When Anaplan was designed, the idea was to replace the patchwork of outdated tools such as SAP, IBM, and even Oracle. Now with Anaplan you will be getting a business planning solution platform built into the cloud to address increasing data volume and variety in today’s market. Anaplan offers use to your entire business by having offerings to teams like sales, marketing, human resources, finance, and IT department. Anaplan uses HyperBlock as it’s in-memory database and calculations engine and allowing thousands of simultaneous users to all access the centralized data pool. Included in the HyperBlock will be data from unstructured and online sources. Anaplan leverages standards-based data integration, bringing in data from any source for real-time modeling and calculation allowing collaborative planning and decision-making across every department. Anaplan uses a familiar easy to use excel style functionality allowing ordinary business users to make data-driven decisions that would typically need a skill level of a data scientist. Anaplan was announced as a Leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Financial Planning and Analytics.

All the following features are what is included with Anaplan:

• Business Performance Optimization
• Dashboarding and Data Mining
• Capital Asset Planning
• Graphical Data Presentation
• Production Budget
• Multi-Department/Project
• Sales
• Project Budgeting

Adaptive Insights is a web-based corporate performance management (CPM) software used for budgeting, reporting, and forecasting for a variety of businesses no matter the size. Adaptive Insights, like Anaplan is also deployed on a cloud platform. Adaptive Insights is a tool that has a lot to offer a wide range of businesses, but it is important to make sure that you are choosing the correct software that benefits your company and its unique needs.

When it comes to modeling Adaptive Insights come up short compared to Anaplan, which will enable you to add different scenarios into the application and see the likely impact that those changes will have on your company and the company’s future plans. This capability is very important if you are in an industry that is very reactive to environmental changes, whether that be from political, financial, or the actual environment. Where this will benefit the company is by modeling potential changes to quickly identify how to best protect your business and take full advantage of the future opportunities.

Adaptive Insights also falls short of Anaplan in forward planning. Forward planning is closely related to modeling, but there are some subtle differences. Like stated above modeling will allow you and the company to see what would happen if there were changes in the business environment, while forward planning will allow you identify what the company needs to do about it and how your decisions to the change is likely to affect your business.