Anaplan Review - why 4.4 stars?

Officially launched in 2011, Anaplan is becoming one of the most prominent players in the budgeting software field, with a customer base increase of 500% in 2012 around the world, and clients such as Jive, Pandora, McAfee and Kimberly-Clark.

Anaplan stands out with its scenario planning and powerful performance analytics, combined with a highly scalable platform which make it a fitting solution for fast growing businesses looking into performance management and future forecasting abilities.

This solution offers a unified approach to planning and performance management that allows aligning data between departments that usually do not work well together because of incompatible tools or methods, thus creating an accurate model with priceless added value that can be leveraged towards future expansions.

Anaplan is funded by Meritech Capital Partners, with business partners in USA, most of Western Europe, Russia, Czech Republic, and recently Asia.

The rating of Anaplan is 4.4 stars out of 5 and the total score is 89 out of 100. The ratings are based on our unbiased experts. Learn more in our rating methodology page

Anaplan’s target users are executives from sales, operations and finance, and its sales orientation that includes features such as modeling for maximizing sales per sale territory will apply to global companies with branches across the world.

Anaplan's main market is big enterprises willing to improve the performance of their company. This is a market already invaded by big names like Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM but Anaplan hopes to win its share of it by bringing in a new technology that would combine cloud with in-memory architecture.

Key customers currently using Anaplan are big technology multinationals like McAfee, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, and companies such as Diageo, Taylor Wimpey, Pandora, Lexmark International, Inc. and Activision.

Anaplan is ranked 2 out of 46 software in their category (Business performance management systems).

Anaplan was designed to improve business performance, analysis, planning, forecasting and modeling. It is capable of scaling to meet the needs of the biggest companies in the world.

Anaplan allows you to update plans on the fly, collaborate with team members and turn complex business operations into easy to use models. Its true cloud SaaS model and in-memory architecture require minimal IT intervention, and its simple Excel-like UI allows quick user implementation. In addition, Anaplan’s self-service approach allows end users to quickly and easily build their own applications without consuming IT resources.

The competitors for Anaplan include Adaptive Planning and Prophix.

Prophix includes a comprehensive planning suite to support corporate performance management. Its features include revenue & cash flow planning, project & capital expenditure planning as well as strategic planning to support budgeting & forecasting. In addition there is personnel planning for resource cost optimization, and support for profitability analysis to improve both sales & operations decision making. Prophix also includes a strong business analytics portfolio that supports dashboards, scorecards and market benchmarks as well.

In comparison while Anaplan addresses similar financial planning aspects, the product extends into sales and operations planning as well. In sales this includes planning for territory & sales quotas, trade promotions, as well as incentive compensation. While in operations there are options for project & site development planning, as well as demand planning to optimize customer requirements. Companies can choose to utilize existing planning models or use the product’s dynamic modeling interface to develop their own planning applications.

Adaptive Planning provides a similar solution to Anaplan but includes support for rolling forecasts which can update the planning process dynamically with real time data updates. Additionally the product can handle capital asset planning to improve allocations. Adaptive Planning also supports modeling for multiple organizational instances and provides self service portals with data analytics for individual planning requirements.

Anaplan on the other hand offers integration with Salesforce, includes workflow automation in a collaborative platform and supports mobile device access as well. Additionally companies can take advantage of its multi-dimensional planning feature to model various requirements of different organizational levels.

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