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."The best thing is that it's very intuitive and user-friendly. You don't need coding skills to manipulate the platform."
"Anaplan is a three-dimensional cloud platform that is good for analyzing data, visualization, integration, terrific for visibility."
"Anaplan's strongest feature is that its GUI is very modern and user-friendly."
"The most valuable feature of Anaplan is machine learning. The solution is constantly evolving from feedback. Additionally, there is a wide range of training material online."
"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."
"I am impressed with the tool’s real-time calculations and intuitive interface. The tool’s user interface is the best compared to other software that I have worked with. I also find the tool’s management reporting feature valuable."
"It's real-time connected planning, so the calculations are pretty much seamless as far as your model is connected."
"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)."
"Our clients have improved a lot in terms of coordination and communication. This has improved their internal performance."
"The ability to do write back and visualization, with minimal IT development orientation."
"It is easy to make quick updates. As the business changes, we can maintain the tool without programming help from IT."
"The support from the BOARD team and their consultants is great. Whenever I use technical support, they are good."
"A lot of flexibility from the data modeling standpoint. It can add specific line items into our budget, for example, or if we want to make changes to the data model itself, we have that flexibility."
"Now, we have only one version of the truth."
"With the combination of 24/7 global support and their community, there was great customer service, tech support, and community support."
"It allows people to quickly create dashboards with reports."
"When there is a lot of data, it sometimes takes long to load."
"One area of improvement is conditional formatting. It's not very practical, and you need to specify additional formatting."
"It would be nice if the solution offered better extensions."
"Space and integration are a problem."
"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."
"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 cloud engine slows down when working with a large dataset. It still lacks a powerful engine."
"There are workspace issues, like the limitation on model sizes."
"We have had some challenges with newer version of the rollout in terms of stability."
"It's very powerful, but there is also a big learning curve. It should be a little more intuitive."
"The initial setup was very complex for us."
"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."
"I would like an eLearning platform for BOARD."
"The setup was a bit complex."
"It would be nice to be able to host your site and actually have BOARD be the driver of your site. So you could have anybody in your organization go to www.myorg.com, for example, and then go through what you allow them to go through. So rather than having to go through the application, to be able to go to actually host it to a website."
"One thing that I personally would like to see is additional visualization tools for visuals."
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, SAP S/4HANA, Oracle Hyperion, SAP Analytics Cloud 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.
We monitor all Business Performance Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
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.