We performed a comparison between Anaplan and Board based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Business Performance Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's real-time connected planning, so the calculations are pretty much seamless as far as your model is connected."
"The solution scales well."
"You don't need to have a programming language to use Anaplan."
"It's highly flexible. If you've got a complex environment with complex calculations, you can build that out. So that's a really good positive."
"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 best thing is that it's very intuitive and user-friendly. You don't need coding skills to manipulate the platform."
"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."
"Anaplan provides 130 GB of cloud storage for organizations to use as part of their license."
"It allows people to quickly create dashboards with reports."
"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."
"It is easy to make quick updates. As the business changes, we can maintain the tool without programming help from IT."
"What is very valuable is the ability to customize. We didn't see a solution out there that really matched exactly what our functional requirements would be. So we were able to work with New Brain, our integrator, and we were able to build from the ground up what we wanted, and I think that's pretty unique to BOARD."
"It has definitely saved us time, especially in our budget and planning processes."
"The flexibility and the user-experience are the most valuable features of the solution."
"The support from the BOARD team and their consultants is great. Whenever I use technical support, they are good."
"The ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic."
"There are workspace issues, like the limitation on model sizes."
"It would be nice if the solution offered better extensions."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Anaplan is a relatively expensive piece of software."
"The price of the solution can improve."
"The negative is that the higher the flexibility, the higher is the complexity. That can act against you as a negative because it does require a model builder or a coder/developer."
"I would like to see better relationships with the partners."
"It would be huge in the future if BOARD offered a lot more graphs and presentations, and it was a lot easier to use."
"We are looking at ways to improve how we deal with security in BOARD and other similar things. "
"We can't delete entities and cubes in Boards because it interrupts our whole data model."
"The engine of the Board should be made powerful like the engine of IBM planning which is more powerful in terms of performance. The consolidated finance area also needs improvement."
"I'd like to see a more passive report user for enterprise report writers that aren't particularly technical."
"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."
"One of the things that I would like to see is the ability to have a rule directly referenced on the cubes."
Anaplan is ranked 1st in Business Performance Management with 24 reviews while Board is ranked 11th in Business Performance Management with 35 reviews. Anaplan is rated 8.0, while Board is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Anaplan writes "Great for large-scale modelling, easy to learn, and very stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Board writes "A stable solution with good user-experience, easy deployment but needs some improvement with engine ". Anaplan is most compared with SAP ERP, Oracle Hyperion, SAP S/4HANA, IBM Planning Analytics and Planful, whereas Board is most compared with SAP Analytics Cloud, IBM Planning Analytics, Oracle Hyperion, Microsoft Power BI and CCH Tagetik. See our Anaplan vs. Board report.
See our list of best Business Performance Management vendors.
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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 simultaneous users to speed the planning process. We see Anaplan competing with Host Analytics, Hyperion, Adaptive, that sort of thing.
BI evaluations generally include Qlik, Tableau and whatever the team used at a previous job posting. We do sometimes recommend Power BI but only if the team is willing to put the budget behind it to properly implement and design. (Lots of companies operate on the 'we're a Microsoft shop' theory and try to set it up themselves - which is fine if your IT guys are also data scientists but kinda sucks otherwise.)
So - in our customer base, which is a limited sample set but we're working on that, we don't see Board and Anaplan in the same evaluations - not to say that we shouldn't, just that we haven't.
So your choice is Board's BI and CPM capabilities, vs Anaplan's FP&A and BI features. As is always the case, whichever specific capability or feature set offers more defined, measurable ROI in your companies' particular situation determines 'better'.
I would say that Board and Anaplan are mainly used for FP&A and not BI.
As a small company, I would suggest using either Power BI or ThoughtSpot. With Power BI you will need some technical, data, analytical expertise either in-house or from a 3rd party. ThoughtSpot MSP may be the answer depending on your use case as there are packages around smaller organizations where you pay for the software already hosted on AWS and services included, all you need to do is provide data, it will be modelled as part of the service then you can search across the data as much as you want. I have a good example of a non for profit organisation using this.
I'm happy to help if you would like some further advice.
Usually, we say Board provides lots of toolkits to achieve both CPM and BI. But, the Anaplan mainly focuses on CPM solutions.
If the enduser doesn't have any existing planning strategy, maybe they can refer to Anaplan solution directly and easily.
If the enduser already has a clear planning strategy, and they just want to find a tool to achieve it, maybe Board is a better choice because its smart toolkits can be used easily and give more possibilities.
BTW, if you want to fully use the BI function (colourful charts, dashboard, multi-dimensional analysis), Board will be absolutely better.
Just for your reference.
Charles as Investment Director for an industrial company with only 1-10 employees, you may find that the SaaS costs of both BOARD and Anaplan are beyond your budget or need.
Happy to engage in a 1-2-1 to analyse requirements and if necessary make appropriate recommendations.