful.
Creating a better way to organize your lists and modules would be incredibly helpful.
Creating revenue waterfalls and billing cycles in the system is very difficult.

Likelihood to Recommend

Any sort of data crunch is great in Anaplan. Learning the system if you aren't very technical is very hard.

Garrett Womack

Finance Analyst in Finance and Accounting at Lithium Technologies (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile

New to Anaplan

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 8, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We're currently implementing Anaplan as our budgeting and forecasting tool for FP&A. It's helping to make our forecasting process more robust than the previous system we had.

Pros

The flexibility the system allows is really great. It's been helpful to be able to design a system that fits our needs and not have to have workarounds in order to make our process fit into a system.
You can maintain the system within your team and don't need IT or someone with a technical skill set to be the system admin.
It's a tool that can be used in other areas of the business. I see a future for fully integrating the companywide analysis we do.

Cons

Reporting, Reporting, Reporting!! I feel like this is a very big weakness in Anaplan.
Being able to highlight several cells and then being able to see the sum or average etc.
Being able to group rows or columns so that you can expand or not instead of just hiding rows or columns.
Formatting isn't great within Anaplan so adding more of those options/capabilities [would be good].
Creating a native ETL tool.
Improvements on error message when formulas aren't correct. More flexibility in formula text editor.

Likelihood to Recommend

I would say it would depend on the size and complexity of what the company is trying to do.

Tiffany Chu

Director, Corporate FP&A in Finance and Accounting at Lithium Technologies (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

View profile

New User Review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 8, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our initial use case for Anaplan was to use it for our annual budgeting cycle. This involves nearly 100 users across our organization. It will save us a ton of time to complete a budget cycle as well as allow us to re-forecast quarterly once we are fully up and running. We have 3 model builders who are in Anaplan daily.

Pros

Processes data very well. We have millions of transactions that Anaplan can provide analysis for extremely quickly. Excel could not manage the process.
Easy to set security permissions based on role. This allows us to create one template and send to 50 business leaders who all manage different aspects of the business.
Dynamic dashboards so individuals can pivot and look at data they want to see.

Cons

Formatting. Formatting is awful when compared to Excel and limits wanted reporting.
Complex integrations require time. No one seems to truly be an expert at Anaplan. Trial and error is a must to learn the system.

Likelihood to Recommend

We are still under a year with Anaplan so I expect us to grow as well as Anaplan. I am still glad we went with Anaplan but wish we had allowed more initial time to learn the system. Our adoption of the language and understanding of Anaplan is taking longer than we expected.

Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Anaplan Consolidations

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 5, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Anaplan for our worldwide consolidation, forecasting and variance analysis.

Pros

Pivot tables allow users to customize the way they see data.
Easy drill down capabilities for variance investigation.

Cons

Formatting of output and linking to Excel could be stronger. We need to do a lot of reformatting after we export to Excel.

Likelihood to Recommend

Translation of foreign entities and consolidation works quite well.

Gary Robisch

Director of Treasury, Tax and Audit in Finance and Accounting at Vasco Data Security (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Anaplan Review

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

May 5, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is being used for Opex modeling across the company. It helps with the cost center budget and forecast. It is user-friendly [self-service] for users.

Pros

Opex Modeling
User interface
Self-served dashboard

Cons

Security - for example, you have to be a model admin in order to make changes to the dashboard.
Limited reporting capacity and functionality in Anaplan.
Anaplan data extract to Excel and Excel add-in has no format control.
Lack of format control on the dashboard. For example: favorable/unfavorable cannot be formatted on dashboard.
Versions limitation in Anaplan - Adding Version (aka Scenario) to the model will increase the space significantly.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Director in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Anaplan for Organizational Insight

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 5, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Anaplan is used by our finance department and investment deal team. It helps give us visibility about our portfolio and our financial performance. It gives us the ability to see high-level overviews, but also drill down into specifics and do deep analysis.

Pros

Robust tool that allows for many different types of analysis
Cross-departmental/functional visibility
Easy to use

Cons

Sales process is very involved and has a lot of touch
High price point
Takes a while to fully implement

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan is great for large teams that need visibility across many functions. Executives/high level managers love it because it gives them insight into how the organization is performing. It is less suited for small teams -- they are better suited to use more lightweight and less expensive tools.

Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Anaplan Functionality and Optimum Uses

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 4, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are currently using Anaplan exclusively in the finance organization. It was initially built to be a budget tool but has since shifted to help with childcare labor alignment and pricing tools. We're exploring the opportunity to use Anaplan as a reporting tool to help with company realignments and movements. Other departments are interested in getting into Anaplan for their own tools and processes.

Pros

The amount of users that can be in Anaplan and making changes is HUGE. It's great being able to walk end users through the process and then immediately let them explore and check their understanding.
Real time changes. Being able to make a change and instantly see the impact, even across several complex modules, helped immensely during the budget build. Making changes and being able to immediately tweak them, cut our build time and made the budget more accurate.
Reduced blackbox budget calculations. This goes hand in hand with real time changes. We were able to walk our end users from start to finish through the process and show how changes in one section impact the final product. Even if the users didn't know the exact process they could see the impact from one input box to the next.

Cons

The most challenging part of Anaplan was getting over its steep learning curve. It was very challenging to adjust logic from the excel language to Anaplan's language. Unfortunately it seems to be a necessary evil to really understand and use the tool.
Unhelpful error messages. The error messages rarely help diagnosing the problem at hand. Better explanation on error messages could help significantly.
Lack of formula formatting. This is not a con by itself but a huge opportunity going forward. Being able to add additional, even redundant, brackets would help itemizing formula logic.

Likelihood to Recommend

Anecdotally Anaplan seemed to be best suited for planning. Any process that needs to collect and/or consolidate information from a large number of data sources would use Anaplan to its strengths. The more data the better.

Using Anaplan to track simple calculations or small data sets wouldn't being using the tool to its strengths. Anything that can easily be build in Excel probably should be.

Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Seagate Anaplan Review

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 4, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The corp FP&A team is using it for financial budgets. The revenue planning team is using it for revenue planning. One of our units is using it for demand planning. The customer service org is using it for returns modeling. It's primarily a finance footprint but that footprint is growing outside finance.

Pros

Hyperbloc architecture -- the ability to see changes to models instantly cascade through all the models.
Function agnostic platform - the ability to adapt the platform to many different use cases and integrate those use cases into a connected planning environment.
Cloud architecture. Security and product enhancements come automatically.

Cons

The actions could be improved - make it obvious what the sources and targets of the are so we don't have to guess or put them in the action names. Also get a native scheduler! That's so simple and it's very frustrating and expensive to have to build/buy our own.
Reporting and UI still have a long way to go. Simple things like being able to alphabetize/order what you see on the screen, or add a rich color pallet to choose from.
User access management could improve. We need to have model level admins that don't have access to everything in the workspace. Also the tenant admin space doesn't work effectively. I can't remove a user from all models simultaneously. I also can't see all models a user has access to from the tenant admin space.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's great for complex models that require frequent updates and instant feedback. That describes most planning situations I know of. It's great for organizations that want to change plans and models independent of IT support or programming. It's not a great reporting or analytics tool. Ad-hoc analysis is a non-starter in the platform--you have to be a model builder and the process of generating a report is very cumbersome compared with something like Tableau.

Christopher Pope

Manager in Finance and Accounting at Seagate Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Generic Anaplan review

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 4, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as an FP&A tool in the finance department.

Pros

Easy collaboration on building models at the same time
One place to go for reporting of actuals
Easy to change the names across all the models

Cons

Missing Functionality - Multi-select filters. Currently there is only a single selection from a drop down list. Creating multi-select requires over-complication of the logic.

Likelihood to Recommend

Works well if there is an Excel based working model. It easier to load data in Anaplan knowing what you want to see in the end. It works for the data that is organized in a table format.

Not sure about specific scenarios when Anaplan does not work well, as I am only starting to use it.

Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Ana-planed it

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 4, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it with FP&A and consolidations. We had some issues with the speed of Anaplan and space was becoming an issue, but we've worked that out and are trying to get the most out of Anaplan. We continue to evolve, and we hope to really take full advantage of all aspects of Anaplan.

Pros

Pivot table to get different views on the fly.
Quick changes in the system allow our fast pace world to exist in systems.
Calculations are very fast and much better than Excel in terms of complexity.

Cons

Definitely, the outages on the weekends sometimes hamper our ability at times to do things in our model.
Possibly offer some more space for sandbox ability.
Get rid of the Blue Box that says someone is making changes in the system.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Anaplan Functionality and Optimum Uses

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 4, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

The amount of users that can be in Anaplan and making changes is HUGE. It's great being able to walk end users through the process and then immediately let them explore and check their understanding.
Real time changes. Being able to make a change and instantly see the impact, even across several complex modules, helped immensely during the budget build. Making changes and being able to immediately tweak them, cut our build time and made the budget more accurate.
Reduced blackbox budget calculations. This goes hand in hand with real time changes. We were able to walk our end users from start to finish through the process and show how changes in one section impact the final product. Even if the users didn't know the exact process they could see the impact from one input box to the next.

Cons

The most challenging part of Anaplan was getting over its steep learning curve. It was very challenging to adjust logic from the excel language to Anaplan's language. Unfortunately it seems to be a necessary evil to really understand and use the tool.
Unhelpful error messages. The error messages rarely help diagnosing the problem at hand. Better explanation on error messages could help significantly.
Lack of formula formatting. This is not a con by itself but a huge opportunity going forward. Being able to add additional, even redundant, brackets would help itemizing formula logic.

Likelihood to Recommend

Using Anaplan to track simple calculations or small data sets wouldn't being using the tool to its strengths. Anything that can easily be build in Excel probably should be.

Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience