We performed a comparison between Anaplan and Board based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Business Performance Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Anaplan provides 130 GB of cloud storage for organizations to use as part of their license."
"Anaplan's most valuable features are that it's a no-coding platform, everything can be scaled to your other functions, and it's easy to learn and use (especially because Anaplan provides excellent interactive training)."
"Anaplan is a three-dimensional cloud platform that is good for analyzing data, visualization, integration, terrific for visibility."
"Anaplan integrates well into my clients' core systems. The ability to aggregate the forms within the dashboarding is also useful. Only one of my clients has implemented workflow. Their usage has been very light. Dashboarding capability is probably the biggest one. My clients like having the ability to aggregate, slice and dice, and dynamically adjust things in the dashboards."
"Anaplan's in-memory calculation engine is super-fast compared to the old tools we previously used. You enter the data and everything shows up in one go."
"The solution works very well for budgeting."
"Where we're seeing the opportunity in the market is at the Fortune 100 companies that have far more complex modeling type scenarios where you need to be able to have a lot of people collaborating together, and you need a lot of information all at everyone's fingertips. This is where you see the big advantage of a solution like Anaplan."
"I believe Anaplan is a new cloud tool, and from time to time, there's a lot of improvement that the Anaplan company deploys with the system. So, with that improvement, we need to really adapt and know the new system trends."
"The flexibility and the user-experience are the most valuable features of the solution."
"I think it's flexible. I chose this solution because, even though it wasn't out-of-the-box, you can customize it, and the long-term growth potential of the software is where I see the value."
"We can build reports super fast."
"The reporting part has been very valuable as the capabilities of the tool do not have to change graphs, change how grids are displayed, and can create reports on the fly."
"All staff can now see their relevant scorecards online."
"I liked the way that I felt as a user and administrator of it. There were a lot of clicks, drops, drags, etc. versus writing code."
"What is very valuable is the ability to customize. We didn't see a solution out there that really matched exactly what our functional requirements would be. So we were able to work with New Brain, our integrator, and we were able to build from the ground up what we wanted, and I think that's pretty unique to BOARD."
"The ease of being able to get the data into BOARD is what makes it nice for people with a semi-IT background."
"The negative is that the higher the flexibility, the higher is the complexity. That can act against you as a negative because it does require a model builder or a coder/developer."
"There are workspace issues, like the limitation on model sizes."
"The cloud engine slows down when working with a large dataset. It still lacks a powerful engine."
"When there is a lot of data, it sometimes takes long to load."
"Automation needs to be built into this solution."
"Anaplan should come up with flexible options to connect to a data warehouse rather than an Anaplan hub."
"Anaplan is a relatively expensive piece of software."
"Anaplan could be improved with a stronger consolidation module."
"We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD."
"The initial setup was very complex for us."
"It's very powerful, but there is also a big learning curve. It should be a little more intuitive."
"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."
"My analysts have used the technical support. Sometimes they have felt like they did not receive the answer that they needed, or you have to go and upgrade in order to address a problem. "
"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."
"I would like to see better relationships with the partners."
Anaplan is ranked 1st in Business Performance Management with 24 reviews while Board is ranked 11th in Business Performance Management with 35 reviews. Anaplan is rated 8.0, while Board is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Anaplan writes "Great for large-scale modelling, easy to learn, and very stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Board writes "A stable solution with good user-experience, easy deployment but needs some improvement with engine ". Anaplan is most compared with SAP ERP, Oracle Hyperion, SAP S/4HANA, IBM Planning Analytics and Planful, whereas Board is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, IBM Planning Analytics, Oracle Hyperion, Microsoft Power BI and CCH Tagetik. See our Anaplan vs. Board report.
See our list of best Business Performance Management vendors.
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We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simultaneous users to speed the planning process. We see Anaplan competing with Host Analytics, Hyperion, Adaptive, that sort of thing.
BI evaluations generally include Qlik, Tableau and whatever the team used at a previous job posting. We do sometimes recommend Power BI but only if the team is willing to put the budget behind it to properly implement and design. (Lots of companies operate on the 'we're a Microsoft shop' theory and try to set it up themselves - which is fine if your IT guys are also data scientists but kinda sucks otherwise.)
So - in our customer base, which is a limited sample set but we're working on that, we don't see Board and Anaplan in the same evaluations - not to say that we shouldn't, just that we haven't.
So your choice is Board's BI and CPM capabilities, vs Anaplan's FP&A and BI features. As is always the case, whichever specific capability or feature set offers more defined, measurable ROI in your companies' particular situation determines 'better'.
I would say that Board and Anaplan are mainly used for FP&A and not BI.
As a small company, I would suggest using either Power BI or ThoughtSpot. With Power BI you will need some technical, data, analytical expertise either in-house or from a 3rd party. ThoughtSpot MSP may be the answer depending on your use case as there are packages around smaller organizations where you pay for the software already hosted on AWS and services included, all you need to do is provide data, it will be modelled as part of the service then you can search across the data as much as you want. I have a good example of a non for profit organisation using this.
I'm happy to help if you would like some further advice.
Usually, we say Board provides lots of toolkits to achieve both CPM and BI. But, the Anaplan mainly focuses on CPM solutions.
If the enduser doesn't have any existing planning strategy, maybe they can refer to Anaplan solution directly and easily.
If the enduser already has a clear planning strategy, and they just want to find a tool to achieve it, maybe Board is a better choice because its smart toolkits can be used easily and give more possibilities.
BTW, if you want to fully use the BI function (colourful charts, dashboard, multi-dimensional analysis), Board will be absolutely better.
Just for your reference.
Charles as Investment Director for an industrial company with only 1-10 employees, you may find that the SaaS costs of both BOARD and Anaplan are beyond your budget or need.
Happy to engage in a 1-2-1 to analyse requirements and if necessary make appropriate recommendations.