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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
6.9
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
Production Planning (5th), Predictive Analytics (4th)
Planful
Ranking in Business Performance Management
15th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Financial Close Software (19th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Business Performance Management category, the mindshare of Anaplan is 13.1%, down from 15.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planful is 2.8%, down from 3.4% 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's connected planning feature is its most valuable aspect, allowing for seamless financial planning, HR planning, and updates."
"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."
"The features that I have found most valuable are that it is web-based and easy to use."
"Anaplan provides 130 GB of cloud storage for organizations to use as part of their license."
"Technical support has been good."
"This product has a very good modeling feature, and its graphical representation of visualizations has also been valuable."
"Anaplan offers flexibility in building different options within the platform."
"It's real-time connected planning, so the calculations are pretty much seamless as far as your model is connected."
"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."
"One key area of improvement is pricing."
"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 solution could improve by better dashboards and while entering the form loss and project implementation the ability to use graphical shapes more effectively."
"The integration technique should be a little bit easier."
"One area of improvement is conditional formatting. It's not very practical, and you need to specify additional formatting."
"Anaplan should come up with flexible options to connect to a data warehouse rather than an Anaplan hub."
"The visualization tools in the product are limited in comparison to other reporting tools."
"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

"The license is a yearly subscription. There are three licensing tiers: the model builder, planner, and the reporting."
"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."
"Anaplan is a bit pricier compared to its competitors - the license costs about $4,000 per user annually."
"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 price of the solution is expensive."
"This is an expensive product and if the price were reduced then it would attract more customers."
"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 tool’s pricing is reasonable and competitive with other solutions."
"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
13%
Computer Software Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
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
Tandem Diabetes Care, Reed Exhibitions, SkyGolf, Zep Inc., Thule, Stylesight, Schumacher Group, Parsons Electric, Nextag, Groupon
Find out what your peers are saying about Anaplan vs. Planful and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
860,632 professionals have used our research since 2012.