Anaplan vs Planful comparison

Anaplan and Planful are both solutions in the Business Performance Management category. Anaplan is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.4, while Planful is ranked #15. Anaplan holds a 7.4% mindshare in BPM, compared to Planful’s 3.1% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Anaplan users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Planful users who would recommend it.

Anaplan

Read 35 Anaplan reviews

5,073 Views
2,131 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

Planful

Read 2 Planful reviews

795 Views
676 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Anaplan

Planful

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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: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Anaplan vs. Planful

December 2025

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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

2nd

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Production Planning (3rd), Predictive Analytics (4th)

Planful

Ranking in Business Performance Management

15th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Financial Close Software (19th)

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Business Performance Management category, the mindshare of Anaplan is 7.4%, down from 13.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planful is 3.1%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Performance Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Anaplan	7.4%
Planful	3.1%
Other	89.5%

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 has positively impacted my organization by reducing the coding work involved by developers, increasing work flexibility, and enabling a better division of tasks among testing, development, and implementation teams."

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

"The solution scales well."

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

"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'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."

"After we implemented it in Anaplan, it made the calculations much easier and at one time, multiple users could log into Anaplan and work simultaneously for different areas."

"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)."

More Anaplan pros

"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

"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 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."

"Anaplan should come up with flexible options to connect to a data warehouse rather than an Anaplan hub."

"The price of the solution can improve."

"There is a chance of improvement for the history. In Anaplan back-end model, if there is any change, it is captured in the history, however, on the front-end UX page, if there are any changes on the UX page, there is no history captured."

"I chose a rating of eight because there is one backlog item: we are currently not using Anaplan for data reporting purposes."

"There are workspace issues, like the limitation on model sizes."

"The tool needs to work on its integration with MS Excel and MS Word. The tool does not allow data analysis in spreadsheets which is possible on other platforms. I want the solution to be more collaborative to facilitate decision-making in organizations."

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. 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 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."

"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."

"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."

"The tool’s pricing is reasonable and competitive with other solutions."

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

"Anaplan is a bit pricier compared to its competitors - the license costs about $4,000 per user annually."

"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

No data available

Computer Software Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

Construction Company

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	17

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

SAP ERP vs Anaplan

Compared 20% of the time

Board vs Anaplan

Compared 11% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Anaplan

Compared 10% of the time

CCH Tagetik vs Anaplan

Compared 6% of the time

Workiva Wdesk vs Anaplan

Compared 2% of the time

More Anaplan Competitors

Adaptive Insights vs Planful

Compared 17% of the time

Pigment vs Planful

Compared 13% of the time

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud vs Planful

Compared 8% of the time

Jedox vs Planful

Compared 8% of the time

OneStream XF vs Planful

Compared 8% of the time

More Planful Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Anaplan

January 2026

Download Anaplan product report

Buyer's Guide

Business Performance Management

December 2025

Download Planful product report

Also Known As

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Overview

Anaplan is a cloud-based planning and performance management platform with documented use cases in finance, sales, supply chain, marketing, IT and HR. At the core of Anaplan's technology is a single hub where business users can build, deploy, maintain, and share models without coding or reliance on IT personnel.

With Anaplan You Can:

Accelerate revenue growth
Convert data into market opportunity
Drive higher sales performance
Gain market share
Improve customer satisfaction
See edge-to-edge across your company
Achieve business and technology goals
Become agile and resilient with continuous models and forecasts

The Anaplan Platform Is:

Flexible
Scalable
Collaborative
Secure
Multi-dimensional
Built to help businesses think ahead and rapidly adapt to change

Anaplan Benefits:

Illuminate blind spots and hidden opportunities.
Easily create a shareable, living representation of how your business actually works.
Dynamic planning allows you to continuously adapt to market changes and other changing circumstances effectively.
Information is always readily available and can be easily shared with all teams across your enterprise.
Anaplan provides intelligent decision-making. The platform gives you all the information you need to make business decisions and also gives you the ability to run several “what if” scenarios to determine which decision is best based on a large range of variables - at record speed, instead of it taking days or weeks to complete.
By using Anaplan, you can adapt to changes very quickly. You can consider all of the possible options before responding in real time.
Anaplan can be used remotely from wherever you are.
Anaplan will help your organization stay focused and on target. You can stay in control with the ability to run scenario calculations quickly and use the information to make adjustments as needed.
Anaplan provides accurate, real-time data so you don’t have to worry about the risk of bad data. In turn, this boosts shareholder confidence because Anaplan’s platform mitigates the risks associated with incorrect data.
Anaplan’s Connected Planning helps you meet regulatory requirements. All the relevant business data is held in one place, therefore making adjustments easier to implement quickly. With Connected Planning, results also have a full audit trail.

Anaplan Features:

Hyperscale computing: Anaplan eliminates the “messy middle” caused by out-of-date, siloed signals.
Integrated and dynamic signal set: This feature incorporates internal and external factors, relationships, and market context across functions which can all be seamlessly integrated.
Responsive unified system: Anaplan’s high-fidelity, responsive, and unified system for execution and accountability is reliable, accurate, and traceable.
Real-time insights: Detect signals hidden in your systems and gain insight into every asset, resource, risk, and change to help provide decision clarity.
Unlimited multi-dimensional scenarios: Anaplan helps your organization run unlimited multi-dimensional scenarios to identify ideal plans of action.
Synchronization: Using Anaplan, you can synchronize execution and readiness. Anaplan enables autonomous and coordinated in-market action by connecting headquarters to your most remote outposts.

Reviews from Real Users:

"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.” - Sandeep A., Lead Analyst at a retailer

"This product has a very good modeling feature, and its graphical representation of visualizations has also been valuable.” - Raghavendra K., Lead Consultant at a tech services company

"Anaplan is a three-dimensional cloud platform that is good for analyzing data, visualization, integration, terrific for visibility.” - Anaplan model builder at a tech services company

Anaplan

You need a financial planning solution that meets the structured demands of standardized financial planning and reporting requirements and regulations. Structured Planning with Planful automates labor-intensive planning activities in a complete cloud-based platform – giving your finance team control, consistency, and confidence in corporate financial plans.

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

December 2025

Free Report: Anaplan vs. Planful

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