Planful review: Pros, cons, and alternative financial software

Contents

1. What is Planful?
2. What does Planful do?
3. Planful pros
4. Planful cons
5. Planful use cases
6. Planful alternatives
7. Conclusion: is Planful for me?

Planful review

Here’s how Planful works, the features it offers, use cases, and the type of businesses it’s best suited for:

What is Planful?

Planful is a cloud-based financial performance management tool for financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams.

Like most modern FP&A software, it helps teams make more confident decisions and reduces reliance on manual processes.

While Planful offers a wide range of features, its limitations might make it not the best choice for fast-growing companies with evolving financial consolidation and management reporting needs.

Planful's biggest competitors are other top-tier FP&A tools like Cube, Anaplan, Workday Adaptive Planning, and Vena Solutions.

Planful features

Planful can help FP&A teams save time and automate manual processes. Its key features include:

• Financial planning: Lets users accelerate planning with pre-built templates and built-in financial intelligence.
• Financial close management: Enables users to automate financial close processes across multiple sets of financial documents.
• Management reporting: For users to automatically create ad-hoc or drill-through reports to guide key decision-makers.
• Cash forecasting: Allows businesses to stabilize their cash position, extend their runway, and build liquidity.
• Scenario planning: Helps users explore multiple scenarios to check the financial impact of decisions 
• Structured planning: Enables businesses to build an annual baseline plan across multiple departments and business units.
• Workforce planning: For businesses to forecast workforce needs, costs and eliminate work silos across teams.
• Currency conversion: Lets users set up currency exchange rate for budgeting and forecasting cycles.
• Rolling forecasts: Gives users real time visibility into financial metrics for them to develop a continuous planning process.
• Financial consolidation: Centralizes disparate spreadsheets, financial data, and operation systems from all sources and serves as a single source of truth. 

Let’s get into more detail: 

Dashboards and reporting

Planful offers templated, automated, and ad-hoc reporting and analysis capabilities designed to help teams surface insights and distribute those findings to stakeholders.

• The financial and regulatory reporting tools help with report creation and allow users to conduct self-service analysis.
• Investigation tools allow teams to explore variances with the help of AI and machine learning-driven insights, drill-through, pivot, and ad-hoc reporting.
• Distribution features allow users to deliver completed reporting and financials to relevant stakeholders automatically.

Financial close and financial consolidation

Planful lets you aggregate and validate data automatically for conducting month-end closing quickly and with a high degree of confidence. With Planful's financial reports, you can speed up your financial close process. 

Financial planning

Planful promises to automate the manual intervention of collecting data in order to reduce risk and save time. It also says it will continuously improve your team's financial IQ and bring more insights to the business.

Workforce planning

You can connect your HRIS and ERP to Planful. This means you can collect your workforce data in a single place.

Secure financial data

A great Planful feature is its security and intelligence capabilities. The platform offers multi-layer security to ensure sensitive information remains secure.

Planful features verification features such as role-based security, audit reporting, and easy security setup. 

Dynamic planning

Planful contains a dynamic planning engine, which is "an advanced multi-dimensional engine and analysis tool designed to support operational planning and advanced analysis."

Built for the web and Excel front-end, it allows for rapid ad hoc queries and formatted reporting. Dynamic planning helps make performing what-if analysis using your Planful data much simpler.

Who is Planful for?

Planful's users are usually mid-market companies, according to Rowan Tonkin, CMO at Planful.

While Planful does have larger businesses in its customer base, the majority of Planful users are comfortably mid-market.

So, small businesses might not need all the features and Planful might not be powerful enough for very large enterprises.

How to implement Planful

Planful promises a finance-owned platform with “minimal IT involvement.” However, the platform is reportedly hard to integrate and get off the ground. 

This requires some upfront investment from IT professionals or (in the absence full internal IT team) consulting from outside agencies to implement. This is due to the myriad of connectors. More complex organizations will have a much longer onboarding period. Some consultants offer an 8-to-12 week Planful implementation plan.

Planful use cases

The Planful platform offers functionality for multiple departments that plan or track corporate spending.

Finance

Financial planning and analysis teams use Planful to create budgets and forecasts, build annual operating plans, forecast cash flow, build reports, and conduct scenario analysis.

Accounting

The AP and AR departments use Planful for financial close, running financial reports, and consolidating financial data.

HR

Human resources can use the platform to conduct workforce planning, compensation modeling, strategy-building, and capacity planning. 

Marketing

Planful is useful for professionals managing the marketing budget, estimating marketing ROI, and planning their marketing spending.

Does Planful integrate with Microsoft Excel?

Technically no. Planful promises users an environment where they can handle complex financial processes while working in a familiar, Excel-modeled environment. The platform isn’t Excel-native---you need to use a separate plug-in that converts your Excel data into a Planful template.

The plug-in, called AirliftXL, only works with one kind of Planful template. You can install it only on Windows 7 machines, and as of this writing, it doesn’t support SSO users.

So you have to have Planful native on your machine, which is a deal breaker if you're not running Windows 7. Planful integrates with AirliftXL, which then integrates with Excel. But Planful and Excel don't directly interact with each other.

Planful pricing

Planful does not disclose its pricing structure.

However, reviews describe it as more cost-competitive than other similar platforms like Anaplan or Workday Adaptive Planning.

While third-party data sources provided no definitive information, Peerspot quotes one user as saying the platform requires multi-year contract pricing. 

Planful pros

Planful has plenty to offer, including:

Lots of features

Planful has enough features to offer flexibility for organizations. It has a mix of financial budgeting, forecasting, scenario planning, and wider financial management features. 

The platform is functionally capable of meeting the needs of mid-market businesses. 

Not Excel-based, but not worlds away

While the switch to Planful means giving up Excel, the leap isn't so big...at least when it comes to the syntax. Excel power users will note the similarities to Planful's syntax.

Also, Planful is not an Excel-native platform.

Tier-based pricing

Although Planful does not make its pricing structure public, reviews often refer to its competitive pricing structure as a plus. It’s a fully-featured platform that competes in the top 10 with other options mentioned in this review.

However, smaller businesses may find the system has more features than they will use early in the journey, and as businesses scale, the affordable price has potential tradeoffs.

(More on those below.)

Planful cons

Although Planful provides a solid alternative to more expensive solutions for younger or more budget-conscious companies, there are a few drawbacks to note when evaluating the platform:

Less-than-ideal implementation processes

One of the most common criticisms of Planful concerns the implementation process. In some cases, implementation required the use of third-party consultants to help with migration. As one reviewer shared, “Integration has gone on for months—multiple recurring errors due to the integration team.” 

It's worth noting that this is an outlier—most Planful implementations take between 8 to 12 weeks—but those worst-case scenarios can happen, especially when you add third parties like external consultants.

Also: implementing Planful is expensive.

Slow data retrieval and manipulation

Data retrieval and manipulation within the system are slow, and reporting is sometimes over-complicated. One user reported, “Data pull is not immediate and can cause some frustration if data is not pulled 100% accurately the first time.”

Another user expressed concern about the ability to scale with its inherent size limitations. So while Planful helps teams save time, the exact value of that time is a little suspect.

Steep learning curve means a long time to value

Users describe the learning curve as steep and “non-intuitive,” with a dated UI that makes the system more difficult to navigate. The platform is reportedly more technical than other solutions and, therefore, not best suited for the layman user.

Compounding the issues with adoption, reviewers report that the training and onboarding materials aren’t sufficient for bringing new users up to speed.

So if your organization needs a great tool with quick time-to-value, you might express some concerns about Planful.

Mixed customer service reviews

The company gets mixed reviews in terms of customer service. While more recent reviews applaud improvements in the customer services and customer support experience, support services and response times have been an issue in the past.

If that white glove service is important to you, Planful isn't your best option.

Top Planful alternatives

There are more options for FP&A than ever, with companies offering financial analysis solutions at many price points and for different target companies in mind.

Let's look at some Planful alternatives.

1. Cube

Cube is a cloud-based FP&A platform that helps companies hit their numbers without having to sacrifice their spreadsheets. Cube helps finance teams work anywhere—integrating natively with both Excel and Google Sheets—so that they can plan, analyze, and collaborate with the ultimate speed and confidence.

Many high-growth companies (like Instride and Figment) use Cube for all their FP&A needs. 

Because here's the thing:

Cube can do almost everything Planful does, and then some. For example, Cube: 

• Has a true, native Excel integration with all versions of Excel (no coding or formulas needed)
• Is always reliable during sophisticated Excel calculations
• Onboards new accounts 5x faster than the competition
• Uses simple formulas for creating reports
• Integrates with almost all source systems
• Works perfectly on Mac OS X and Google Sheets

Perhaps even more importantly, a former CFO founded Cube, baking the problems and use cases of FP&A into the platform from its inception.

FP&A teams already know and love spreadsheets and Cube simplifies many of the headaches of the often challenging planning process—like collecting actuals from other departments or checking and verifying that your numbers are correct—and lets teams turn their complicated budgeting process into a lean operation.

Check out all of the 5-star reviews on Capterra.

Sounds like a fit? Book your demo with Cube today. 

Features: 

• Automated data consolidation: Connect real-time data from numerous sources for automated rollups and drilldowns.
• Multi-scenario analysis: Model how changes to key assumptions affect overall outputs seamlessly.
• Endless integrations: Seamlessly integrate tools like spreadsheets (Google and Excel), accounting & finance, HR, ATS, billing & operations, sales & marketing, and business intelligence. 
• Customizable dashboards: Build and share customizable dashboards.
• Native Excel and Google Sheets integration: Leverage compatible and bi-directional native integration with any spreadsheet.
• Multi-currency support: Evaluate your financials in both your local and reporting currencies.
• User-based controls: Ensure that the right data goes to the right people at the right time with user controls, validations, and an audit trail.
• Centralized formulas and KPIs: Store all your calculations in a central location and manage from a single source of truth.
• Drill down and audit trails: Get straight to the transactions and history behind a single data cell in just one click.

➡️ See all of our features here.

Pros: 

• Cube gives users a powerful reporting and KPIs dashboard that helps automate and analyze important data. 
• The platform's users can easily collaborate with industry-leading FP&A experts and an award-winning support team. 
• Cube offers a standard implementation time that is 5x shorter than the competition. 
• Its user interface and controls are user-friendly, and it has easy permission management. 
• The software is fully compatible with Mac OS X

Cons:

• Cube works best for mid-sized and commercial businesses—it’s not a personal finance app
• Cube serves finance professionals and is not a solution for learning FP&A for the first time
• Its pricing is not designed for pre-series A startups

Pricing:

• Starting at $2,000/month. See detailed pricing for customizable plans.

Best for: Mid-size and enterprise FP&A teams looking to save time and grow. Cube also works for hypergrowth SMBs who want a solution that will scale with their organization's complexity.

Curious to see if Cube is a fit for your company?

Book your demo now

2. Anaplan

Anaplan is a web-based planning and forecasting application that helps organizations make decisions by providing real-time access to data. 

The application offers the ability to create and manage models, share data across teams, and collaborate on projects.

Anaplan helps businesses make decisions by evaluating options and trade-offs in the current environment in real time. It also offers signal analysis to uncover insights and adapt to continually changing conditions and markets.

Key features:

• Forecasting: Apply audience intelligence, machine learning, and algorithms to your signals. 
• Scenario modeling: Gauge the impact of changes and adapt your strategy with scenario modeling.
• Anaplan Workflow: Digitize your processes and drive effective conversations between teams.
• Anaplan Data Hub: House information needed to execute the planning scenarios.

Pros:

• It has a web-based application
• The software easily aggregates data into a single source of truth
• It supports enforcing segregation of duties and enables audit tracking within the user interface.

Cons:

• The tool’s model sizing can become an issue for new model builders.
• There can be some lag in saving data inputs
• The software doesn’t offer the most customization or flexibility. 

Pricing: Anaplan’s pricing is not listed on the website but online sources reveal that Anaplan’s pricing varies based on specific user needs.

Best for: Anaplan is a good choice for larger enterprises with a strong IT team to support implementation. 

Check out our full review of Anaplan here. 

3. Workday Adaptive Planning

Workday Adaptive Planning allows users to forecast, budget, and model. In addition to its forecasting capabilities, it offers several other features, including tracking KPIs, creating what-if scenarios, and collaborating with colleagues in real time.

Adaptive delivers automation across its attract-to-pay process, eliminating manual tasks and helping your team focus on other goals.

It also models hiring, transfers, and retention plans with driver-based assumptions to help you see the cost impact.

Key features:

• Profitability analysis: Create profitability documents, from internal reports to external regulatory statements, in one system.
• Payroll and workforce management: Visualize workforce costs and trends, identify the root cause, and take action.
• Analytics and reporting: Analyze financial, workforce, and operational data together in one place.
• Human capital management: Get insights into team member’s skills and improvements needed.

Pros:

• It allows users to forecast which resources they need, define roles, and shop for talent in one dashboard.
• It has flexible budgeting, scenario planning, and reporting options 
• The platform enables users to run sourcing events collaboratively, streamline supplier selection, and manage contracts.

Cons:

• Adaptive Insights has a stressful setup process
• It lacks robust functionality
• The software is occasionally slow

Pricing: Workday Adaptive Planning does not list pricing on its website, but the software offers three pricing plans that vary based on the user’s feature needs.

Best for: Adaptive Insights is best for larger enterprises that need workforce, sales, and operational planning support. 

4. Vena Solutions

Vena Solutions is a financial planning and analysis solution that allows companies to create a centralized solution with reliable automated data analysis and decision-making workflows.

Vena supports companies’ financial systems by reducing the workload for manual labor and optimizing overall operational performance. 

With specific tasks assigned to each team member, automated processes help reduce bottlenecks and increase efficiency.

Key features:

• What-if modeling: Model multiple what-if scenarios to analyze the impact of business decisions.

• Profitability analysis: Perform P&L analysis, profitability ratio analysis, and gross margin analysis to spot trends in business performance.

• Performance metrics: Monitor custom KPIs and metrics.

• Capital asset planning: Integrate CapEX budget with financial statements and track capital costs.

Pros:

• Vena’s visual data storytelling tool is effective
• It works on mobile devices 
• The platform gives users training support

Cons:

• Reported glitches during set-up and installation
• It has a relatively high learning curve for users
• The software might be expensive for smaller or mid-sized companies.

Pricing: Vena does not provide pricing details on its website, but its pricing comprises the cost of the software plan and license.

Best for: Vena Solutions is best suited for large or medium organizations with large finance teams and lots of business data.

5. Datarails

Datarails offers data consolidation, financial reporting, scenario analysis, financial reporting, and ERP-Excel connectivity. It integrates with CRMs and ERPs for businesses to consolidate their financial data and unite departmental plans. 

Datarails’ Excel connectivity allows companies using Excel for financial planning and analytics to keep their financial models while automating their processes to build budgets and forecasts within Excel. 

The platform also offers a financial dashboard that enables users to see their numbers, spot anomalies, trends, or variances, and make data-driven decisions. 

Key features:

• Data visualization: Use customizable built-in visualization tools to see performance at a glance and share with others.
• Financial analytics: Leverage AI-powered financial analytics tools to analyze data and find insights.
• Reports: Generate customizable reports.
• Financial close: Automate financial reporting, eliminate manual data collection, and speed up reporting.

Pros: 

• The platform syncs smoothly with accounting software
• It allows users to work directly in Excel 
• Its customer support is fast and helpful

Cons: 

• Its dashboard reporting tool has limited functionality 
• Datarails is slow when exporting large data to platforms like Tableau
• It is time-consuming to manage permissions with Datarails 

Pricing: Pricing is not available on Datarail’s website, but online sources reveal that its plan starts at $24,000 per year.

Best for: Datarails is best for businesses with multiple entities and branches across various locations that want to consolidate their data on a single platform.

6. IBM Planning Analytics

IBM is business intelligence software that enables businesses to collect and analyze multiple data points for their budgeting and forecasting needs. It offers customizable modeling tools for users to combine past data analysis with future outcome forecasting for data-driven decisions. 

The software has inbuilt AI capabilities enabling users to automate their financial planning processes and build budgets, forecasts, reports, etc., faster and with better accuracy. 

IBM also provides a DevOps environment for businesses to build, deploy, and manage custom cloud-native solutions for multiple devices. 

Key features:

• Drag and drop Excel interface: Organize financial data within Excel without manually creating cells or tables.
• AI forecasting: Automate financial forecasting with on-demand, multivariate, or baseline forecasting.
• Databases: Store financial data from multiple sources, query structured data.
• Analytics: Aggregate large datasets and automate analytics. 

Pros: 

• The tool has an intuitive user interface 
• It has a quick response time when running complex calculations 
• It integrates smoothly with Excel

Cons:

• The platform requires strong technical knowledge 
• It has a high learning curve 
• It does not have a mobile app

Pricing: 

• Essential: From $825/month
• Standard: From $1650/month
• Premium: Custom quote 

Best for: IBM Planning Analytics is best for businesses in more technical sectors (i.e., oil and gas) that do more advanced data analysis and modeling and need to verify their use cases.

7. Pigment 

Pigment is a business planning platform that enables revenue and finance teams to create forecasts, model scenarios, and generate reports to guide financial decision-making. 

The software syncs and consolidates business data into a single platform and collects inputs and insights from multiple sources, helping users build dynamic financial models and surface insights on their businesses. 

It offers a collaborative tool for teams to work on projects together in real-time and integrates with other tools like Google Sheets, SAP, Workday Adaptive Planning, and Salesforce. 

Key features:

• Custom dashboards: Create and share customizable dashboards 
• Modeling: Build dynamic multidimensional models using workforce, finance, and revenue plans. 
• Collaboration: Unite cross-functional teams, information, and project, and break down data silos.
• Data imports: Automate data collection from multiple sources in real-time 

Pros:

• Pigment offers cross-functional integration 
• It has responsive customer support 
• The tool can automate data export and import 

Cons: 

• Its customer support is sometimes slow to solve problems 
• It has a high learning curve 
• Pigment slows when processing large sets of data at the same time.

Pricing: Pigment pricing is not available on its website, but the software offers customizable plans with three pricing components–the platform fee, the number of licenses, and associated features.

Best for: Pigment is best for startups or mid-market companies looking for an FP&A tool that scales with them.

Planful review conclusion: Is it the right software for you?

Although Planful fans celebrate the tool’s flexibility, the unique value proposition of “continuous value from day one” may not be applicable in all instances–especially in the face of protracted and error-prone implementation. 

The platform’s limitations may not be apparent to all users. Still, speed issues tend to scale along with data complexity, prompting the need for workarounds or technical burdens as company financial needs evolve.

While the difference in price point might make Planful an attractive option, in terms of total cost and long-term potential value, you should consider other options in the market.

Ready to try another financial planning and analysis software suited for your business?

 Book a demo with Cube