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Adaptive Insights vs Board vs Planful comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Business Performance Management category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 4.6%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Board is 6.7%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planful is 2.8%, down from 3.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Performance Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Adaptive scales well, simple to create new budget versions and models
For the organization I used to work at, it streamlined the process of creating budgets. It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday. So that made it easy. Reporting was pretty easy to set up as well. It streamlined the amount of time it took to do the budget as well as kind of making it simple to implement a rolling forecast process. So, it really was more just a productivity increase and time shortening for the budgeting and forecasting process.
Wiboon Thabsuwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features
I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.
reviewer1110591 - PeerSpot reviewer
It has helped us speed up the turnaround time on our consolidation, and we haven't had anything come up that the program has not been able to solve
The part that we liked about Excel is that it had a better interface in terms of just graphical illustration of our results. So, if we wanted to look at our financial trends and put it into some type of graphical interface for people to look at, we still have to leverage Excel for that. The dashboards aren't as usable as maybe some of the other solutions, such as Tableau or other BI tools. The application that we use today for our BI tools is Tableau. That's how people absorb information. We don't really use the functionality or dashboards within Planful because of the robustness of Tableau. That's our single source of data. If Planful was better or more comparable in terms of features and functionality, we could probably leverage that in Planful.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Reports are allowed to be edited for aesthetic purposes, which is lacking in a lot of other dashboard tools."
"Automated reporting."
"It helps develop a more unified work format throughout the company."
"Changes to corporate structure, account codes are updated in all versions including prior years, hence "one-version of truth" as claimed."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its dashboard."
"It's very stable."
"It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday."
"Forecasting changes that instantly flow through all financial statements."
"It is easy to make quick updates. As the business changes, we can maintain the tool without programming help from IT."
"Primary valuable features are its flexibility and versatility and, obviously, functionality goes along with that. Plus, it does that at a small footprint in the file servers, and does it very efficiently."
"The ability to do write back and visualization, with minimal IT development orientation."
"The ease of being able to get the data into BOARD is what makes it nice for people with a semi-IT background."
"It allows people to quickly create dashboards with reports."
"It has a good set of visual elements that you can use and can explain quite well."
"All staff can now see their relevant scorecards online."
"BOARD technical support is knowledgeable and helpful."
"It has helped us speed up the turnaround time on our consolidation. We don't have to do reporting in Excel anymore, which has cut down on the errors and the efficiency of our close time."
 

Cons

"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."
"The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up."
"Adaptive Insights could improve the data designer interface to make integrations easier to set up."
"Adaptive Insights has a limit of 1,00,000 rows for HTML reports. It should be improved because we will have multiple dimensions that need to be populated to enhance the image."
"The upload feature exists, but isn't terribly useful."
"Better user interface (UI)."
"It's a Workday product; they could do a little bit better to integrate a pure-play integration with Workday, which really doesn't do that."
"Being able to drill down when using OfficeConnect needs work."
"We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. ​"
"One thing that I personally would like to see is additional visualization tools for visuals."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"In terms of scalability, I would say that there are some limitations in the solution. It cannot handle data that is too big."
"If we could upload other data, e.g., pivot tables which can be done in BOARD already, that we have pre-existing and have that data distribute to more complex spreadsheets​, I would like that going forward."
"What could be better is the manual... nowadays, most people use a web client, but on the Board manual website, a lot of the information is only about the Windows client. If they could update that, it would be helpful."
"I'd like to see a more passive report user for enterprise report writers that aren't particularly technical."
"The one thing that I think we would like to see in terms of improvement of the application is the ability to print. It's fantastic to have all of these graphic visualization of data, but we're not able to very easily just print... From my perspective, if you can have a little "print" button and then you just click it and it would produce what's on the screen, that would be very helpful."
"The part that we liked about Excel is that it had a better interface in terms of just graphical illustration of our results. So, if we wanted to look at our financial trends and put it into some type of graphical interface for people to look at, we still have to leverage Excel for that. The dashboards aren't as usable as maybe some of the other solutions, such as Tableau or other BI tools."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."
"Pricing is in line with other cloud-based EPM tools. It is a subscription-based model based upon the number of users and site type if it's an admin or end-user type thing."
"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."
"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is relative to its peer competitors. It's certainly competitive compared to a spreadsheet template that you build in Excel. It can be expensive if you need to have 100-500 budget holders giving input and building financial plans. However, in that case, it becomes an extremely good bargain. Compared to its competitors, it offers an excellent value."
"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."
"It's affordable."
"​In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."
"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."
"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."
"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."
"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."
"Right now, everything is on a three-year term contract, and that is our main cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Non Profit
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Healthcare Company
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Adaptive Insights?
It's very simple to create a new version and do some more modeling based on your need for planning things like headc...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Adaptive Insights?
12 years ago, it was very affordable. Workday has definitely increased its price since it acquired Adaptive a few yea...
What needs improvement with Adaptive Insights?
The integrations could be simpler. It takes quite a bit of internal and IT know-how to set up. So, there could be roo...
Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?
We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS ge...
What do you like most about Board?
All the reports are prepared automatically.
What needs improvement with Board?
Board's integration could be a bit more robust, but what we have works. If the design isn't right, the flexibility of...
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Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

1. Cisco Systems 2. Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated 3. Deloitte 4. DocuSign 5. Dropbox 6. Electronic Arts 7. Fender Musical Instruments Corporation 8. Fitbit 9. Fossil Group 10. Groupon 11. Hilton Worldwide 12. HP Inc. 13. Intuit 14. Johnson & Johnson 15. LinkedIn 16. Lyft 17. McAfee 18. Medtronic 19. Netflix 20. Oracle 21. Pandora 22. PayPal 23. Pinterest 24. Red Hat 25. Salesforce 26. ServiceNow 27. Slack Technologies 28. Spotify 29. Symantec 30. Tableau Software 31. Twitter 32. Workday
Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB
Tandem Diabetes Care, Reed Exhibitions, SkyGolf, Zep Inc., Thule, Stylesight, Schumacher Group, Parsons Electric, Nextag, Groupon
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle, Anaplan, IBM and others in Business Performance Management. Updated: June 2025.
862,077 professionals have used our research since 2012.