Adaptive Insights vs Windward Core comparison

Workday and Windward Studios are both solutions in the Reporting category. Workday is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.2, while Windward Studios is ranked #23. Workday holds a 0.6% mindshare in RT, compared to Windward Studios’s 0.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Workday users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Windward Studios users who would recommend it.

Adaptive Insights

Read 18 Adaptive Insights reviews

1,373 Views
302 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Windward Core

Read 36 Windward Core reviews

804 Views
531 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Adaptive Insights

Windward Core

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Adaptive Insights and Windward Core are competitive products in the business intelligence and reporting software market. Windward Core seems to have an edge in terms of advanced reporting features, while Adaptive Insights is preferred for its seamless financial planning capabilities.

Features: Adaptive Insights offers Budgeting Reporting, OfficeConnect features that greatly assist with planning and reporting, and the ability to create new versions for various scenarios. Windward Core provides the ability to integrate with Microsoft Office, offers easy-to-design complex templates using AutoTag, and allows for dynamic data integration from multiple sources.

Room for Improvement: Adaptive Insights could benefit from a streamlined interface for non-financial users and improved integration with non-financial data sources. Enhancing customization options for unique business processes and improving mobile accessibility could also be considered. For Windward Core, improving the learning curve for first-time users and offering more intuitive analytics tools would be beneficial. Expanding cloud-based features and offering more comprehensive support for diverse data types could also be areas for enhancement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Adaptive Insights is known for its straightforward cloud-based setup with minimal IT involvement and strong support services, making the onboarding process smooth. Windward Core, while requiring more complex integration with existing infrastructure, offers extensive customization options, which provides flexibility for complex reporting environments.

Pricing and ROI: Adaptive Insights typically presents a higher upfront cost due to its all-in-one analytics suite but delivers substantial ROI with cost-efficient financial operations. Windward Core offers competitive pricing with a lower initial investment, focusing on ROI through its scalable document generation capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Adaptive Insights vs. Windward Core Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. Windward Core

July 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 865,484 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Adaptive Insights

Ranking in Reporting

11th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Performance Management (6th), Financial Performance and Strategy Management (3rd), Data Visualization (11th), ESG Reporting Software (3rd)

Windward Core

Ranking in Reporting

23rd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Document Generation Tools (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Adaptive Insights is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Reporting

Featured Reviews

Andrew Rosenberg

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.

Read full review

Christopher Heinz

Sr. Systems Analyst at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Strong layout and design capabilities; leverages every aspect available in Word-native formatting

The licensing key is a little bit twitchy. I'd like to see more HTML formatting support in templates. It has a basic stock of HTML formatting capability, but it doesn't have a rich vocabulary. I have to work around that sometimes. The help documentation and blog posts are extensive, but not always up to date. The error reports also need improvement. If you don't key it in right, it's a little hard to find the root cause. It gives you information as much as it can, but it doesn't really hone in and tell you explicitly what you should do to correct the problem.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's very stable."

"We utilize planning on a daily basis, therefore we find it to be the most valuable product for our organization."

"Automated reporting."

"Changes to corporate structure, account codes are updated in all versions including prior years, hence "one-version of truth" as claimed."

"The integration with our payroll system to complete staff modeling during our budget and forecast processes."

"Forecasting changes that instantly flow through all financial statements."

"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."

More Adaptive Insights pros

"The ability for users to have design and layout control is very important because it allows them control over the design and layout of their reports, without the help of IT."

"The integration with MS Office is an advantage, creating a better user experience."

"The ultimate feature is the product it produces. The ROI around that saves hours and hours. It's probably about a hundred days per year. The time savings and the ability to turn it around quickly pleases our customers."

"We can develop any report at least five times faster."

"The most valuable features are the ability for it to be integrated into our software solution and the AutoTag tool that allows us to quite quickly create and update the templates themselves."

"The Windward solution was very fast to rollout, and it is proven."

"The solution is very flexible, so you can create anything you want. Think of the possibilities you have in Excel or in Word, because these are the two document generators that are used the most. I only use Word, but I can use nearly every feature in Word, including making charts and tables, and produce those features in Windward, parametrically."

"Creating dynamic table of contents (TOC) based on dynamic data in different reports."

More Windward Core pros

Cons

"Better user interface (UI)."

"Adaptive Insights could improve the data designer interface to make integrations easier to set up."

"Users continue to become more advanced and are looking for more advanced solutions."

"Their customer support team is slow to respond and not extremely confident."

"The upload feature exists, but isn't terribly useful."

"We tried Discovery and OfficeConnect at one point and found them too cumbersome, at the time."

"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."

"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."

More Adaptive Insights cons

"We would like to shrink these reports into one page, because there is a lot of free space on one page, but we cannot shrink it into the one page to be shorter. This is one thing we would like to change."

"I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list."

"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive) into data."

"They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient."

"A lot of clients who want to use this don't have the technical background for the SQL portion of gathering the data. If Windward were to make a more user-friendly SQL extract front-end, that would help a lot of clients to leverage the application a lot more."

"I'm still working in Office 2016, and we have had some issues, but Windward is very quick to react when there is a problem. We are also going to switch over to Office 365 and that will solve a few of the problems."

"Is there any way to avoid AutoTag loading in Word/Excel each time? I need to use it from time to time - quite rarely. AutoTag affects performance of Word/Excel. I do not want to install/uninstall AutoTag each time I need it."

"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."

More Windward Core cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Ensure that you have the proper pricing plan in place."

"It's affordable."

"Licensing seems to be worth the cost considering the efficiency Adaptive brings."

"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."

"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."

"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 reasonable."

"Everything is negotiable, but this solution is low cost compared to others."

"The pricing is fair. The way that they have it priced is the Windward Designer has a price that's associated with it. Then, depending on the number of cores that you're looking for, that is the price that you pay. The more cores that you want, the more expensive it is."

"From my experience in this field, the product is reasonably priced, at least with the RESTful engine implementation. It's definitely not a cheap option. People say, "That's a fair amount of money to pay for a document generation tool." At the same time, you do get good functionality and the support is good."

"The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable."

"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."

"It is absolutely worth the value. They have flexibility, depending on what you're looking for from a buying standpoint. The current pricing models are quite flexible, with the ability to use it on an as-needed basis, or to get a perpetual license that covers a customer that might have extensive needs. I think it's pretty good."

"Pricing is a bit higher than normal desktop applications, but it's well worth it. The ROI is simple to understand and the monthly payment for an annual license is affordable and worth it."

"CapEx fits our requirements, OpEx is higher due to the 20% service and maintenance cost, where we normally pay 15%."

"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."

More Windward Core pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Non Profit

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

Performing Arts

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 headcount, other expenses, and revenue, everything is configurable within Workday.

See all answers

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 years ago. So, it's affordable. But there are other more affordable solutions that ...

See all answers

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 room for just improving the integrations, making it easier to integrate outside sys...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights

August 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Windward Core

July 2025

Download Windward Core product report

Also Known As

Workday Adaptive Planning, Adaptive Discovery , Workday Adaptive Planning

Windward, Windward Studios

Overview

Adaptive Insights is a cloud-based financial planning and analysis software that helps businesses streamline their budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes.

With its intuitive interface and powerful analytics, it enables organizations to make data-driven decisions and drive business performance.

Workday

What is Windward Studios?

For over a decade, Windward has been a leader in the software development industry by creating the most innovative and advanced document automation and reporting software on the planet.

Data-Driven Document Automation

Generate stunning documents that incorporate relevant data easily and seamlessly.

Visually Striking Designs

Our software provides innovative tools and features to build beautiful designs and stunning layouts, all within the familiar Microsoft Office Suite. Your imagination is the only limitation.

Agile Document Logic

We offer the best document automation software for the new millennium. With our conditional logic functionality, you can swiftly personalize the document content to gratify your end users.

Huge Time Saver

Looking for faster template creation that enables you to keep pace with your business? With our software, template creation takes minutes and you do not need any programming experience to get it done.

Exceptionally Intuitive Interface

Our program's design offers documents that can be edited, customized and designed using MS Office. Enjoy a stress-free document automation experience in programs you already know.

Efficient Savings

Significantly reduce the resources and time required for template development by using our streamlined template design and document automation tools.

Windward Studios

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

HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt

Buyer's Guide

Adaptive Insights vs. Windward Core

July 2025

Free Report: Adaptive Insights vs. Windward Core

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