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Anaplan vs Planful comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

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
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Production Planning (5th), Predictive Analytics (4th)
Planful
Ranking in Business Performance Management
16th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Financial Close Software (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the Business Performance Management category, the mindshare of Anaplan is 13.5%, down from 15.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planful is 2.6%, down from 3.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Performance Management
 

Featured Reviews

Antonio Flor - PeerSpot reviewer
Real-time data integration enhances operational efficiency and flexibility
As a client developer and solutions architect, I use Anaplan for building modules and deploying logic end-to-end. I work closely with the business in an agile manner to ensure the model aligns with business needs Anaplan offers flexibility in building different options within the platform. The…
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

"Anaplan provides 130 GB of cloud storage for organizations to use as part of their license."
"You don't need to have a programming language to use Anaplan."
"The best thing is that it's very intuitive and user-friendly. You don't need coding skills to manipulate the platform."
"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."
"The solution works very well for budgeting."
"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."
"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."
"This product has a very good modeling feature, and its graphical representation of visualizations has also been valuable."
"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 is a relatively expensive piece of software."
"It would be nice if the solution offered better extensions."
"Anaplan should come up with flexible options to connect to a data warehouse rather than an Anaplan hub."
"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 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."
"The cloud engine slows down when working with a large dataset. It still lacks a powerful engine."
"The visualization tools in the product are limited in comparison to other reporting tools."
"Anaplan could enhance its user interface by including a more user-friendly API."
"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

"This is an expensive product and if the price were reduced then it would attract more customers."
"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."
"The license is a yearly subscription. There are three licensing tiers: the model builder, planner, and the reporting."
"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 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 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."
"The tool’s pricing is reasonable and competitive with other solutions."
"The price of the solution is expensive."
"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
Educational Organization
18%
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Real Estate/Law Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
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...
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...
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

 

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Sample Customers

HP, ForeScout, DocuSign, EAT, Pandora, Aviva, Intel Security, Zalora
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Find out what your peers are saying about Anaplan vs. Planful and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
856,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.