Anaplan vs. Adaptive Insights | Enterprise Planning
Anaplan vs. Adaptive Insights – which to choose for Enterprise Planning and Decision Making?
When speaking with customers who are actively looking for Enterprise Planning software, a question frequently asked is how do Anaplan and Adaptive Insights stack-up against each other? It’s an interesting question – especially when one starts to think beyond the immediate customer need, and what the long-term planning goals are for both the organization and wider business. Yes, both Anaplan and Adaptive Insights offer SaaS solutions in the Enterprise Planning space, and both boast an impressive customer base. But which of the two offers the greatest impact and value?
Anaplan was founded in 2006 and went on to IPO on the NYSE (PLAN) in October 2018. Today, as the leader in Connected Planning, Anaplan provides enterprise solutions to customers, including AXA, Vodafone, and Carter’s.
Adaptive Insights was founded in 2003 and was acquired by Workday (WDAY) in 2018. Today, Adaptive Insights’ customers include Specsavers, JLL, and HubSpot.
Adaptive Insights is usually the cheaper solution, offering limited out-of-the-box functionality. Anaplan, on the other hand, is a premium platform, offering a wide range of customization, tailored to each customer’s specific business needs and operational infrastructure. Thus, if price is the primary consideration then Adaptive Insights may be the best option. However, if you’re after sustainable and scalable functionality that can grow with your enterprise planning needs, then it’s reasonably safe to suggest price – albeit important – isn’t your primary consideration.
When considering the two, there are three important industry shifts to consider when comparing Anaplan vs Adaptive Insights for Enterprise Planning, especially if you are looking to strategically get ahead of your competition in the process:
1) Enterprise Planning requires a robust modeling engine that offers flexibility
· Anaplan: using proprietary technology – Hyperblock – Anaplan offers the ability to run sophisticated ‘what-if’ scenario modeling, empowering teams with data-led foresight.
· Adaptive Insights: The platform’s calculation engine begins to struggle when dealing with large data volumes, ultimately making it both unusable and unstable in these situations.
2) Enterprise Planning needs to be built for change, complexity, collaboration, and scale
· Anaplan: the platform is highly modular and has the ability to seamlessly connect different planning models together.
· Adaptive Insights: the platform is highly likely to struggle to adjust to changing business structures, entities, and relationships.
3) Point solutions have become too short-minded and becoming somewhat archaic, in order to meet the evolving needs of any enterprise business
· Anaplan: the platform is built for Connected Planning – unifying use cases to create dynamic enterprise planning.
· Adaptive Insights: the platform could potentially suffer from a lack of flexibility to handle a broad set of use cases outside of Finance.
Based on the above, it’s evident that, unlike Adaptive Insights, Anaplan offers not only specific solutions, but also the ability for customers to become far more sophisticated with their planning through the connection of people, plans, and data. All of which can be scaled across an organization – true enterprise planning.
Anaplan is the logical step for Enterprise Planning and Decision Making for these reasons:
| Criteria | Anaplan | Adaptive Insights |
|---|---|---|
| Market Focus: | Enterprise and hypergrowth focus: Large, mid-sized and fast-growing enterprises use the Anaplan Connected Planning platform to connect people, data and plans for real-time planning and decision-making in a rapidly changing business environment. |
Traditionally small to mid-sized focus on cost center budgeting: We see limited scalability across multiple departments or to thousands of users, in managing large data sets, or support complex planning models. Suitable for businesses that are satisfied with predefined templated and limited modeling functionality. |
| Enterprise Readiness: | Scalable and flexible for for growth with expansive dimensionality and real-time calculations. Adjusts to changing business structures, entities and relationships on the fly. Enables detailed revenue planning by customer, product and channel. |
We see limited scalability and performance: We believe there could be restricted dimensionality and calculation performance challenges. Must rebuild models to adapt to business changes. Optimized for chart of accounts planning and cost center budgeting; inability to link financial and operational planning. |
| Large Data Sets: | Handles large data sets to support detailed planning and analysis. One centralized repository (data hub) for data, metadata and business logic for all planning use cases. Multiple hierarchies to roll up data for increasingly complex international planning scenarios. |
Potential data limitations: Can store large amounts of data but likely that calculation engine can break down when dealing with large data volumes. Adaptive can handle multiple currencies but highly likely that it is unable to support complex international planning scenarios. |
| Modeling: | Intuitive modeling interface designed to create planning models in finance, HR, sales, marketing supply chain, and operations; model financial and operational business drivers; perform timely reliable forecasts; and complex, "what-if" analysis on-the-fly. |
Application is likely to restrict complex use cases. Models are mostly designed for specific applications or templates. A design best-suited to support the old practice of relying on lagging financial indicators that limit forward-looking plans. Rarely and cannot easily offer POCs for CPM die to complexity and time intensiveness. |
| Future Ready: | Anaplan is not married to one ERP/GL platform and leverages best-of-breed integration with any source system. Anaplan is driving value in 1,250 large, mid-sized and fast growing enterprises across every major industry vertical. Anaplan provides local capabilities across 20 offices in 15 countries to service over 1,000 customers across 40 countries. |
We believe the Technology platform runs on an unproved "sidecar database." (Elastic Hypercube Technology) that does not solve Adaptive's legacy application scalability challenges. Must conform to the Workday platform. With Majority of its customers in North America, Adaptive's global reach is not very expansive. |
Organizations looking to the future of enterprise planning and decision-making will find it in Anaplan. Several customers that outgrew Adaptive Insights have made the move to Anaplan, as its cloud platform enables enterprise scale planning and analysis supporting large datasets, complex calculations, and deployments with thousands of contributors. When you use Anaplan, models can be built in days by business users. Business logic and metadata changes can be made in real-time powering timely thought, collaboration, and action.
If you are interested in finding out more about either Enterprise Planning and Decision Making, or the Anaplan platform, then please do contact us – we welcome the conversation!