Planful is a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) suite. It includes financial applications for modeling, planning, consolidation, reporting and analytics.
N/A
Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning(formerly Adaptive Insights) is a financial planning and reporting tool. It includes automated budgeting and forecasting, financial reporting, and other active planning capabilities, including integrations with third-party products like Salesforce.
Planful seems to have the best price to performance option against the tools listed. Some of the more premium options on the market have outdated UIs and dont get updated as frequently and other in the same price category dont seem to have the same level of options and "ease" …
Planful was a more cost effective approach vs our previous platform (Adaptive) and is able to be managed fully within the FP&A team (no IT resources or outside consultants post-implementation)
Sr. Financial Analyst/ Planful System Administrator
Chose Planful
We felt the platform was more user-friendly and had better functionality for our purposes. Since we already had Planful instance within our company, we already had in-house expertise on the Planful system, which gave us some consistency in tools.
Ease of use, integrations, price, and excel compatibility were the driving factors behind getting off of Adaptive and selecting Planful over these other competitors
Planful is lightyears better than Adaptive in the way it allows you to customize and do things on your own. It doesn't use it's own formula language so it's very intuitive for average Excel users.
Very similar; Planful looks cleaner, Adaptive seems less painful.
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose Planful
Planful (formerly Host Analytics) can be quick to implement and does not require an army to administer. It's multi-dimensional technology also allows for a lot more flexibility in it's design and use. It's reporting suite is the most intuitive that I have seen in the industry. …
We selected Host Analytics due to (i) strong out of the box feature set, (ii) best excel integration among cloud tools, (iii) no model size limit, (iv) simple pricing, (v) solid customer references
Overall we thought that Host fit our company better than Adaptive. We thought the tools that it had to offer were better. In addition, we liked the sales pitch better than Adaptive.
Vena was a close second in our selection process. We liked the smaller price tag and faster start up time. It s use of Excel was attractive. However, we did not feel that it would be able to grow with us. It was only good for the short run. Adaptive had some good features. …
Being a small company with limited cash flow, my goal was to evaluate what functions that are important and how much that we have to pay for them and last how easy it is to maintain without owning internal IT staff. I have evaluated Hyperion, Adaptive, Vena, and Host. …
Host Analytics was more robust than Adaptive Planning. Since it is built around Excel, our users did not have to learn a new "language" as they would have with Prophix and it is more nimble and easier to support than SAP.
Cheaper than Hyperion and a better platform that the other cloud systems. We also looked at some Excel based budgeting systems but they all fell well short of our requirements.
Host user interface was more "user friendly" so we felt it would be easier to train our users and they would actually use the system, especially as compared to SAP business Objects.
We demoed Adaptive Insights about a year ago and at that time it seemed Host Analytics was slicker and easier to use than Adaptive. However, in a recent release of Adaptive Insights, the software has jumped well ahead of Host in UX. I have not seen Adaptive's day to day …
Workday Adaptive Planning
Verified User
Analyst
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Adaptive seemed to be the most user-friendly, easy to implement, and cost-effective solution.
My decision came down to Adaptive vs Host Analytics. Host made the claim that because their sheets were just like excel, you wouldn't need to learn any new commands. Rather, I thought that was a downside. I didn't want another glorified version of excel, I was looking for …
I prefer Adaptive Planning in comparison to Planful and Data Rails. It feels like is has been easier to use with a quicker learning curve. The other systems were more intimidating for the nonfinance users, like the budget owners who would only need it for reporting or inputting …
All of the systems have their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Workday Adaptive Planning as a system is further along in overall functionality and is a more user-friendly system compared to other EPM systems on the market.
Adaptive is much more flexible and powerful for our needs. It provides a wealth of reporting tools and capabilities that Cognos simply didn't or couldn't provide. The ability to have a team of one completely implement and manage the solution for a company is not unreasonable …
Adaptive Insights is well-positioned against the new tier of SaaS players as well as the larger, legacy, on-premise financial planning solutions such as Hyperion and IBM Cognos TM1. Its got an approachable user interface and relatively easy to use models and forecast …
When we were evaluating the software solutions we wanted: 1) A product that would efficiently consolidate our annual budget. 2) Something that would be easily adopted by the entire company.
Adaptive provided the best solution for the price given how we wanted to deploy the solution. For our size business they appear to the be best in class solution.
Host Analytics appeared to provide the same functionality, but was for a more distributed budgeting and …
We look hard at Host Analytics and softly at Longview and Prophix. Adaptive's advantages was ease of use, offered a full solution and pricing. We wanted to roll this out to the entire organization and felt Adaptive met those needs best and could grow with the company.
Adaptive has a much better interface and usability compared to all these systems. It is also less complex, easy to configure and install, and easy to teach. Adaptive is more affordable, both short and long term.
Adaptive Suite gave us what we needed and fit our use case perfectly. We did short list Host Analytics and they were neck and neck with Adaptive and it was a win/win for us and we would have been successful with either tool. My familiarity with Adaptive, the simplicity of …
We had meetings with several industry leaders and Adaptive was our choice in the end. We liked IBM and also liked Host Analytics for different reasons. In the end it was the combination of cloud, Excel add-in, Office Connect, Discovery, and cost that would ultimately end up …
We evaluated Host along with Adaptive, and chose Adaptive. We felt Adaptive was a better solution for our needs, which was primarily forecasting, and we thought Adaptive better handled our significant dimensionality all while maintaining a more user friendly interface. Our …
Adaptive was more flexible, able to be maintained without heavy IT involvement, cost effective, had no additional hardware requirements, and since it is a cloud platform, updates are automatic.
Cognos - capabilities are very similar. Cognos does allow a "push-down" (e.g. current rollup of Outside Services is $600k, enter $1mm at the highest level and the additional $400k is spread to the lowest level based on the existing spread).
We also looked at A3 Solutions, Budget …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
I've implemented Host Analytics at a previous company. We performed an extensive vendor selection process and Adaptive Insights came out on top. Adaptive Insights allowing us to use a demo helped prove the functionality of the software. Since we've started implementation there …
I have used Oracle, Host Analytics, and Axiom. Adaptive Planning is far and away superior to Host Analytics on every stand point. Adaptive Planning is a much easier version to use over Oracle and Axiom on a budgeting and planning only standpoint. When we chose Adaptive we only …
Verified User
Director
Chose Workday Adaptive Planning
Host Analytics which we also reviewed in-depth (saw demos, had department heads and users to sit in on demos, talked to vendor supplied references with both companies, asked same list of standard questions)
Adaptive planning was:
Planful, formerly Host Analytics, and Workday Adaptive Planning are both Corporate Performance Management software with strong focuses on budgeting and financial management. While the products historically catered to slightly different markets, they have become more directly comparable in recent years.
Planful serves midsize companies and enterprises, and is designed with scalability across that size range in mind. Historically, Adaptive Planning, formerly Adaptive Insights, catered more to growing midsize companies that had outscaled Excel-based financial processes. However, with Workday’s acquisition of the platform, Adaptive Planning has been expanding into the enterprise market more heavily as well.
Features
Planful and Workday Adaptive Insights both offer robust CPM features for scaling organizations.
Planful stands out for its easy deployment and prebuilt capabilities. Reviewers highlight the platform’s out-of-the-box feature set that does not rely on heavy customization. Planful also adjusts well to mid-flight dynamic budgeting. This capability gives large organizations and enterprises more financial maneuverability.
Workday excels in its relative user-friendliness, especially among professionals that are not used to working in CPM tools. For instance, reviewers frequently highlight Adaptive Planning’s Office Connect capability, which allows users more versed in Excel-based corporate performance management to more easily transition to the Workday platform. The user interface is also more friendly and accessible for users.
Limitations
There also some limitations or drawbacks to Planful and Workday Adaptive Insights worth evaluating.
Planful has been criticized for its reporting and data visualizations. While dynamic budgeting is well supported, Planful lacks equivalent dynamic and customizable reporting features. Reviewers frequently describe using 3rd party visualization tools in conjunction with Planful.
Workday also struggles some with reporting flexibility. Reviewers specifically criticize the web-based reporting functionality, which does not feel on par with the Office Connect-enabled reporting abilities. The processes and functions in Office Connect are also not identical to Excel, which requires some lingering learning curve when transitioning to the platform.
Pricing
Planful pricing is available by quote from the vendor.
Workday Adaptive Planning offers two packages, each priced by quote from the vendor. The Standard package includes all the core features and capabilities, while the Enterprise package adds on unlimited storage, additional automation, and sandboxing. Workday also offers 3 license types, a Full Seat, or admins, which cost the most, Contributors, which are standard users, and Viewers, which can access data but not make changes.
Features
Planful
Workday Adaptive Planning
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
6.3
35 Ratings
23% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
9.3
1 Ratings
16% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports
6.416 Ratings
9.01 Ratings
Customizable dashboards
6.531 Ratings
10.01 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates
6.129 Ratings
9.01 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Planful
7.2
62 Ratings
13% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
3% below category average
Drill-down analysis
7.960 Ratings
9.01 Ratings
Formatting capabilities
6.761 Ratings
7.01 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration
7.057 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages
00 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Planful
6.3
50 Ratings
25% below category average
Workday Adaptive Planning
8.0
1 Ratings
2% below category average
Publish to Web
6.814 Ratings
00 Ratings
Publish to PDF
6.946 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Report Versioning
5.230 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling
6.633 Ratings
8.01 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Planful makes it very easy to roll forward forecasts and conduct scenario analyses. I'm also a big fan of their reporting and how easy it is to distribute a report burst to satisfy all the needs and questions of our SLT. Lastly, their latest developments in the AI space make it easy to quickly identify outlier projections.
Adaptive is much more versatile than most planning software, and in most ways better than Excel for planning and analytics. It is great and bringing together data from multiple sources, especially if on the Workday platform, and really allows your team to collaborate in real time without any issues unlike trying to work in Excel workbooks at the same time or needing an adminstrator to enter data for you. Power users can even update models and reports themselves and share with others. The flexibility of designing your own models is also great in allowing you to plan however granular you need and have different methods of planning for different business units but bring it all together consolidated.The reporting is the least useful feature. Yes, OfficeConnect gives you all the power of Excel and PowerPoint and is great if you can utilize it, but for now it only works on Windows when many businesses have shifted to Apple or Google platforms. Also, OfficeConnect is not fast or easy to use, like the web reports and web dashboards, which are great for quick ad-hoc reports but not great for presentation-level reports. This creates a huge disconnect in the quickness of analytics, if you want to run and show in depth analytics you'll need OfficeConnect due to the limited functionality and limited formula capabilites of Adaptive web reports which requires someone to build and maintain and refresh the OfficeConnect reports which is slow and not easily shared with other users.Also the planning functionality of the 3 sheet types have not been updated in years. Some new features or sheet types would be greatly appreciated.
Creating forecasts for the month, quarter, and year
Creating new variables by using variables pre-defined and that are new in the system
Having a very simple setup in the reports section - not straying away from the old Excel model which most people are used to. I can speak for a lot of people when I say that tools that look new can easily be frightening! 😅
It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Multiple currency calculations/ consolidations support IFRS accounting
Ability to inactivate old data dimensions
Reporting - Need ability to expand all/collapse all lines easily
Reporting - Formula exceptions added to a report do not update when information is revised.
Automatic Sandbox refreshes initiated by Planful - When Planful does an automatic refresh of the sandbox environment, it copies any Boomi/integration connections.
Limited to 8 data dimensions in core application
Add more API connectors to make data integration easier
ability to transfer sandbox tests to production environment
Variable Time Roll-ups. Different entities within our company look at "years" differently, but we're only able to specify one global time roll-up for aggregating data quickly, which can lead to some confusion.
Administrative UI. Management of Access Rules and ordering sheets from an administrative point of view can be a bit tedious and have received less attention than other features recently.
List Sheet Reporting. Any sheet that is a variable list of things (like People, Capital Projects, Marketing Programs) is somewhat constrained in how it can be reported on. Adaptive provides two kinds of reports but both leave something to be desired when reporting on this kind of data.
Our new Comptroller understands the value of Planful, and we plan to utilize it further in the organization to enhance external reporting. Strangely enough, Planful had not previously been embraced by the former CFO, who argued that we were running two sets of books (of course, we were not). Fortunately, the before mentioned reconciliation of EBITDA to Net Income demonstrated that to the banks.
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
Planful is very easy to use for end users. The budget templates can be customized to meet the business needs. They just released business user experience functionality which you to take a complicated budget template and filter it down to meet departmental needs to avoid sending more lines than needed
Workday Adaptive Planning has detailed online help with both articles and videos that are comprehensive. It has a lot of similarities to Excel, which most finance people are already familiar with, plus the user interface is intuitive and easy to pick up. The online support team is quick to respond and very knowledgeable.
I only give a 9 rating rather than a 10 rating because it seems that every day around 2pm we see a slowdown in the use of Planful. I have requested our internal IT department verify that it is not an internal issue and have been assured it is the tool. We have not yet reached out to Planful to do extensive research to solve this issue.
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
Again, the system is very reliable and, for the most part, runs very quick and smooth. When running larger queries, it does take some time, and during budgeting season our users experienced slower loading times, but nothing that raises concerns outside of normal network issues. Occasionally, as with any software we use, it will crash and you have to restart, but that does not happen very often.
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
Sometimes we get great help when using Planful's support team and other times we don't. In particular, there is one person that often responds to our support tickets who is less than helpful, hence the reason for the 5 out of 10 rating. As a result, most of the time we reach out to our Planful consulting group as they provide faster and better support
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
My team has attended training offered several times before/during the Planful Perform conference. This training has been extremely useful and we always learn something we didn't know prior to the training. The trainers are always very knowledgeable and more than willing to help each and every user after the training with specific questions regarding their environment.
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
This training is much more robust now than it was when we first implemented our Planful environment. Many times we can do a little research in the "help" portal and do not even need to reach out to support. They are continuously improving the training and information available to users.
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
After going through the initial implementation with Host Analytics and a re-implementation with Cervello (due to an ERP change, not due to a poor initial implementation), I've learned that you really must rely on your internal staff to bear most of the implementation burden. Use the vendor or partners for ideas and best-practice suggestions, and some of the easy-but-time-consuming work. Since you will ultimately be using and maintaining the application, you should be able to do most of it yourself.
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
Planful seems to do a better job of pulling things in a format that is more understandable to an accounting-minded person, whereas the other platforms seem more focused on operations. From a detail perspective, Planful provides more powerful and complete data, in my experience. When using a platform for financial planning and budgeting, the details are critical and the ability to match the GL structure and pull full P&L data has been a big improvement from Qlik, which we used previously.
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
From our experience, Planful is only used in 2 overhead departments in our organization. We easily added another overhead department, but they decided against using Planful for their workforce and financial planning. Removing them from our environment was extremely easy.
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
We have saved a large amount of time on reports that we previously manually compiled in Excel via MS Dynamics. Planful was linked to Dynamics through automatically scheduled DLR's, reports were created, and now our manual processes are as simple as accessing and refreshing a report.
Dashboards have improved our budgeting process specifically with our production leaders as they can visualize their P&L's, their current actuals, current budget, and see where they are forecasting with their proposed budget for the next year
With the use of templates, structured planning, and the Simulation Engine, it has added a lot of value and automation to our annual budget process, allowing for plug-and-play type data loading and viewing various scenarios easily
Adaptive Insights has had a positive impact on organizational expansion. With our break-even analysis we have created, what would once take place in a notebook or Excel, we have created templates and can run a conservative estimate on revenue and costs quite quickly. We have cut back on research and time on expansion by months this way, to mere hours.
One negative impact is the costs with implementing connections between our other ERP systems with Adaptive Insights. Currently, we would like to have near real-time data, but cannot due to the costs. Currently, I am tasked with uploading from multiple systems and this can be time consuming, especially during a close.
Overall, positively we have had an excellent experience. The ease of the functionality and the easy learning curve have enabled everyone on my team to have an enjoyable experience.