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Adaptive Insights vs Planful vs SAS Activity-Based Management 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 June 2026, in the Business Performance Management category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 4.9%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planful is 3.3%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAS Activity-Based Management is 2.5%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Performance Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Adaptive Insights4.9%
Planful3.3%
SAS Activity-Based Management2.5%
Other89.3%
Business Performance Management
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg - PeerSpot reviewer
Adaptive Planning Manager at Alight
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.
reviewer1110591 - PeerSpot reviewer
Financial Planning & Analysis - Finance Manager at a engineering company with 501-1,000 employees
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.
it_user530763 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
Helps to compare production costs across different departments. Try CostPerform from QPR.
Helps to compare production costs across different departments The data integration is very complex Visualization of the cost flow is not user-friendly It takes hours to build OLAP cubes to analyze the results of the model We have been using this solution for three years. I would rate the…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has helped us to automate a lot of our processes."
"Customer Service: Excellent, always available and hardly needed."
"The biggest feature is the source of truth for all of our budget and forecast versions."
"The important feature is integration with source data. It connects to various ERP systems, including Workday, Intact, and others. It can also import actuals and compare them to PlanPoint quite easily."
"Our organization is able to use Adaptive to complete a major majority of our monthly management and quarterly Board reports, and by refreshing reports and pages automatically, it creates the monthly report package with little to no manual staff work."
"The integration with our payroll system to complete staff modeling during our budget and forecast processes."
"We have gone from an organization that looked backwards at financials and had a one-time annual budget to an organization that looks forward, has rolling forecasts, long-term planning, metrics, and push button reporting."
"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."
"Planful has probably cut our time in half, given that we can now leverage the cloud-based services to interact with our subs for getting their forecast inputs."
"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."
"I believe the ROI is very high."
"The product allows us to calculate the distributed cost across activities."
"Helps to compare production costs across different departments."
"Cube generation is a valuable feature."
"The product helped determine the organization's true cost of providing its products and services to customers."
"We use ABM as an expense allocation model and it has improved the awareness and accountability of the cost incurred due to the traceability feature."
 

Cons

"We do have issues getting information on our customer success turnover."
"Discovery (the data visualization module): Needs to catch up with BI leaders, such as MS and Tableau. E.g., sorting by amounts in column charts and page slicers to control all visuals."
"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."
"Needing to focus on upgrades for all industries, including CPG."
"The planning functionalities are the weakest part of Adaptive Insights."
"We tried Discovery and OfficeConnect at one point and found them too cumbersome, at the time."
"The product's configuration process could be faster."
"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."
"The part that we liked about Excel is that it had a better interface in terms of just graphical illustration of our results."
"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."
"Some of the behind the scenes processing for the simulation engines has a learning curve to use in that there are certain changes that need to happen for the reporting to be "Live"."
"It could be made much more simpler. Most of the time it looks like a black box for developers."
"The usability needs to be improved but bear in mind that we did not have the latest update."
"The data integration is very complex Visualization of the cost flow is not user-friendly It takes hours to build OLAP cubes to analyze the results of the model"
"We experienced severe performance issues when the models created are getting more details and becoming more complex."
"The interface is poorly designed and could really use an improvement to compete with other comparable software."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's affordable."
"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."
"Adaptive Insights' pricing is reasonable."
"Prior to purchasing licenses, make sure you understand which users will only need planning and which users will need both planning and OfficeConnect."
"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."
"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."
"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."
"Right now, everything is on a three-year term contract, and that is our main cost."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Construction Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Computer Software Company
14%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise10
No data available
No data available
 

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning
Host Analytics
No data available
 

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
Tandem Diabetes Care, Reed Exhibitions, SkyGolf, Zep Inc., Thule, Stylesight, Schumacher Group, Parsons Electric, Nextag, Groupon
Bank of Queensland, Barclays Bank, BioMar, Danske Bank, Danske Spil, DPPS, First Allied
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