We performed a comparison between IBM Planning Analytics and IBM Watson Explorer based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Anaplan, Oracle, Jedox and others in Business Performance Management."A lot of the platform is in-memory, so Planning Analytics can run calculations quite fast. It also offers several user interfaces. And in the newest version of Planning Analytics, there is a new one called the Planning Analytics Workspace. Maybe it could be useful for the business side."
"All the different platforms are well integrated."
"The product's stability is good."
"The ease of use is valuable. The fact that it's plugged into Excel spreadsheets is also valuable. It provides additional functionality where you can slice and dice the information in a way that you can't do with spreadsheets"
"The flexibility of IBM Planning Analytics is a great feature of this solution. The design flexibility with data rules and defining calculations The ability to combine online and offline calculations are a benefit. Additionally, the forecasting features and predictive analytics is very good."
"The most valuable feature is that it is able to slice and dice the data."
"The tool is flexible."
"It's a very stable, robust product."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them."
"The dashboard is very poor and needs a lot of improvement."
"It is a bit expensive, but it does the job."
"The tool's transport layer could be improved when promoting development between environments."
"The local authentication part is difficult to manage in the product, making it an area where improvements are required."
"It's highly competitive right now, and all the vendors are in a race to put out new versions with additional features. IBM comes out with new versions too often, and it has an impact on quality."
"It would have been better if the solution was not just a tool kit."
"It's wonky, and not super user-friendly with Excel."
"Planning Analytics could be improved by adding automation features."
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary"
"The solution is expensive."
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
Earn 20 points
IBM Planning Analytics is ranked 6th in Business Performance Management with 21 reviews while IBM Watson Explorer is ranked 9th in Data Mining. IBM Planning Analytics is rated 8.6, while IBM Watson Explorer is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Planning Analytics writes "Can easily create dashboards and helps businesses improve forecasting accuracy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Watson Explorer writes "Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them". IBM Planning Analytics is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, Microsoft Power BI, Anaplan, Jedox and IBM Cognos, whereas IBM Watson Explorer is most compared with Salesforce Einstein Analytics, Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.
We monitor all Business Performance Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
