Balanced planning tools have supported detailed calculations and clear summary reporting
What is our primary use case?
IBM Planning Analytics is better for large data manipulation, whereas Anaplan excels in the presentation side and ease of use. My group company uses Anaplan for summarizing clean data, while the UK region company uses Planning Analytics for detailed calculations and speed.
I develop in both Anaplan and IBM Planning Analytics, so I know both very well. I try to find ways to compare them for various purposes and explain their slightly different use cases based on the tools' capabilities.
What is most valuable?
Anaplan's focus on APIs helps streamline data consolidation, while IBM Planning Analytics offers stronger capabilities in base-level data and detailed calculations.
Anaplan is excellent for summarizing clean data and is easier to use for reporting and security, while Planning Analytics is better for data cleansing and low-level data manipulation. The ease of developing individual models in Anaplan is notable, allowing users to handle it with minimal complication.
What needs improvement?
Anaplan's problem is that it has its own niche market. It cannot perform some tasks handled by Planning Analytics due to their different foundations, Anaplan on Hyperblock technology and TM1 on OLAP.
Anaplan lacks a native ETL tool, making it challenging to integrate numerous flat files. Its licensing model could also be changed, and integration with other solutions simplified.
The report on Anaplan and Planning Analytics could have been more detailed.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have worked with Planning Analytics for years.
How are customer service and support?
I do not use technical support much because I write code, run servers, and handle technical aspects myself, minimizing reliance on external customer service.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Planning Analytics and Anaplan have unique selling points despite being marketed in the same area. They are not the same tool, each catering to different needs. It is important to choose based on specific user requirements and end goals.
Anaplan has a different pricing methodology compared to Planning Analytics, with a more consolidated approach. This difference might guide a company's decision to switch tools if cost structure is a concern.
What other advice do I have?
I do not view it in a commercial competition way; it is more about which tool is best for my specific data needs.
I am still exploring what features could be suggested for improvement since Anaplan and IBM Planning Analytics serve different purposes in our applications.
I have colleagues who are Anaplan salespeople and marketers, driving its adoption across different companies.
Anaplan is marketed strongly, and many cannot see the distinction without understanding the backend and coding structures.
I would rate this review a nine out of ten.
streamlined processes to ensure reliability and performance
What do you like best about the product?
Anaplan is a powerful and user-friendly solution that integrates easily, making it ideal for planning business processes of any complexity. It significantly reduces the time required to accomplish these tasks.
What do you dislike about the product?
However, implementing the solution can become quite tedious if the publisher's recommended best practices are not adhered to. Careful attention to design is crucial for developing an effective tool and ensuring that users are able to fully adopt the solution.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan allows you to plan complex business processes and enhances their reliability. The centralization and standardization of data are crucial advantages that help ensure strong operational performance.
Real-Time Data Makes Budgeting Effortless
What do you like best about the product?
That the data is real time and connected, so as users are making updates to their budgets the impacts are seen right away.
What do you dislike about the product?
The cost and having to pay for workspace size.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan removed spreadsheets and manual input/consolidation errors from the budgeting process. It moved ownership of budget numbers from finance to the budget owners.
Reporting and forecasting have become more automated through intuitive data organization and flexible number calendarization
How has it helped my organization?
Anaplan provides me with real time insights and I find it beneficial for decision making. I rate it an eight. After we have loaded our operation plan into
Anaplan, it is easy to go back and recalendarize or reallocate numbers forward or backward.
For example, with rolling forecasts, you can go back after three months to do a rolling forecast and determine whether to replan forward or backward.
Anaplan saves time for me and is cost effective.
What is most valuable?
I like about Anaplan the simplicity and the way it makes reporting easier and planning is broken down well. You can calendarize your numbers and do some auto allocations of numbers. These features make it a very robust planning tool.
The main benefits that I have seen from using Anaplan are the ease of automation and the way the feature looks and feels. The UI and UX is simple and you can easily see the general overview of what you have done. The chart tree is easy to follow. If you are not used to using that resource, it may take some time, but for Anaplan, it is easy to get your way around with the tree of the charts and chart of accounts.
What needs improvement?
I do not have any improvements from my own end at this time.
There are some specific features or functionality that I would like to see included in Anaplan in the future. From what we have been using, I do not think there is any specific one because we import and export numbers. Importing and exporting with CSV files is already available in Anaplan. I do not have any special requests from Anaplan.
I still decided to give Anaplan an eight because I have not seen a specific dashboard on Anaplan. Anaplan could have a dashboard where you can see the flow of your numbers displayed on pictorials rather than just saying this is the number. Simple dashboards should be implemented.
What other advice do I have?
Anaplan's scenario planning feature is used for forecasting. The integration capabilities of Anaplan have helped to streamline data consolidation in my organization. We use JD Edwards as the basic
ERP system and the data from JD Edwards is transmitted into Power BI so that it can be transmitted into Anaplan. The interface of this process is wonderful and simple for users. We can perform integrity checks where you can verify all the data from JDE to Anaplan to
HFM and see them at a glance to ensure all the numbers are complete and there is no variance. The user interface is very friendly.
Anaplan has helped to adapt to market changes. Planning happens outside of Anaplan because you need to consider economic situations and the factors that are driving your numbers. If, for example, we are planning inflation to be single digit but it becomes double, you have to go into Anaplan to change that. Anaplan will not automatically do that for you.
I like Anaplan more than the Cognos product because it is more updated and works with different tools. You can automate with various features and even implement artificial intelligence to help data flow properly. Anaplan is more current. In the age of artificial intelligence, if Anaplan could research into using more artificial intelligence to design and sort data, that would be beneficial.
My recommendation for other organizations considering Anaplan is to adopt it for the ease of working with it to do reporting and planning. It consolidates your efforts so that you do not have to report in one place and budget in another place.
I gave this review a rating of eight.
Empowers Business Users with Flexible, User-Friendly Low-Code Platform
What do you like best about the product?
This is a low-code/no-code platform that empowers business users to take ownership of their applications, reducing dependence on IT and eliminating common bottlenecks. Its hyper-block technology supports real-time collaboration throughout the organization, helping to break down silos. The platform also gives you the flexibility to define your own models without being constrained by rigid structures or limitations. It's user friendly UX allows model builder to build highly customized UX with KPIs, Charts and Conditional formatted tables, hence improving overall user experience.
What do you dislike about the product?
The extra efforts in handling sparsity of the model; we need to spend significant efforts in building concatenated list to reduce sparsity of the model to gain better performance. Polaris seems to be an answer for that, however, the costs of the license would be higher.
The limitation in reporting, currently we are restricted to do slice and dice on the reporting dimensions included in the module. It would be nice if we could also include properties of the reporting dimensions to achieve something similar in BI tools.
The current solution on this would be exporting the data with the properties and build those kinds of reports in BI tools.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan effectively replaces disconnected Excel-based processes by creating a single, cloud-based planning environment where all teams work from the same real-time data. Instead of juggling multiple spreadsheets across departments, Anaplan connects finance, sales, supply chain, and HR into one integrated model.
This eliminates version-control issues, reduces manual consolidation, and ensures consistent assumptions and formulas across the enterprise. Users can collaborate simultaneously, run live “what-if” scenarios, and update plans instantly — without waiting for manual data rollups.
By removing Excel silos, Anaplan improves data accuracy, speeds up decision-making, and shifts focus from spreadsheet maintenance to value-added analysis. The result is a more agile, transparent, and collaborative planning culture across the company.
Flexibility and Power for Complex planning tasks.
What do you like best about the product?
Anaplan is highly capable and can handle any task with impressive flexibility and power. It is also able to manage large amounts of data effectively.
What do you dislike about the product?
Anaplan is a very expensive tool, but it can be worthwhile if you develop a well-defined use case. Although Anaplan is capable of handling almost any task, it's important to consider whether a particular task truly needs to be done within Anaplan, or if it would be more cost-effective to handle it elsewhere. We should remember, that Anaplan is the planning tool at first. For example, raw data transformation might be better performed outside of Anaplan to save on performance / cost.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Having worked in the consultancy business for many years, I deal with clients' challenges on a daily basis. Anaplan supports its clients across a wide range of use cases, but what stands out most is how Anaplan serves as a single source of truth for key planning processes within a company. This centralization helps eliminate data silos and allows Anaplan to function as an effective process orchestrator.
Smarter Forecasts, Stronger Decisions through Integrated Finance Planning
What do you like best about the product?
Anaplan is a cloud-based software platform primarily designed for Connected Planning, and it has now expanded its capabilities to include finance, sales, supply chain, retail, and workforce management. The platform enables users to conduct dynamic scenario analysis, variance analysis, and generate real-time reports within the application. As a low-code solution, Anaplan can be easily managed by business users after the initial implementation. Recently, Anaplan introduced Financial Close and Consolidation solutions, providing a more comprehensive financial offering. Additionally, the product features prebuilt applications that help organizations reduce implementation time by two to three weeks.
What do you dislike about the product?
Anaplan has consistently faced challenges due to its expensive licensing model and performance limitations when handling large datasets. The basic AI and Gen AI features are not only costly but also have a very limited user base, as their use cases are quite narrow. Achieving scalability with Anaplan comes at a significant expense. Additionally, its ad hoc analysis capabilities, especially in Excel, are much weaker compared to other EPM tools, which forces users to rely solely on the application.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Anaplan has provided us with a comprehensive end-to-end connected planning solution. The product's modeling capabilities are straightforward and do not rely heavily on other products or tools. Recent improvements in third-party software integration, particularly through ADO, have made it much easier and faster to pull data from various sources. Anaplan's support service is very responsive, typically replying within a few hours. Software updates are seamless and do not require assistance from the development or support teams. Anaplan has been valuable for both opportunity and demand planning, enabling us to identify opportunities that are likely to convert quickly into sales. Additionally, it provides us with useful aging reports.
Unmatched Scalability and Flexibility for All Your Planning Needs
What do you like best about the product?
Scalability and flexibility in planning is the cornerstone feature of this product. Errors associated with excel based planning can be eliminated and much more can be done with productivity improvements. The calculation engine Hyperblock is the foundation that powers this 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. In addition, the new features like combined grids, ADO etc will definitely make it a serious product in the market.
What do you dislike about the product?
More AI features are required for the increasingly competitive industry. The product roadmap is already filled with AI roadmap so it is just a matter of time. The tool is costly and the pricing definitely needs to be standardized and made transparent for all customers. Also, there should be focus to replace visualization tools like PowerBI by bringing in visual planning. This has been addressed with geo-mapping feature that is released recently but Anaplan should be bringing in and constantly improving the features like these. On the upsteam, the integration ability with other systems should be made easily. ADO is definitely a game-changer but it needs to be bi-directional.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
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. 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. Also, we identify the potential of a territory and it helps make decisions quickly and manage workloads of reps. We are also using it to segment and prioritize the accounts within different businesses.
Highly Adaptable Platform That Grows with Your Business
What do you like best about the product?
The platform's modularity accommodates even the most specialized business processes, enabling us to have the platform adapt to our business needs rather than forcing our business to adapt to the platform.
What do you dislike about the product?
The platform lacks extensibility, which has forced us to create several workarounds to better integrate it with our process automation. Features released at each initial GA stage often feel incomplete or fall short of what was promised on the roadmap. That said, these features do tend to improve over time and eventually align with the original vision. We've also experienced moderate to significant cost increases during each contract negotiation, particularly when there are changes to platform features.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
The platform offers strong data governance, providing a single source of truth for forecasting approaches. Its forecasting models are straightforward and easy to understand, and the data integration processes are also simple to follow.
A fantastic multi-purpose EPM platform for true Cross Planning & Analytics (XPA)
What do you like best about the product?
Highly flexible, highly configurable, ever-improving UX and ever-growing list of functionalities such AI, ADO or Excel add in.
What do you dislike about the product?
The sales strategy felt overly aggressive, and there’s room for improvement in the account executives’ product expertise to provide a smoother purchasing and renewal process. An experiences and trusted advisor is needed to know when to choose pre-built Apps over Customised models, Standard Calculation Engine vs Polaris or other options.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Streamlined, controlled and auditable FP&A across business areas and regions. Best in-class Demand Plan connected to Supply.
