Anaplan vs SAP Analytics Cloud

Anaplan has garnered a reputation for its robust modeling capabilities, allowing users to create intricate financial models with ease. Reviewers frequently praise its flexibility and ability to handle complex calculations, making it a powerful tool for forecasting, budgeting, and scenario planning. The platform's "Connected Planning" approach, which links various planning processes across an organization, is seen as a major advantage, enabling better collaboration and alignment between departments. However, some users find the interface to be less intuitive than other performance management systems, requiring a steeper learning curve. Additionally, the platform's extensive customization options, while powerful, can sometimes lead to complexity and require specialized knowledge to manage effectively. Compared to competitors like Oracle Hyperion and SAP BPC, Anaplan stands out for its cloud-based architecture and user-friendly interface. Reviewers often highlight its ease of use and accessibility from any device, making it a popular choice for organizations with distributed teams. While Anaplan may not have the same level of industry-specific functionality as some of its competitors, its flexibility and ability to integrate with other systems make it a versatile solution for a wide range of planning needs. The platform's scalability is also a significant advantage, allowing organizations to easily adjust their usage as their needs evolve. Anaplan is best suited for mid-sized to large organizations with complex planning requirements and a need for collaboration across departments. Its ability to handle large data sets and perform sophisticated calculations makes it ideal for financial planning, sales forecasting, and supply chain management. However, smaller organizations or those with simpler planning needs may find the platform's capabilities to be excessive and the learning curve to be a barrier to adoption.

SAP Analytics Cloud is a powerful data visualization tool that helps users explore data in an easy-to-understand format and discover metrics that help them make informed decisions. Many users who reviewed visualization said that the platform has rich graphics libraries and a range of templates for story presentation of business metrics. Citing its aesthetic design, a majority of users said that the solution’s interface is intuitive for programmers and non-technical users alike. Mentioning its strong predictive and augmented analysis capabilities, a lot of users said that the platform is a strong planning tool and helps them gain business insights easily. Many users said that the tool works well on a plethora of devices, including mobile, and is accessible on multiple browsers, though some users said that its offline mode capabilities are limited. Most of the users who reviewed data integrations said that the tool handles large amounts of data seamlessly, though quite a few users said its compatibility with live connection data sources is limited to other SAP products. Reviewing functionality, a majority of users said that the tool is versatile and scalable to ensure a great end-to-end user experience, though some said that it needs more features, such as improved live data analytics. The solution does have its limitations, though. Around 85% of users who reviewed its performance said that it struggles at the enterprise level, though quite a few users said that it performs exceedingly well within the SAP ecosystem. A majority of the users who mentioned reporting said that the solution lacks automatic report distribution and broadcasting capabilities, though some said that it has excellent analytical and data-oriented report creation. Many users who discussed data management complained that the process for updating an existing data model needs a lot of rework, and that the solution needs more versatile modeling features. Overall, SAP Analytics Cloud is a planning tool with strong BI capabilities that brings the power of cloud computing to self-service data analysis for gaining actionable insights into business metrics.