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Anaplan Reviews & Product Details

Paul P.
PP
Director
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Anaplan?

Excel is great when you are working by yourself, but as you start to collaborate with colleagues and add enterprise-level amounts of data the cracks start to show. Anaplan gives you the same flexibility to build whatever you need, but with enterprise-level information system guardrails for things like security, auditability, change control, etc. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

The initial price point is pretty high. It is hard for organizations to inexpensively do a Pilot or Proof of Concept. I would like to see them offer an inexpensive 90 or 180 day option for 2-4 users with Model Builder access to accelerate adoption. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

Anaplan helps our clients connect their Financial planning with Operational planning. We hear over and over again from our clients that they are able to forecast more frequently and more accurately because the Anaplan solutions we configure for them reduce the time to forecast and plan. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Anaplan Overview

What is Anaplan?

Anaplan is the only scenario planning and analysis platform designed to optimize decision-making in today’s complex business environment so that enterprises can outpace their competition and the market. By building connections and collaboration across organizational silos, the platform intelligently surfaces key insights — so businesses can make the right decisions, right now.​ More than 2,400 of the world’s best brands continually optimize their decision-making by planning with Anaplan. G2 categories include: Corporate Performance Management, Budgeting & Forecasting, Compensation Management, Financial Close, Sales & Ops Planning, Sales Performance Management, Sales Planning, Supply Chain Planning, and Workforce Management.

Anaplan Details
Languages Supported
English
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Product Description

Anaplan provides a SaaS business modeling and planning platform for enterprise planning. It serves multiple functions across the business including: Finance, Marketing, Sales, Supply Chain, and Workforce.

How do you position yourself against your competitors?

Anaplan sells its cloud-native SaaS platform to optimize business planning and performance management in functions including finance, sales, supply chain, workforce and marketing. Its planning tools can be used for budgeting, forecasting, modeling, pricing optimization, analysis, and other planning and management tasks. In September 2020, Anaplan began offering its enterprise and business performance software on Google Cloud.

Among other tasks, the planning platform’s connected planning is used by businesses for planning and modeling. The company’s in-memory HyperBlock® calculation engine allows thousands of concurrent users to access centralized data pools to create models and plans for collaborative planning across all departments. Data is processed in real-time.


Seller Details
Seller
Anaplan
Year Founded
2006
HQ Location
Miami, FL
Twitter
@anaplan
22,465 Twitter followers
LinkedIn® Page
www.linkedin.com
2,377 employees on LinkedIn®
Description

Anaplan is building a future where connected leaders and teams are able to constantly adapt, transform and reinvent their businesses. We make it possible to share actionable insights, empower and unleash creativity, and drive innovation. With Anaplan, finance and operational leaders across the organization can model complex scenarios, forecast continuously with added intelligence, and make agile decisions with confidence.


Andrea B.
AB
Overview Provided by:
Sr. Manager, Customer Marketing

Recent Anaplan Reviews

Verified User
C
Verified UserMid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
4.0 out of 5
"Great flexible cloud based platform"
Cloud based platform Application Lifecycle Management UX Dashboards Flexible formula based logic
JS
James S.Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)
4.5 out of 5
"Anaplan continues to improve for Sales Planning"
Anaplan's platform continues to evolve in an incredible way. Just in the last 18 months, the following has released: app native workflow, build in ...
KS
Khushboo S.Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)
5.0 out of 5
"Master Anaplanner"
Its flexibility and scalability make it suitable for various use cases across different industries. Easy to use, Ease to implement, Reliable custom...
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Anaplan Media

Anaplan Demo - The Anaplan Platform
The Anaplan platform is a unified cloud-based solution that connects people, data, and plans to enable complex scenario modeling and drive growth
Anaplan Demo - OpEx Planning
Review revenue target setting goals by brand, season, and capacity all on a unified, highly-visual dashboard
Anaplan Demo - Supply Planning
Break down costs across assembly production to project profitability and align your supply chain to market opportunities
Anaplan Demo - Territory and Quota Planning
Keep track of sales goals and quotas across territories and industries to optimize sales performance
Anaplan Demo - Headcount Planning
Easily align workforce plans with your strategic plans; quickly see where the best qualified talent resides to fit your organization’s staffing needs
Anaplan Demo - Marketing
Eliminate spreadsheets to drive efficiency across planning and manage budget against planned activity
Answer a few questions to help the Anaplan community
Have you used Anaplan before?
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Video Reviews

390 out of 391 Total Reviews for Anaplan

4.6 out of 5
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390 out of 391 Total Reviews for Anaplan
4.6 out of 5
390 out of 391 Total Reviews for Anaplan
4.6 out of 5

Anaplan Pros and Cons

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Pros and Cons are compiled from review feedback and grouped into themes to provide an easy-to-understand summary of user reviews.
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Time to Implement
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>12 months
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48+ months
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JS
Director of Commercial Strategy
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Anaplan?

Anaplan's platform continues to evolve in an incredible way. Just in the last 18 months, the following has released: app native workflow, build in data management, AI, brand new tech that builds models for you ("T&Q app"). It's changing what you expect from an EPM tool Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

Anaplan's pricing can be confusing and opaque. This is due to an evolving platform, technology, and GTM model. Customers from just 3 years ago may have completely different expectations on pricing and that can cause friction. However, the GTM model had to change - the platform, which did not drastically change from 2014-2022, has received an incredible overhaul in terms of technical functionality, and old pricing models did no capture that at all. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

I will specifically answer this question regarding the territory and quota (T&Q) use case. T&Q represents a widespread, needed-everywhere planning problem but it doesn't have any of its own big software players. The reason is that Anaplan is so well-suited to the use case, that you'd waste your time trying to create a bespoke competitor. And Anaplan's offering is only strengthening.

T&Q has the hallmarks needs of planning: nuanced, many disparate data sets, very large data sets, operational and financial considerations, many distributed stakeholders, and consistent collaboration. Anaplan checks each of those boxes an we see it at our customers. Our customers tell us they love a prescriptive approach that they still can own (the new T&Q app comes out of the box), where they can merge what they love about their current process with the best-in-class they need. These streamlined T&Q apps help our customers create fairer territories with better account scoring, build better quotas to set the right incentives and reach the right attainment curve, and do it all significantly faster. Our happiest customer now deploys territories and quota before the yera begins when it previously took them until 6 weeks into Q1. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Thierry D.
TD
Consultant Master Anaplaner
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Anaplan?

Anaplan is an excellent EPM tool for business process planning. Its computing power allows you to produce real-time simulations of several scenarios based on complex sets of hypotheses defined for and by the business.

Data processing is comprehensive, covering a wide range of business needs through a large number of native functions and formulas.

A large number of use cases can be modelled.

The user experience is simple to set up, pleasant to use and allows a large number of graphical displays. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

Despite its many strengths, Anaplan could benefit from better rendering tools for modelbuilders to manage complex models. The lack of a ‘saved views’ parameter-setting page, similar to the ‘lineItem’ page, can lead to a loss of time when analysing complex models.

There is also not easy to find indication of the publication of modules, and this information could be needed for a detailed analysis, particularly in the case of models with a very large number of pages in their app.

These few elements could improve the modelling experience. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

Before using this EPM tool, the exchange file formats differed depending on who was involved. The business process was neither clear nor fluid.

Implementing a management system with Anaplan means more accurate decision-making, thanks to real-time scenario simulation, more reliable results, a single, well-defined process for everyone involved in the business, and a single, reliable data source. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Constantin T.
CT
Co-Founder
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Anaplan?

From a partner's perspective, it is so easy to learn the programming language. From a user perspective, I like how easy it is to update front-end pages when I want to have a specific view. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

The company is growing quickly, and sometimes they might not keep up with the client requirements. But they seem to always push for more which is fantastic. So far, there wasn't a problem for which they didn't have an immediate solution or a workaround. So that's great Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Anaplan:

If you are a medium or large sized company that stil uses Excel for it's planning, budgeting and forecasting process, Anaplan is a great tool for unifying your processes, disrupting the department silos and enable collaboration for a faster and better business process within your company. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

I'm helping clients by making internal business processes faster and more efficient. You enable decision making avoiding the number-crunching that usually takes place when you use a more labor-intensive tool such as Excel. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

BS
Manager
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Anaplan?

Most of my engagements on Anaplan have been around financial planning with very large and complex data sets. Anaplan's ability to allow you to slice, dice and join data to calculate forecasts is something I haven't seen on any other platform at this scale. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

The main issue I have only applies to using the Polaris engine. In Polaris, there are functions and formulas that are unavailable that are otherwise available in the standard Anaplan platform. This requires the users to think through their build and construct the model in a way that avoids these issues. Additionally, when developing in Polaris, extra care needs to be taken to ensure proper syntax as the "toaster" can take longer than in a standard Anaplan model to clear when an error is made. In general, I would recommend customers weight the pros and cons of Polaris and work with an experienced Imiplementation Partner. This should help ensure a smooth decision-making process, model build and model rollout. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

In previous engagement, we used Anaplan to create both Current Quarter and Long-Term Forecasts for Orders, Revenue and Margin for a large Telecom company. We had to bring together over 30 data sets in order to do this, meaning that Anaplan was being used to slice, dice and join those data sets to allow us to forecast. This data included Salesforce data, Oracle data, contract data, transit time data and numerous others. I can't even count how many spreadsheets and manual processes we replaced with that model. Prior to that I build short and long-term forecasting models for large financial firms, primarily in the mortgage servicing industry. In my current engagement we are working to implement Anaplan to build a truly "connected planning" environment with a top healthcare firm by bringing together the planning functions of multiple divisions and replacing dozens of spreadsheets and outdated processes with Anaplan models. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

KD
Engagement Manager/Solutions Architect
Small-Business(50 or fewer emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Anaplan?

Anaplan allows the "business" to own the toold rather than IT. This allows areas like finance and sales to make changes and updates to the logic without having to wait for IT to make the changes. Plus, the changes are easy becasue the "logic" is behaves in the same way as other programs used by the business. Anaplan also allows the business to design the tool to cater to the specific needs of the business such as terminoly and allowing for unique processes. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

There are quite a few ways to connect data to Anaplan, but not always a direct connection. However, Anaplan is constantly evolving as well. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

Anaplan can be used as a tool to centralize many processes. Each department within a business can create a process in Anaplan that fits their specific needs while also being able to aggregate the results into a summary level (such as corporate planning) all within the same tool with real live connectivity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

CG
Senior Consultant
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Anaplan?

I love the ease of building in Anaplan compared to the Excel documents I used to work with. The syntax is straightforward, and the drill-down feature makes it very easy to troubleshoot any issues while building out a User Story. Anaplan takes out all the validation issues that come along with end-users "fat fingering" a key and erasing data. Also, the history feature where you can view any change to a specific cell has been incredibly useful. When troubleshooting issues with end-users since I can see the exact action they ran and what order they performed the steps. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

My major issue with Anaplan is the concurrency issues when running processes or editing cells. The first complaint I hear from any client is that there is a blue box on their screen preventing them from entering data. I have minimized the time the actions run by following the best practices, but when there are multiple users in the system, it will inevitably happen. I know that I could remove actions from the end-users, but the clients ask for a way to input then submit. So therefore, I have to have a submission action. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Anaplan:

Anaplan is a sleek and powerful tool that can help you escape the large, slow, clunky Excel files you're dealing with today. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

The main problem I run across with all clients is the need to move from Excel because the file is too large and will not load/perform properly. Anaplan is the perfect tool for these cases because it can replicate excel almost precisely, giving the clients comfort, while also being a much more powerful tool that can handle large amounts of data without performance issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Vignesh M.
VM
Solution Architect
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Anaplan?

Using Anaplan since 2012, seen how anaplan changed over period of time in every possible way from coding, user interface and enabling MLachine Learning and Artifical Interlligence....,

1. Anaplan continous focus on improvement of the platform,

2. Time to deploy the solution and scalability

3. Ease of coding Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

I like Anaplan a lot overall, however I believe there is space for improvement in UX to imporve usability, also some functionalities which exist in excel are not available and had to find a workaround which is not super complex. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Anaplan:

Refer to the Apps in Anaplan App hub and check best practises articles like Planual and other Posts in community. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

We have been using Anaplan since long time, we use it across various financical use cases; Revenue and Expenses Forecasting, Insurance P&L, Real Estate Cashflow modeling, Real Estate P&L...

Anaplan helped us in various ways starting from connecting all the financical model to see the real time impact, each model has its own benefits, Below is the benefit of our first Anaplan implemention within our orgainsation.

Before Anaplan, we had to consolidate 100+ spreadsheet from asset managers from various location to produce Fund cashflow and Fund performance metrics, more time was spent on data collection, error checking, and reporting.

After Anaplan, zero time spent for reporting as anaplan is powerful enough to produce real time consolidated reports, one platform to manage 100+ properties. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

AD
Solution architect, team lead
Mid-Market(51-1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Anaplan?

I like that the user experience is really flexible and meets the main needs of most enterprises. The Connected Planning experience a good implementation can give to its customers is a high-end solution that works really well. The platform constantly expands and is market competitive, the multiple integration options allow the system to communicate and seamlessly fit in any existing environment. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

Having been exposed to the gritty back-end work and not only the shiny front-end, there are things that can be enhanced in the way the dimensions work and the way the engine performs - being a live system means any blocking action cripples user experience for everyone involved. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

Enterprises shifting their planning processes to a tool that can meet all their needs - processes can be clear and concise, and seamlessly interact with the overall business cases. Complex processes that span over multiple regions and business units are usually difficult to optimize or consolidate; however using Anaplan makes this step far easier to accomplish and maintain. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

SK
Senior Manager, Finance Transformation
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
What do you like best about Anaplan?

Anaplan is an easy-to-use SaaS platform with global coverage. Over the last 10 years, they have adopted the best-in-class funcitonalities on their platform to rival other big players in the EPM space such as Oracle, SAP and TM1. It is used for enterprise wide planning and improving collaboration among various teams within an organisation from finance to sales, HR, marketing, tax, operations and treasury to name a few. The platform uses simple drag and drop functionality along with excel-like scripting to build models and front-end pages, resulting in quicker adoption times for both end-users and new model builders and making implementation a breeze. The Anaplan REST API can be leveraged to connect the system to other existing ERPs and master data source system to ensure integrity of data across an enterprise. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

While Anaplan has recently produced some exceptional functionalities like geo-mapping and workflow, and has a strong roadmap with GenAI coming into the picture soon, a lot of these capabilities (such as Workflow, or the new Polaris engine) come at an additional cost to customers. A lot of times customers are discouraged from using these features due to the additional price tag. This prevents consultants and partners like us from leveraging the full power of Anaplan to implement for the customer. However, the minimum/basic features that come with an enterprise licence are sufficient for a great start to the Anaplan journey. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

Anaplan solves a wide array of problems including but not limited to: better data integrity, improved collaboration, scenario planning, faster forecasting cycles. Even though we are a partner/consultant, we also use Anaplan internally for sales perfomance management, financial budgeting/forecasting and workforce planning. Adopting Anaplan has made the before-mentioned processes significantly faster and more reliable. I have also implemented supply-chain use cases for customers, which have resulted in better communication with their suppliers, reduced cost through optimised inventory and better collaboration across the enterprise. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

RS
Manager
Consulting
Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
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Validated Reviewer
Verified Current User
Review source: Organic
(Original )Information
What do you like best about Anaplan?

I like Anaplan's planning and modeling features, intelligent engine, user experience, extensibility and scalability. Anaplan connects people, data and plans like no other with their unified cloud platform. New features and functionalities are incorporated into the platform on a frequent basis which enhance the product's value proposition and usability significantly. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Anaplan?

Auditability of line items can be enhanced by adding extra features like saved views references, filter references, UX page references etc. Ability to natively view the size consumed by a line item (not just cell count) can greatly help with size impact analysis. Detailed error logging and scheduler accuracy can be improved in Cloudworks. Native support for allowing input/breakback and calculation logic in the same line item can be added to further boost platform adoption in Retail Planning use cases. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Anaplan solving and how is that benefiting you?

Anaplan's versatility is one of its key differentiators. Using Anaplan, comprehensive planning solutions that facilitate quick decision-making can be built for all critical functions - Finance, Sales, Supply Chain, HR and Workforce, Marketing etc. As a partner, this enables me to implement best-in-class solutions for our customers and their planning needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.