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

Love Anaplan

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use anaplan in our FP&A department and my team uses it for quota planning and territory management. Quotas are managed for over 350 sales people across the country.

Pros

anaplan is incredibly flexible
anaplan is really easy to use even for an untrained outsider
anaplan is easy to integrate with other systems like Salesforce

Cons

I would love to have more training on chart and dashboard building in order to look at trending analysis.
I don't own my company's anaplan agreement so I don't have a lot of control over what else I can do.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is great for revenue forecasting and management of quotas.

Verified User

Strategist in Sales (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Anaplan - Rigid, Clunky, Terrible UI, Missing Functionality

Rating: 1 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently have Anaplan for the purpose of managing territories, account deployment, and quota planning. That means that we are using the product exclusively within sales operations. The business problem that it is attempting to solve is that there are lots of potential accounts that a rep can work on, and it is difficult to prioritize and balance the accounts by the rep's level or tier; as a result, we need to assess the aggregate value of books by rep, team, and region.

Pros

It's fast
What-if scenarios

Cons

Rigid
Expensive for being Excel in a straight jacket
Formula Syntax is unnecessarily complicated
Limited sorting or filtering capability
You can't change or choose the colors your charts use

Likelihood to Recommend

Based on my knowledge, Anaplan is best suited for FP&A. I can't speak to how well that works as that is not our use case. However, I have seen a far better response by those using the tool for FP&A.

The tool has the potential to work for Territory & Quota planning; similar to how you would use a spreadsheet. While it may be a decent solution, for the price you pay to use that solution over Excel or any other better reporting software it seems inappropriate for a sales org.

Verified User

Analyst in Sales (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Anaplan is a good plan!!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Several departments use it. My role is primarily the management of Anaplan as a tool for the organization. We have a conferencing center that serves as a retreat center which uses Anaplan for budgeting and some sales and finance analysis. The whole organization uses it for budgeting.

Pros

It's a very powerful tool when it comes to budgeting.
It serves us well in some analysis work but we are not yet using it to its full capabilities.

Likelihood to Recommend

As I mentioned earlier we are seeing the benefits of using it for our budgeting purposes. We in the past had no budgeting tool and Excel was able to perform. But, switching over to Anaplan has enabled us to create 'what if' scenario easier.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Excel Spreadsheets & Charts without the Capability of Excel

Rating: 2 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Anaplan within sales ops and across our sales teams for territory planning. It is used by 3 members of our sales operations team, 5 region leads, and 15 team leads. We use it for "What-if" analysis in territory design. It allows reps to be able to see the impact of changes before they actually happen.

Pros

Speed

Cons

The UI (User Interface) is Ugly
Cumbersome to Use / Model
Lacks basic functionality of Excel
Clunky

Likelihood to Recommend

Territory planning would be the ideal use case here, but Anaplan lacks basic Excel functionality. You need to choose one sorting option for all of your graphs, you can't change the color or theme of the display pages, and it is not intuitive to use. If you need speed, it can handle that, but be prepared to give up a lot of capabilities.

Cody Guymon

Sr. Manager, Sales Operations in Sales at Qualtrics (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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Anaplan is Flexible but Comes with Drawbacks

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using Anaplan for Financial Planning for the past 2 years. Overall, the tool is very flexible, robust and has a lot of very useful features, but also comes with a number of noteworthy drawbacks. The learning curve to become fluent on the platform is relatively steep and it is essential to build up and maintain a level of competency across the team of core users. There are also structural modeling constraints the are inherent to the multi-dimensional nature of the tool that require very thoughtful architecting when building new, complex models.

Pros

Flexible
Cloud-based and easily accessible

Cons

Steep learning curve
Limited data integration technology - getting data in and out is not easy

Likelihood to Recommend

Anaplan is well suited for consolidations across uniform dimensions.

Jessica Seilhan

FP&A Manager in Finance and Accounting at Stitch Fix (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Anaplan Can

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 3, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is used for our pricing model. Currently being used in only a couple departments. It is used because the large data we have is not easily used in Excel.

Pros

Handles Large Data
Streamlined Model
Provides Ability for Quality Reporting

Cons

Limits of calculation functions
Limited Flexibility

Likelihood to Recommend

It is well suited for large, complicated models that take a lot of time to update in Excel. It would be less appropriate for simple models.

Verified User

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

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Anaplan Income Statement Forecasting

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

May 2, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

It is currently being implementing for Income Statement Forecasting. The goal is to eventually utilize it for other various use cases across the organization.

Pros

Driver-Based Forecasting; allows users to easily input drivers to build up a financial forecast.
Version control; easy to see how your current forecast compares to prior versions.

Cons

Steep learning curve for model builders; it takes a while to get up to speed on how to build out models in Anaplan.

Likelihood to Recommend

Great software for our initial use case (Income Statement Forecasting). Once complete, we will begin to utilize for other use cases.

Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Anaplan: flexible yet solid

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Anaplan is used in my organization for primarily FP&A. We use it in a a comprehensive way to model out our business lines, headcount, G&A, sales, and eventually the 3 financial statements. We also use it for sales territory planning.

Pros

Anaplan's flexibility as a free form model allows us to model as complex as we want.
The import/export, mappings, and API features make this closer to an enterprise tool.

Cons

The BI and dashboard functionalities need much improvement. While I appreciate that it tries to auto decide how I want to scale and move items around it's not always exactly what is needed for the best end-user experience.
The formula box could be improved. Our formulas get rather complex and the box does not allow for new lines or tabbing. It would be phenomenal if we could write formulas similar to programming code to make development and debugging more intuitive.
The rollbacks when there's an error still boggles us. A simple error will cause rollbacks up to 18 minutes which locks everyone out of the system.

Likelihood to Recommend

Almost any scenario. With Anapalan's free-form flexibility I can see it being used for all sorts of use cases.

Verified User

Analyst in Finance and Accounting (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Anaplan gives you the flexibility and scale you need.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 1, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are using Anaplan for both our financial models: P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, as well as for our revenue model and channel (VAR) commissions payouts. The main advantage it provides us is being able to do quick ad-hoc analysis through pivoting multi-dimensional data. Excel was simply not able to handle the data set we have and would slow to a crawl in our previous models.

Pros

Hierarchy management for list structures is good, and can easily adapt to changes when doing reorgs.
Speed is good when pivoting a large data set compared to Excel.
Flexibility in design is much more robust than competitors such as Essbase.

Cons

The GUI has slowly improved, but still leaves room for improvement.
Formula error checking can be slow in a complex model.
Dashboards, charting, and conditional formatting should be improved to the level of Excel.
Pricing model should be streamlined, they seem to change it significantly every year.

Likelihood to Recommend

It works very well as an internal FP&A tool to create models that can scale with the complexity of a growing business. The commissions aspect we are using on a limited basis currently, but it seems well suited to the task. Despite their efforts to create an executive level interface, it lacks some of the flexibility to clean things up in a concise presentable manner.

Neil Young

FP&A Manager in Finance and Accounting at RingCentral (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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Anaplan for Sales Ops

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

April 27, 2017

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Anaplan currently is used in various organizations within Cisco for purposes such as goaling and compensation and sales operations. Within sales operations we are using it to discover renewal opportunities, scrub data, pricing and consolidate these opportunity lines to be uploaded in Salesforce.

Pros

Sales Planning and Forecasting
Data Scrubbing and comparison
Read and write data from Salesforce.com

Cons

Training materials can be improved. Also, it's very difficult to understand the formula syntax mentioned in Anapedia.
Dashboards.

Likelihood to Recommend

It's more suited for building sales planning models.

Arpit Shrivastava

Senior Business Consultant in Customer Service at Enquero (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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