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 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 is a three-dimensional cloud platform that is good for analyzing data, visualization, integration, terrific for visibility."
"It's simple to use with a lot of functions."
"Where we're seeing the opportunity in the market is at the Fortune 100 companies that have far more complex modeling type scenarios where you need to be able to have a lot of people collaborating together, and you need a lot of information all at everyone's fingertips. This is where you see the big advantage of a solution like Anaplan."
"Anaplan provides 130 GB of cloud storage for organizations to use as part of their license."
"The solution scales well."
"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."
"This product has a very good modeling feature, and its graphical representation of visualizations has also been valuable."
"Our data is now more structured. Between our data warehouse and BOARD, which are both brand new, we now have a more structured data view with more accurate, timely data."
"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."
"The ability to create a data model and have it in testing within a week is fantastic."
"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."
"We can build reports super fast."
"The ability to do write back and visualization, with minimal IT development orientation."
"The support from the BOARD team and their consultants is great. Whenever I use technical support, they are good."
"With the combination of 24/7 global support and their community, there was great customer service, tech support, and community support."
"One area of improvement is conditional formatting. It's not very practical, and you need to specify additional formatting."
"There are so many business rules to set up in the system that as a business user it's hard to gauge what they're doing and it's possible to get lost."
"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 integration technique should be a little bit easier."
"Space and integration are a problem."
"There are workspace issues, like the limitation on model sizes."
"Anaplan should come up with flexible options to connect to a data warehouse rather than an Anaplan hub."
"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."
"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."
"The one thing that I think we would like to see in terms of improvement of the application is the ability to print. It's fantastic to have all of these graphic visualization of data, but we're not able to very easily just print... From my perspective, if you can have a little "print" button and then you just click it and it would produce what's on the screen, that would be very helpful."
"We would like to see better logging in the procedural world."
"It would be nice to have more connectors for other data sources. BOARD is a great tool to become the single source of the truth. Making it easier to connect data sources for niche software tools will make it easier to keep everything in one place."
"It needs more export to Excel functionality. Right now, we're having to build within the cloud-based platform, as well as build within the Excel add-in, because the export to Excel is somewhat ugly."
"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."
"It would be huge in the future if BOARD offered a lot more graphs and presentations, and it was a lot easier to use."
"I'd like to see a more passive report user for enterprise report writers that aren't particularly technical."
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.
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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.