Anaplan vs Planful comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Anaplan and Planful are both solutions in the Business Performance Management category. Anaplan is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4, while Planful is ranked #14. Anaplan holds a 5.8% mindshare in BPM, compared to Planful’s 3.4% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Anaplan users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Planful users who would recommend it.

Anaplan

Read 36 Anaplan reviews

6,588 Views
3,953 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Planful

Read 2 Planful reviews

1,737 Views
1,459 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Anaplan

Planful

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Planful and Anaplan are products competing in the financial planning and analysis solutions category. Comparisons highlight Planful’s superiority in affordability and support, while Anaplan shines with its extensive features, offering greater value for users needing comprehensive capabilities.

Features: Planful features robust planning, budgeting, and forecasting tools. It integrates seamlessly with various data sources and offers intuitive collaboration tools. Anaplan provides superior modeling power, flexibility for complex scenario analysis, and large-scale data processing capacities. Anaplan’s algorithms are versatile across different business functions, allowing extensive analytical capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Planful’s straightforward deployment and strong customer service include a supportive onboarding process, ideal for quick implementation. Anaplan has a complex deployment process, focusing on scalability and customization. Although its service is effective, it requires more initial setup, drawing users in need of extensive customization.

Pricing and ROI: Planful maintains a reputation for cost-effectiveness, balancing features with reasonable pricing to deliver a favorable ROI. Anaplan's higher initial investment reflects its expansive feature set, providing significant ROI for enterprises with advanced planning needs, making it an attractive option for businesses seeking comprehensive solutions.

To learn more, read our detailed Anaplan vs. Planful Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Anaplan vs. Planful

September 2026

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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

Anaplan

Ranking in Business Performance Management

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Production Planning (2nd), Predictive Analytics (4th)

Planful

Ranking in Business Performance Management

14th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Financial Close Software (19th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Business Performance Management category, the mindshare of Anaplan is 5.8%, down from 11.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planful is 3.4%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Performance Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Anaplan	5.8%
Planful	3.4%
Other	90.8%

Business Performance Management

Featured Reviews

Segun Oladele

Associate Manager, Accounting at BIC

Reporting and forecasting have become more automated through intuitive data organization and flexible number calendarization

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.

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reviewer1110591

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"Technical support has been good."

"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."

"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."

"Anaplan has eased a major pain point in mapping multidimensional data by combining all the necessary dimensions into a single tool, making it much easier for managers to understand the data coming in from their reps."

"It's real-time connected planning, so the calculations are pretty much seamless as far as your model is connected."

"It’s very agile and we can do changes in minutes, rather than waiting for consultants and change requests, so it’s as dynamic as the business."

"Anaplan's connected planning feature is its most valuable aspect, allowing for seamless financial planning, HR planning, and updates."

More Anaplan pros

"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."

"I believe the ROI is very high."

"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

"Anaplan's workflow component is probably the biggest area for improvement. I'd also like to see Anaplan add an ad hoc reporting tool that allows users to query things. It's going to factor into how you design your data set and your models, but I'd like the ability to create ad hoc queries against the data that's in there."

"The solution can improve by providing an easier form of integration to different platforms, such as receiving data from different Salesforce. There is a process to do it through the use of some APIs but it could be made much easier. This would be a large help to us."

"When there is a lot of data, it sometimes takes long to load."

"I would rate scalability between six and seven. Anaplan had issues before, but the new Polaris engine solves them, although its implementation is more challenging compared to the Classic engine."

"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."

"Anaplan could enhance its user interface by including a more user-friendly API."

"The cloud engine slows down when working with a large dataset. It still lacks a powerful engine."

More Anaplan cons

"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"."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This is an expensive product and if the price were reduced then it would attract more customers."

"The entry-level is anywhere from about $30,000 to $50,000 a year, however, it does go up significantly after that depending on the complexity and how much space you're using."

"A value-for-money product and a very reasonable price compared to competitors like SAP or IBM."

"We are currently using a free workspace license for 90 days. We are satisfied with the price of the solution. There are additional costs if you want more storage, the default limit is 250 GB."

"This is a yearly subscription. So a customer initially buys a workspace and specifies how much GB they want. The minimum starts at around 30 GB. You can buy multiple workspaces."

"The license is a yearly subscription. There are three licensing tiers: the model builder, planner, and the reporting."

"The cost of Anaplan is a challenge for clients, especially if they don't have an ongoing long-term use case for it. It's a $50,000 licensing fee just to get started. Clients need a strong business case to switch from Excel to Anaplan. But if clients have used something similar in the past, such as Hyperion or other solutions, that's not a factor because they know what to expect."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

More Anaplan pricing and cost advice

"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

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

13%

Construction Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	10
Midsize Enterprise	5
Large Enterprise	18

No data available

Questions from the Community

What are your main use cases for Anaplan?

Anaplan is an industry-leading cloud-based corporate performance management (CPM) platform that combines business planning and analytics in a single solution. It is designed to assist organizations...

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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 generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...

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Is Anaplan better than SAP ERP?

There are different aspects of both Anaplan and SAP ERP that I like and dislike. Anaplan improves forecast accuracy and drives up the quality of analytics. Rather than spending all of their time co...

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Comparisons

Board vs Anaplan

Compared 10% of the time

SAP Business Data Cloud vs Anaplan

Compared 7% of the time

SAP ERP vs Anaplan

Compared 5% of the time

Longview Analytics vs Anaplan

Compared 5% of the time

JD Edwards EnterpriseOne vs Anaplan

Compared 3% of the time

More Anaplan Competitors

Workday Adaptive Planning vs Planful

Compared 12% of the time

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud vs Planful

Compared 6% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Planful

Compared 6% of the time

IBM Planning Analytics vs Planful

Compared 5% of the time

Prophix vs Planful

Compared 5% of the time

More Planful Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Anaplan

September 2026

Download Anaplan product report

Buyer's Guide

Business Performance Management

August 2026

Download Planful product report

Also Known As

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Overview

Anaplan delivers a comprehensive cloud platform designed for three-dimensional data analysis, visualization, and planning. Known for real-time integration with systems such as Salesforce, it enables efficient budgeting, reporting, and modeling without extensive coding knowledge.

The Anaplan platform enhances operational efficiency with its flexible and scalable capabilities, supporting financial planning, supply chain management, and sales operations among others. Users benefit from features like an advanced in-memory calculation engine, quick updates, and ease of integration with systems like SAP. While Anaplan offers a robust toolset, enhancements in dashboard capabilities and integration processes are needed, with improvements requested in visualization tools, more flexible graphs, and better API integration. Additional desires include machine learning features and streamlined data import processes to reduce latency.

What are the key features of Anaplan?

Three-dimensional Planning: Provides robust data analysis and visualization.
Real-time Integration: Seamlessly integrates with systems like Salesforce and SAP.
Advanced Calculation Engine: Enables quick updates across platforms.
Model Map: Aids easy model navigation and management.
Scalability: Adapts to companies of all sizes with ease.

What benefits should users consider?

Operational Efficiency: Enhances planning and execution processes.
Ease of Use: Reduces the need for extensive coding knowledge.
Flexibility: Adapts to diverse business needs and industries.
Cost-effectiveness: Offers potential ROI by optimizing planning efficiencies.

In industries like financial planning, supply chain management, and sales operations, Anaplan facilitates scenario-based analysis, demand forecasting, and business execution. It is employed in marketing, commercial real estate planning, and integrates easily with existing systems. Users in these sectors find it valuable for improving planning accuracy and responsiveness.

Anaplan

Planful provides collaborative financial planning and analysis, empowering businesses to streamline budgeting, forecasting, and reporting processes. Ideal for data-driven professionals aiming for precision and efficiency.

Planful stands out by delivering a robust platform for financial planning and reporting. Its use case spans multiple industries where it offers seamless integration, aiding professionals with precise planning, accurate forecasting, and detailed financial reporting. Known for its flexibility, Planful caters to the demands of a data-driven user base, enhancing strategic decision-making capabilities.

What are the most important features of Planful?

Continuous Planning: Enables dynamic, ongoing forecasts adapting to changing business environments.
Predictive Analytics: Integrates advanced analytics to inform proactive business decisions.
Scenario Modeling: Provides tools for testing financial strategies against diverse scenarios.
Automated Reports: Simplifies the creation of detailed financial reports saving time.
Collaboration Tools: Facilitates teamwork by consolidating input from multiple stakeholders.

What benefits and ROI should users look for in reviews?

Time Efficiency: Noticeable reduction in time spent on planning and reporting tasks.
Enhanced Accuracy: Increased precision in forecasts and financial reports.
Scalability: Ability to support growing business needs without additional resource expenditure.
Cost Reduction: Lower operational costs through streamlined processes.

Planful finds its implementation in industries such as retail, healthcare, and manufacturing. Retail businesses leverage it for inventory forecasting and sales analysis. Healthcare institutions use it for budgeting and resource allocation, while manufacturers employ its analytics for production planning and cost management.

Planful

Sample Customers

HP, ForeScout, DocuSign, EAT, Pandora, Aviva, Intel Security, Zalora

Tandem Diabetes Care, Reed Exhibitions, SkyGolf, Zep Inc., Thule, Stylesight, Schumacher Group, Parsons Electric, Nextag, Groupon

Buyer's Guide

Anaplan vs. Planful

September 2026

Free Report: Anaplan vs. Planful

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