Board vs Planful comparison

Board International and Planful are both solutions in the Business Performance Management category. Board International is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.0, while Planful is ranked #15. Board International holds a 6.9% mindshare in BPM, compared to Planful’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 94% of Board International users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Planful users who would recommend it.

Board

Read 37 Board reviews

1,117 Views
773 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Planful

Read 2 Planful reviews

759 Views
412 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Board

Planful

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 2024

Board and Planful are competing solutions in the financial planning and analytics space. Board seems to have the upper hand due to its robust data analytics and forecasting capabilities.

Features: Board provides integrated business intelligence, advanced forecasting abilities, and comprehensive data analytics features. Planful focuses on streamlined budgeting cycles, efficient financial consolidations, and user-friendly budgeting management.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Board presents a flexible deployment model supported by a robust system, requiring technical expertise. Planful offers a simpler user setup but could benefit from improvements in customer service responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: Board's higher initial setup cost matches its advanced analysis capabilities, while Planful's pricing aligns with a quicker return on investment, appealing to budget-focused users. No specific pricing details available.

To learn more, read our detailed Board vs. Planful Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Planful

April 2025

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Helped 851,604 peers since 2012

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

Board

Ranking in Business Performance Management

10th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (22nd), Reporting (19th)

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 May 2025, in the Business Performance Management category, the mindshare of Board is 6.9%, up from 5.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Planful is 2.7%, down from 3.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Performance Management

Featured Reviews

Wiboon Thabsuwan

Senior Consultant at IMD Company Limited

Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features

I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.

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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

"The drill down is good for people who have that high level view, because they can do some analysis based on it."

"I think it's flexible. I chose this solution because, even though it wasn't out-of-the-box, you can customize it, and the long-term growth potential of the software is where I see the value."

"My favourite feature of BOARD is the ability to write back to the OLAP DB, as well as the Rdb, and secure user data allowing databases to be flushed and rebuilt daily."

"Primary valuable features are its flexibility and versatility and, obviously, functionality goes along with that. Plus, it does that at a small footprint in the file servers, and does it very efficiently."

"We can build reports super fast."

"The reporting part has been very valuable as the capabilities of the tool do not have to change graphs, change how grids are displayed, and can create reports on the fly."

"Where it used to take me three days at the beginning of the year to create the new financial statement, now it is a matter of minutes because all the data is in the system."

"Instead of taking two people a week each month to perform our internal KPI reporting, the same two people can have it done in a day."

More Board 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

"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."

"It can have more functionality for narrative reporting. They should also improve their training courses, which are currently very lightweight. When you get into more complex things, it is quite difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do, and you have to look at a lot of videos before you actually understand, which is a bit frustrating. Their training can be more comprehensive."

"My analysts have used the technical support. Sometimes they have felt like they did not receive the answer that they needed, or you have to go and upgrade in order to address a problem. "

"We would like to see better logging in the procedural world."

"I would like an eLearning platform for BOARD."

"We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. "

"It's very powerful, but there is also a big learning curve. It should be a little more intuitive."

"Some of our users are still using an MS Office add-in for Excel for certain calculations, and when they export from Board, some of the values, some of the totals and column names, are not coming through into Excel."

More Board 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 solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."

"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."

"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."

"In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."

"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

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Real Estate/Law Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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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What do you like most about Board?

All the reports are prepared automatically.

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What needs improvement with Board?

Board's integration could be a bit more robust, but what we have works. If the design isn't right, the flexibility of Board can negatively impact performance.

See all answers

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Comparisons

Anaplan vs Board

Compared 30% of the time

Pigment vs Board

Compared 14% of the time

Microsoft Power BI vs Board

Compared 10% of the time

SAP Analytics Cloud vs Board

Compared 9% of the time

Oracle Hyperion vs Board

Compared 8% of the time

More Board Competitors

Adaptive Insights vs Planful

Compared 32% of the time

Jedox vs Planful

Compared 28% of the time

Anaplan vs Planful

Compared 22% of the time

Pigment vs Planful

Compared 18% of the time

More Planful Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Board

May 2025

Download Board product report

Buyer's Guide

Business Performance Management

May 2025

Download Planful product report

Also Known As

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Overview

BOARD International - headquartered in Switzerland - is a leading global provider of software for improving business results through better decision making. By unifying Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management into a single product, BOARD enables companies to achieve a shared vision of their performance across the entire organization, and thus a single version of the truth.

BOARD provides seamless solutions for • Reporting & Analysis • Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting • Profitability Modelling & Optimization • Simulation & What-if-Analysis • Scorecarding & Strategy Management • Financial Consolidation. Based on visual modelling, BOARD has enabled global companies to deploy BI and CPM applications without a single line of code in a fraction of the time and cost associated with traditional solutions.

Board International

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

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB

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

Buyer's Guide

Board vs. Planful

April 2025

Free Report: Board vs. Planful

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