Rob leads and manages the business software research and advisory team at ISG Software Research, focusing on the intersection of information technology and applications across the front- and back-office areas of enterprises. Rob leads the Office of Finance practice and the AI for Business efforts and is a book author and thought leader on integrated business planning (IBP). Prior to ISG and two decades at Ventana Research, he was an equity research analyst at several firms including Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley and Drexel Burnham, and a consultant with McKinsey and Company. Rob was an Institutional Investor All-American Team member and on the Wall Street Journal All-Star list. Rob earned his BA in Economics/Finance at Hampshire College, an MBA in Finance/Accounting at Columbia University and is a CFA charter holder.
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Executive Summary
Buyers Guide Overview
ISG Research has conducted market research for over two decades across vertical industries, business applications, AI and IT. We have designed the ISG Buyers Guide™ to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive approach to rating software providers and rank their ability to meet specific product and customer experience requirements.
ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guides™ for Business Planning are the distillation of continuous market and product research. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for business planning software. The Value Index methodology is structured to support a request for information (RFI) for a request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. The ISG Buyers Guide evaluates customer experience and the product experience in its capability and platform.
The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. It can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of business planning software can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on opinions or historical biases.
ISG Research believes that an objective review of existing and potential new software providers and products is a critical strategy for the adoption and implementation of business planning software. An enterprise’s review should include an analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating business planning software and offer these Buyers Guides as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.
How To Use This Buyers Guide
Evaluating Software Providers: The Process
We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to assess existing approaches and software providers or establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes in the most efficient manner.
- Define the business case and goals.
Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technological efforts.
- Specify the business and IT needs.
Defining the business and IT requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
- Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the enterprise from executives to frontline workers and determine the needs of each.
- Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan.
- Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your enterprise’s requirements.
- Establish software provider evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: capability and platform with support for adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation.
- Evaluate and select the software provider and products properly.
Apply a weighting the evaluation categories in the evaluation criteria to reflect your enterprise’s priorities to determine the short list of software providers and products.
- Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.
Using the ISG Buyers Guide and process provides enterprises a clear, structured approach to making smarter software and business investment decisions. It ensures alignment between strategy, people, processes and technology while reducing risk, saving time and improving outcomes. The ISG approach promotes data-driven decision-making and collaboration, helping choose the right software providers for maximum value and return on investment.
Business Planning
The primary goal of business planning is to make decision-making consistently faster and better informed. Dedicated software platforms can refine an enterprise’s forecasting, planning, analysis and decision-making cycles while improving the productivity of the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team and the performance of executives and managers. Companies engage in many forms of planning—some formal and some informal. They plan sales, production, headcount, distribution and supply chain activities. They also produce a budget, which represents the financial expression of those plans. The quality of planning determines how effectively an enterprise can anticipate change, manage resources and pursue growth.
ISG Research defines business planning as the simplified context from the integrated business planning (IBP) method describing a rapid, collaborative, high-participation process that brings together operational and financial planning using a planning software platform to connect the disparate planning activities of an enterprise. Each business unit plans as appropriate but in a connected manner that achieves stronger alignment with strategy and objectives. This connected planning approach improves coordination in execution and evaluation. Business planning uses technology to overcome the organizational issues of siloed planning. Artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI enable faster, more agile planning cycles that increase participation and raise the overall business value of planning. ISG Software Research asserts that by 2028, one-fourth of FP&A organizations will implement this form of integrated business planning.
Business planning promotes structured dialogue between executives and managers around clear operational and financial objectives, rather than just budget line items. Technology removes barriers to achieving this dialogue by creating a dynamic environment that shifts focus from explaining what happened to understanding how to capture future opportunities. Planning platforms transform information into actionable, data-driven insights that optimize performance and enhance agility. In doing so, technology elevates the role of planning from a static financial exercise to an ongoing strategic process that fosters collaboration and accountability across departments.
Business planning and IBP differ from traditional budgeting or financial planning because the two serve different purposes. Budgeting defines financial limits and ensures fiscal control, while planning focuses on opportunity and strategy. Financial planning is essential to the finance department, but enterprise planning aligns the entire organization around shared objectives. Planning determines what departments need to achieve those objectives, ensuring that actions, resources and measures of success are clearly defined. Quantitative objectives also make it possible to evaluate performance and adjust actions in real time.
Effective business planning requires measurable targets and collaborative processes. Asking, “What are your objectives for next year?” must lead to quantified responses such as “Volume will be up 11% and revenue will grow 9%.” Structured planning dialogues supported by technology help leaders set these measurable goals and allocate the resources required to reach them. Frequent, short planning sprints enable organizations to refine assumptions at shorter intervals, promoting agility and responsiveness to market and competitive changes. These shorter cycles help finance, operations and business leaders remain aligned and adaptive.
Frequent, short planning sprints enable organizations to refine assumptions at shorter intervals, promoting agility and responsiveness to market and competitive changes
Budgeting remains a vital but distinct process. It focuses on financial safety and control, ensuring that spending limits prevent failure. Planning, on the other hand, seeks success by identifying opportunities and paths to improvement. Budgeting focuses on income statements and balance sheets, while planning focuses on the activities and resources departments need to execute effectively. Successful companies integrate both approaches, balancing fiscal discipline with strategic ambition. However, many organizations devote excessive attention to budgeting at the expense of planning in a way that limits their ability to use either as a meaningful management tool.
Dedicated planning software enables organizations to achieve a higher return on the time invested in planning. The widespread adoption of spreadsheets in the 1980s automated many budgeting tasks such as adding columns of numbers and consolidating multiple individual budgets. Yet spreadsheets remain error prone and time consuming. They are adequate for financial planning because finance teams primarily work in two or three dimensions, but businesses operate in multiple dimensions that include products, customers, currencies and business units. Planning platforms address this complexity by applying multidimensional structures to planning and budgeting, enabling faster, more accurate analysis and reporting.
With multidimensional modeling, planners can adjust assumptions globally and calculate impacts instantly. This makes it possible to explore scenarios interactively in meetings rather than waiting days for spreadsheet-based analysis. Each version of the plan can be saved, compared and viewed from multiple perspectives, improving visibility and collaboration. These capabilities allow executives and managers to make faster, more informed decisions and maintain alignment across business functions.
AI in all its forms is transforming forecasting, planning and analysis. The potential applications are extensive, with many already available or emerging in the near term. Examples include accelerating forecasting with reduced bias, automating analytics production, simplifying budgeting, identifying data errors, generating recommendations for decision-making and automating commentary in reports. AI, GenAI and natural language processing are making interactive self-service reporting widely available, turning periodic and ad hoc reports into dynamic decision-support tools. Through the remainder of the decade, analysts will spend less time preparing data and more time evaluating insights, while executives will use intelligent, interactive tools to anticipate change rather than react to it.
Automation reduces the significant manual effort traditionally spent on data preparation, enabling analysts and planners to focus on strategy and performance improvement
Another key evolution in business planning platforms is the integration of advanced data management capabilities. Technology for managing data flows between planning platforms and source systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management and supply chain management has advanced rapidly. Application programming interfaces (APIs) automate data extraction, transformation and loading, ensuring that accurate and consistent information is available to all participants in the planning process. This automation reduces the significant manual effort traditionally spent on data preparation, enabling analysts and planners to focus on strategy and performance improvement.
Over the past two decades, software providers have steadily embraced the structure and principles of IBP while introducing greater usability and AI integration. Modern platforms are far more capable and accessible than those of the past, transforming what was once an administrative burden into a valuable management asset. As planning becomes increasingly continuous and collaborative, technology ensures that it remains a central function for guiding enterprise performance.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Business Planning evaluates software providers and products based on functionality that supports integrated operational and financial planning, multidimensional modeling, forecasting, analysis and reporting. It also assesses platform usability and support for executives, participants, analysts and planners. This research evaluates the following software providers: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Business planning has evolved into a continuous, enterprise-wide process that unifies financial and operational objectives. Modern platforms enable organizations to accelerate decision-making, align resources and improve agility through connected, collaborative planning cycles. AI-driven automation and multidimensional modeling now extend planning capabilities beyond finance, integrating scenario analysis and performance optimization across departments. As a result, planning is transforming from a periodic budgeting task into a strategic discipline that drives organizational adaptability.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Business Planning evaluates 17 software providers offering products supporting integrated financial, operational and workforce planning. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM and Planful rated as Innovative. Pigment and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (25%) and Platform (55%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional modeling and strong platform integration. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt platforms that unify financial and operational planning to improve collaboration and transparency across the organization. Selecting solutions with multidimensional modeling and seamless data integration enhances forecasting accuracy and responsiveness to market change. AI-enabled capabilities such as scenario modeling and natural language reporting help shift focus from manual analysis to proactive decision support. Organizations should embed planning as a continuous management discipline that aligns strategic priorities with operational execution.
The Findings – Business Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Anaplan and OneStream have done so in five categories; Oracle in four and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Planful.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations recognizing that similar provider rankings do not mean the products are equally suitable for every organization or use case.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (25%) and Platform (55%). OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Business Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support business planning, including integrated business planning, functional and departmental planning, advanced planning techniques and AI using machine learning, and support executives and participants, analysts and planners and administration.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| insightsoftware | Longview | v. 25.4 | July 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning, augmented with AI | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Planful Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One™ | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena Solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v. 2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Financial Planning
Financial planning software refines and accelerates the budgeting process, improving the productivity of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams while helping executives set objectives and allocate resources in alignment with enterprise strategy. Yet budgeting has long been criticized for being time-consuming and offering limited business value, often constrained by competing priorities and internal politics. Many enterprises still plan within silos, making it difficult to align resources with strategic goals. ISG Research asserts that by 2028, just 1 in 4 FP&A organizations will have redefined their mission to make planning easier for business unit leaders. Those that do will transform finance into a strategic asset.
Modern platforms streamline repetitive tasks, enhance productivity and provide timely, actionable insights
ISG Research defines financial planning software as applications that enable a rapid, collaborative process connecting budgeting, forecasting, analysis and decision-making across departments. Modern platforms streamline repetitive tasks, enhance productivity and provide timely, actionable insights across planning, forecasting and performance management. Technology shifts focus from reviewing past performance to shaping future outcomes, making planning a connected, enterprise-wide process that strengthens accountability and supports execution.
AI is transforming forecasting, planning and analysis across finance functions through automation, interactivity and predictive accuracy to allow for more intelligent decision-making. It accelerates forecasting, automates analytics and simplifies workflows. ISG Research asserts that by 2027, almost all providers of software designed for finance organizations will have incorporated some AI capabilities to reduce workloads and improve performance. Analysts spend less time preparing data and more time delivering insights, while executives gain tools that guide decisions and improve responsiveness.
Modern planning platforms automate data extraction and transformation from enterprise systems, ensuring accurate and consistent information across participants. Automation reduces manual effort, accelerates analysis and supports self-service reporting. By minimizing preparation and embedding AI-driven insights, FP&A professionals can focus on higher-value analysis and create shorter, iterative forecasting sprints that improve accuracy, agility and accountability to drive stronger alignment across the enterprise.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning evaluates software providers and products based on how well the software facilitates budgeting and financial planning. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of financial planning as we define it: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Financial planning software enables enterprises to accelerate budgeting cycles, improve alignment between finance and operations and strengthen accountability across departments. Modern platforms transform forecasting and analysis from periodic reporting exercises into continuous, data-driven processes that guide strategic execution. Automation and AI reduce manual effort and improve accuracy, allowing FP&A teams to shift focus from preparing reports to delivering insights that support enterprise agility. As planning becomes iterative and technology-driven, finance functions increasingly serve as strategic partners in decision-making.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning evaluates 17 software providers offering products supporting budgeting, forecasting, analysis and financial performance management. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM and Jedox rated as Innovative. Pigment and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, insightsoftware, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (30%) and Platform (50%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional modeling and robust platform adaptability. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt financial planning platforms that unify budgeting, forecasting and analysis to enable faster, more accurate and collaborative decision-making. Integrating AI-driven forecasting and automation reduces cycle times and enhances predictive accuracy while freeing analysts for higher-value activities. Seamless data integration across enterprise systems improves consistency and accelerates scenario planning. Organizations should institutionalize financial planning as a continuous discipline that balances fiscal control with strategic agility.
The Findings – Financial Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. OneStream, Anaplan has done so in three categories; Oracle in two; and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Jedox.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, insightsoftware, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (30%) and Platform (50%). OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support budgeting and financial planning, including balance sheet, budgeting, capital spending, cash flow, corporate finance and capital and strategy and long-range planning.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| insightsoftware | Longview | v. 25.4 | July 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning augmented with AI | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One™ | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena Solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v.2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Revenue Planning
Planning software is designed to refine and expedite the budgeting process, improving the productivity of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams while helping executives set objectives and allocate resources in alignment with overall enterprise strategy and priorities. In many businesses, planning has evolved beyond sales targets to focus on total revenue. This shift, combined with more sophisticated technology, has made accurate revenue projection an essential part of planning and financial performance management.
ISG Research defines revenue planning as a holistic, data-driven approach to detailed forecasting of revenue sources and associated sales operations elements, including territory and quota planning, sales capacity planning, incentive compensation and demand planning for revenue. The term “revenue” is replacing “sales” in planning as enterprises form revenue teams responsible for retention, expansion and cross-sell in addition to new customer acquisition. ISG Research asserts that by 2026, over one-half of enterprises will establish a Chief Revenue Officer leadership role, focusing on all channels and sources of revenue, not just direct sales. The rise of recurring models such as subscriptions and e-commerce requires coordination between finance, operations and sales to manage multiple revenue streams, align territories and quotas, and maintain accurate forecasts.
Managing revenue operations demands planning tools capable of modeling territories, quotas and compensation structures across products, services and markets. Spreadsheets cannot scale to meet this complexity, producing inconsistent data and delayed insights. Dedicated software enables continuous performance monitoring and adjustment of incentives, quotas and forecasts based on data-driven insights and analytics.
AI is reshaping revenue planning by automating analytics to align incentives and improve forecast accuracy across all revenue-generating functions
AI is reshaping revenue planning by automating analytics to align incentives and improve forecast accuracy across all revenue-generating functions. ISG Research asserts that through 2026, fewer than 1 in 5 enterprises will utilize AI and data to balance direct, indirect and digital channels to achieve revenue targets, but those that do will outperform their peers.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Planning evaluates software providers and products based on how well the software facilitates revenue forecasting, territory and quota planning, sales capacity and incentive compensation. It also assesses AI capabilities that improve the timeliness and accuracy of planning and how platforms support executives, participants and administrators. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of revenue planning as we define it: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Revenue planning has evolved from traditional sales forecasting into a connected discipline that unites finance, operations and sales around shared growth objectives. Modern platforms enable enterprises to model territories, quotas and compensation structures while managing multiple revenue streams across channels and customer segments. AI and automation now support continuous forecasting and performance analysis, helping organizations balance recurring and transactional revenue sources. As revenue management becomes more data-driven, enterprises are transforming planning from a sales activity into a strategic enterprise process that aligns growth strategy with execution.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Planning evaluates 16 software providers offering products supporting revenue forecasting, territory and quota management, sales capacity planning and incentive compensation. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM, Jedox and SAP rated as Innovative. Pigment, Prophix and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (30%) and Platform (50%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional modeling and strong integration across revenue planning processes. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should select revenue planning platforms that unify forecasting, quota, capacity and incentive management under a single data model to improve alignment and accountability. Integrating AI-driven automation and analytics enhances forecasting accuracy, transparency and operational agility. Organizations should prioritize systems that connect financial, operational and sales data to enable continuous performance optimization. Treating revenue planning as a connected, enterprise-wide discipline helps ensure sustained growth and responsiveness to market dynamics.
The Findings – Revenue Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. OneStream and Anaplan has done so in five categories; Oracle in four; and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM, Jedox and SAP.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment, Prophix and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (30%) and Platform (50%). OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, an
d represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not a Leader, Oracle was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support revenue planning, including sales forecasting, territory and quota planning, sales capacity, incentive compensation, demand planning and revenue-specific analytics and planning.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board International | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v.2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Workforce Planning
Planning software refines and accelerates the budgeting process. It improves the productivity of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams and helps executives set objectives and allocate resources in line with enterprise strategy. Headcount is often among the top three expenses, so accurate planning is essential. Workforce planning software helps FP&A, business unit leaders and HR teams improve accuracy, shorten forecasting cycles and gain visibility into hiring needs, workforce costs and talent distribution.
When integrated with overall business planning, workforce planning improves headcount forecasts, identifies skills requirements and connects talent demand through enterprise data models
ISG Research defines workforce planning as including the modeling of hiring, transfers and retention, and skills capacity by location, ramp time and workforce costs. When integrated with overall business planning, workforce planning improves headcount forecasts, identifies skills requirements and connects talent demand with financial operations through enterprise data models. It also gives managers and HR professionals greater flexibility and control.
FP&A teams must model and measure resources across departments instead of viewing them only as costs. Headcount planning demonstrates this approach. A department head builds a plan from existing employees, adds expected hires and links those roles to salary and benefit data from HR. This creates a headcount budget and grounds budget discussions in workforce needs rather than abstract financial targets.
ISG Research asserts that by 2027, one-half of enterprises utilizing compensation planning tools will require them to support complex (salary increase and bonus) budget allocation modeling scenarios, rules and guidelines, by both P&L and talent segments. Workforce planning software supports multidimensional analysis across geographies, employment types and currencies. Modern platforms include analytics and AI that strengthen forecasting, automate data management and improve accuracy across distributed workforce data sources.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning evaluates software providers and products based on how well the software supports headcount forecasting, models the employee lifecycle, manages hiring and retention plans and aligns skills with business needs. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of workforce planning as we define it: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Workforce planning has become a critical function linking human capital management with financial and operational performance. Modern platforms integrate headcount forecasting, hiring and retention modeling, and skills planning into unified data environments that connect HR and finance objectives. AI and analytics automate data collection and improve forecast accuracy across distributed workforces, allowing enterprises to better align labor investments with business goals. As workforce planning becomes continuous and collaborative, organizations gain greater agility, visibility and control over their talent and resource strategies.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning evaluates 16 software providers offering products supporting headcount forecasting, hiring and retention modeling, skills alignment and workforce cost management. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM and SAP rated as Innovative. Pigment and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (30%) and Platform (50%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional workforce modeling and strong integration with HR and finance systems. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt workforce planning platforms that unify financial, HR and operational data to improve forecast accuracy and cross-functional alignment. Integrating AI-driven analytics strengthens visibility into workforce composition and identifies skills gaps that affect performance. Organizations should choose platforms that scale globally and support continuous collaboration across business units. Workforce planning should be treated as a dynamic process that aligns talent strategy with enterprise growth and financial objectives.
The Findings – Workforce Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Anaplan and OneStream have done so in five categories; Oracle in four and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and SAP.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (30%) and Platform (50%). OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, an
d represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not a Leader, Oracle was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least 50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support workforce planning, including support for headcount, compensation, hiring, staffing scenarios, skills and forms of workforce-specific planning, embedded analytics, embedded AI, reporting and dashboards, and advanced planning techniques. The product must also support executives, participants and administration.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning, augmented with AI | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena Solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v.2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Executive Summary
Buyers Guide Overview
ISG Research has conducted market research for over two decades across vertical industries, business applications, AI and IT. We have designed the ISG Buyers Guide™ to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select software providers and products. The findings of this research provide a comprehensive approach to rating software providers and rank their ability to meet specific product and customer experience requirements.
ISG Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of software providers and products that is rooted in an understanding of business and IT requirements
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guides™ for Business Planning are the distillation of continuous market and product research. It is an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings address enterprises’ requirements for business planning software. The Value Index methodology is structured to support a request for information (RFI) for a request for proposal (RFP) process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with software providers. The ISG Buyers Guide evaluates customer experience and the product experience in its capability and platform.
The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of software providers and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a provider’s marketing and sales efforts. It can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment We believe it is important to take a comprehensive, research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of business planning software can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an enterprise’s ability to reach its potential. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time and eliminate the risk of relying on opinions or historical biases.
ISG Research believes that an objective review of existing and potential new software providers and products is a critical strategy for the adoption and implementation of business planning software. An enterprise’s review should include an analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge enterprises to do a thorough job of evaluating business planning software and offer these Buyers Guides as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these providers and as an evaluation methodology.
How To Use This Buyers Guide
Evaluating Software Providers: The Process
We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing software providers for your enterprise. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to assess existing approaches and software providers or establish a formal request for information from providers on products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating an RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes in the most efficient manner.
- Define the business case and goals.
Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technological efforts.
- Specify the business and IT needs.
Defining the business and IT requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
- Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the enterprise from executives to frontline workers and determine the needs of each.
- Outline the project’s critical path.
What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan.
- Ascertain the technology approach.
Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your enterprise’s requirements.
- Establish software provider evaluation criteria.
Utilize the product experience: capability and platform with support for adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation.
- Evaluate and select the software provider and products properly.
Apply a weighting the evaluation categories in the evaluation criteria to reflect your enterprise’s priorities to determine the short list of software providers and products.
- Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources.
Using the ISG Buyers Guide and process provides enterprises a clear, structured approach to making smarter software and business investment decisions. It ensures alignment between strategy, people, processes and technology while reducing risk, saving time and improving outcomes. The ISG approach promotes data-driven decision-making and collaboration, helping choose the right software providers for maximum value and return on investment.
Business Planning
The primary goal of business planning is to make decision-making consistently faster and better informed. Dedicated software platforms can refine an enterprise’s forecasting, planning, analysis and decision-making cycles while improving the productivity of the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team and the performance of executives and managers. Companies engage in many forms of planning—some formal and some informal. They plan sales, production, headcount, distribution and supply chain activities. They also produce a budget, which represents the financial expression of those plans. The quality of planning determines how effectively an enterprise can anticipate change, manage resources and pursue growth.
ISG Research defines business planning as the simplified context from the integrated business planning (IBP) method describing a rapid, collaborative, high-participation process that brings together operational and financial planning using a planning software platform to connect the disparate planning activities of an enterprise. Each business unit plans as appropriate but in a connected manner that achieves stronger alignment with strategy and objectives. This connected planning approach improves coordination in execution and evaluation. Business planning uses technology to overcome the organizational issues of siloed planning. Artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and agentic AI enable faster, more agile planning cycles that increase participation and raise the overall business value of planning. ISG Software Research asserts that by 2028, one-fourth of FP&A organizations will implement this form of integrated business planning.
Business planning promotes structured dialogue between executives and managers around clear operational and financial objectives, rather than just budget line items. Technology removes barriers to achieving this dialogue by creating a dynamic environment that shifts focus from explaining what happened to understanding how to capture future opportunities. Planning platforms transform information into actionable, data-driven insights that optimize performance and enhance agility. In doing so, technology elevates the role of planning from a static financial exercise to an ongoing strategic process that fosters collaboration and accountability across departments.
Business planning and IBP differ from traditional budgeting or financial planning because the two serve different purposes. Budgeting defines financial limits and ensures fiscal control, while planning focuses on opportunity and strategy. Financial planning is essential to the finance department, but enterprise planning aligns the entire organization around shared objectives. Planning determines what departments need to achieve those objectives, ensuring that actions, resources and measures of success are clearly defined. Quantitative objectives also make it possible to evaluate performance and adjust actions in real time.
Effective business planning requires measurable targets and collaborative processes. Asking, “What are your objectives for next year?” must lead to quantified responses such as “Volume will be up 11% and revenue will grow 9%.” Structured planning dialogues supported by technology help leaders set these measurable goals and allocate the resources required to reach them. Frequent, short planning sprints enable organizations to refine assumptions at shorter intervals, promoting agility and responsiveness to market and competitive changes. These shorter cycles help finance, operations and business leaders remain aligned and adaptive.
Frequent, short planning sprints enable organizations to refine assumptions at shorter intervals, promoting agility and responsiveness to market and competitive changes
Budgeting remains a vital but distinct process. It focuses on financial safety and control, ensuring that spending limits prevent failure. Planning, on the other hand, seeks success by identifying opportunities and paths to improvement. Budgeting focuses on income statements and balance sheets, while planning focuses on the activities and resources departments need to execute effectively. Successful companies integrate both approaches, balancing fiscal discipline with strategic ambition. However, many organizations devote excessive attention to budgeting at the expense of planning in a way that limits their ability to use either as a meaningful management tool.
Dedicated planning software enables organizations to achieve a higher return on the time invested in planning. The widespread adoption of spreadsheets in the 1980s automated many budgeting tasks such as adding columns of numbers and consolidating multiple individual budgets. Yet spreadsheets remain error prone and time consuming. They are adequate for financial planning because finance teams primarily work in two or three dimensions, but businesses operate in multiple dimensions that include products, customers, currencies and business units. Planning platforms address this complexity by applying multidimensional structures to planning and budgeting, enabling faster, more accurate analysis and reporting.
With multidimensional modeling, planners can adjust assumptions globally and calculate impacts instantly. This makes it possible to explore scenarios interactively in meetings rather than waiting days for spreadsheet-based analysis. Each version of the plan can be saved, compared and viewed from multiple perspectives, improving visibility and collaboration. These capabilities allow executives and managers to make faster, more informed decisions and maintain alignment across business functions.
AI in all its forms is transforming forecasting, planning and analysis. The potential applications are extensive, with many already available or emerging in the near term. Examples include accelerating forecasting with reduced bias, automating analytics production, simplifying budgeting, identifying data errors, generating recommendations for decision-making and automating commentary in reports. AI, GenAI and natural language processing are making interactive self-service reporting widely available, turning periodic and ad hoc reports into dynamic decision-support tools. Through the remainder of the decade, analysts will spend less time preparing data and more time evaluating insights, while executives will use intelligent, interactive tools to anticipate change rather than react to it.
Automation reduces the significant manual effort traditionally spent on data preparation, enabling analysts and planners to focus on strategy and performance improvement
Another key evolution in business planning platforms is the integration of advanced data management capabilities. Technology for managing data flows between planning platforms and source systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management and supply chain management has advanced rapidly. Application programming interfaces (APIs) automate data extraction, transformation and loading, ensuring that accurate and consistent information is available to all participants in the planning process. This automation reduces the significant manual effort traditionally spent on data preparation, enabling analysts and planners to focus on strategy and performance improvement.
Over the past two decades, software providers have steadily embraced the structure and principles of IBP while introducing greater usability and AI integration. Modern platforms are far more capable and accessible than those of the past, transforming what was once an administrative burden into a valuable management asset. As planning becomes increasingly continuous and collaborative, technology ensures that it remains a central function for guiding enterprise performance.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Business Planning evaluates software providers and products based on functionality that supports integrated operational and financial planning, multidimensional modeling, forecasting, analysis and reporting. It also assesses platform usability and support for executives, participants, analysts and planners. This research evaluates the following software providers: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Business planning has evolved into a continuous, enterprise-wide process that unifies financial and operational objectives. Modern platforms enable organizations to accelerate decision-making, align resources and improve agility through connected, collaborative planning cycles. AI-driven automation and multidimensional modeling now extend planning capabilities beyond finance, integrating scenario analysis and performance optimization across departments. As a result, planning is transforming from a periodic budgeting task into a strategic discipline that drives organizational adaptability.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Business Planning evaluates 17 software providers offering products supporting integrated financial, operational and workforce planning. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM and Planful rated as Innovative. Pigment and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (25%) and Platform (55%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional modeling and strong platform integration. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt platforms that unify financial and operational planning to improve collaboration and transparency across the organization. Selecting solutions with multidimensional modeling and seamless data integration enhances forecasting accuracy and responsiveness to market change. AI-enabled capabilities such as scenario modeling and natural language reporting help shift focus from manual analysis to proactive decision support. Organizations should embed planning as a continuous management discipline that aligns strategic priorities with operational execution.
The Findings – Business Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Anaplan and OneStream have done so in five categories; Oracle in four and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Planful.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations recognizing that similar provider rankings do not mean the products are equally suitable for every organization or use case.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (25%) and Platform (55%). OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Business Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support business planning, including integrated business planning, functional and departmental planning, advanced planning techniques and AI using machine learning, and support executives and participants, analysts and planners and administration.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| insightsoftware | Longview | v. 25.4 | July 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning, augmented with AI | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Planful Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One™ | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena Solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v. 2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Financial Planning
Financial planning software refines and accelerates the budgeting process, improving the productivity of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams while helping executives set objectives and allocate resources in alignment with enterprise strategy. Yet budgeting has long been criticized for being time-consuming and offering limited business value, often constrained by competing priorities and internal politics. Many enterprises still plan within silos, making it difficult to align resources with strategic goals. ISG Research asserts that by 2028, just 1 in 4 FP&A organizations will have redefined their mission to make planning easier for business unit leaders. Those that do will transform finance into a strategic asset.
Modern platforms streamline repetitive tasks, enhance productivity and provide timely, actionable insights
ISG Research defines financial planning software as applications that enable a rapid, collaborative process connecting budgeting, forecasting, analysis and decision-making across departments. Modern platforms streamline repetitive tasks, enhance productivity and provide timely, actionable insights across planning, forecasting and performance management. Technology shifts focus from reviewing past performance to shaping future outcomes, making planning a connected, enterprise-wide process that strengthens accountability and supports execution.
AI is transforming forecasting, planning and analysis across finance functions through automation, interactivity and predictive accuracy to allow for more intelligent decision-making. It accelerates forecasting, automates analytics and simplifies workflows. ISG Research asserts that by 2027, almost all providers of software designed for finance organizations will have incorporated some AI capabilities to reduce workloads and improve performance. Analysts spend less time preparing data and more time delivering insights, while executives gain tools that guide decisions and improve responsiveness.
Modern planning platforms automate data extraction and transformation from enterprise systems, ensuring accurate and consistent information across participants. Automation reduces manual effort, accelerates analysis and supports self-service reporting. By minimizing preparation and embedding AI-driven insights, FP&A professionals can focus on higher-value analysis and create shorter, iterative forecasting sprints that improve accuracy, agility and accountability to drive stronger alignment across the enterprise.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning evaluates software providers and products based on how well the software facilitates budgeting and financial planning. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of financial planning as we define it: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, insightsoftware, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Financial planning software enables enterprises to accelerate budgeting cycles, improve alignment between finance and operations and strengthen accountability across departments. Modern platforms transform forecasting and analysis from periodic reporting exercises into continuous, data-driven processes that guide strategic execution. Automation and AI reduce manual effort and improve accuracy, allowing FP&A teams to shift focus from preparing reports to delivering insights that support enterprise agility. As planning becomes iterative and technology-driven, finance functions increasingly serve as strategic partners in decision-making.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning evaluates 17 software providers offering products supporting budgeting, forecasting, analysis and financial performance management. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM and Jedox rated as Innovative. Pigment and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, insightsoftware, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (30%) and Platform (50%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional modeling and robust platform adaptability. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt financial planning platforms that unify budgeting, forecasting and analysis to enable faster, more accurate and collaborative decision-making. Integrating AI-driven forecasting and automation reduces cycle times and enhances predictive accuracy while freeing analysts for higher-value activities. Seamless data integration across enterprise systems improves consistency and accelerates scenario planning. Organizations should institutionalize financial planning as a continuous discipline that balances fiscal control with strategic agility.
The Findings – Financial Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. OneStream, Anaplan has done so in three categories; Oracle in two; and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix, SAP and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and Jedox.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, insightsoftware, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (30%) and Platform (50%). OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support budgeting and financial planning, including balance sheet, budgeting, capital spending, cash flow, corporate finance and capital and strategy and long-range planning.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| insightsoftware | Longview | v. 25.4 | July 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning augmented with AI | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One™ | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena Solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v.2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Revenue Planning
Planning software is designed to refine and expedite the budgeting process, improving the productivity of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams while helping executives set objectives and allocate resources in alignment with overall enterprise strategy and priorities. In many businesses, planning has evolved beyond sales targets to focus on total revenue. This shift, combined with more sophisticated technology, has made accurate revenue projection an essential part of planning and financial performance management.
ISG Research defines revenue planning as a holistic, data-driven approach to detailed forecasting of revenue sources and associated sales operations elements, including territory and quota planning, sales capacity planning, incentive compensation and demand planning for revenue. The term “revenue” is replacing “sales” in planning as enterprises form revenue teams responsible for retention, expansion and cross-sell in addition to new customer acquisition. ISG Research asserts that by 2026, over one-half of enterprises will establish a Chief Revenue Officer leadership role, focusing on all channels and sources of revenue, not just direct sales. The rise of recurring models such as subscriptions and e-commerce requires coordination between finance, operations and sales to manage multiple revenue streams, align territories and quotas, and maintain accurate forecasts.
Managing revenue operations demands planning tools capable of modeling territories, quotas and compensation structures across products, services and markets. Spreadsheets cannot scale to meet this complexity, producing inconsistent data and delayed insights. Dedicated software enables continuous performance monitoring and adjustment of incentives, quotas and forecasts based on data-driven insights and analytics.
AI is reshaping revenue planning by automating analytics to align incentives and improve forecast accuracy across all revenue-generating functions
AI is reshaping revenue planning by automating analytics to align incentives and improve forecast accuracy across all revenue-generating functions. ISG Research asserts that through 2026, fewer than 1 in 5 enterprises will utilize AI and data to balance direct, indirect and digital channels to achieve revenue targets, but those that do will outperform their peers.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Planning evaluates software providers and products based on how well the software facilitates revenue forecasting, territory and quota planning, sales capacity and incentive compensation. It also assesses AI capabilities that improve the timeliness and accuracy of planning and how platforms support executives, participants and administrators. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of revenue planning as we define it: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Revenue planning has evolved from traditional sales forecasting into a connected discipline that unites finance, operations and sales around shared growth objectives. Modern platforms enable enterprises to model territories, quotas and compensation structures while managing multiple revenue streams across channels and customer segments. AI and automation now support continuous forecasting and performance analysis, helping organizations balance recurring and transactional revenue sources. As revenue management becomes more data-driven, enterprises are transforming planning from a sales activity into a strategic enterprise process that aligns growth strategy with execution.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Planning evaluates 16 software providers offering products supporting revenue forecasting, territory and quota management, sales capacity planning and incentive compensation. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM, Jedox and SAP rated as Innovative. Pigment, Prophix and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (30%) and Platform (50%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional modeling and strong integration across revenue planning processes. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should select revenue planning platforms that unify forecasting, quota, capacity and incentive management under a single data model to improve alignment and accountability. Integrating AI-driven automation and analytics enhances forecasting accuracy, transparency and operational agility. Organizations should prioritize systems that connect financial, operational and sales data to enable continuous performance optimization. Treating revenue planning as a connected, enterprise-wide discipline helps ensure sustained growth and responsiveness to market dynamics.
The Findings – Revenue Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. OneStream and Anaplan has done so in five categories; Oracle in four; and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM, Jedox and SAP.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment, Prophix and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (30%) and Platform (50%). OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not a Leader, Oracle was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support revenue planning, including sales forecasting, territory and quota planning, sales capacity, incentive compensation, demand planning and revenue-specific analytics and planning.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board International | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v.2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
Workforce Planning
Planning software refines and accelerates the budgeting process. It improves the productivity of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) teams and helps executives set objectives and allocate resources in line with enterprise strategy. Headcount is often among the top three expenses, so accurate planning is essential. Workforce planning software helps FP&A, business unit leaders and HR teams improve accuracy, shorten forecasting cycles and gain visibility into hiring needs, workforce costs and talent distribution.
When integrated with overall business planning, workforce planning improves headcount forecasts, identifies skills requirements and connects talent demand through enterprise data models
ISG Research defines workforce planning as including the modeling of hiring, transfers and retention, and skills capacity by location, ramp time and workforce costs. When integrated with overall business planning, workforce planning improves headcount forecasts, identifies skills requirements and connects talent demand with financial operations through enterprise data models. It also gives managers and HR professionals greater flexibility and control.
FP&A teams must model and measure resources across departments instead of viewing them only as costs. Headcount planning demonstrates this approach. A department head builds a plan from existing employees, adds expected hires and links those roles to salary and benefit data from HR. This creates a headcount budget and grounds budget discussions in workforce needs rather than abstract financial targets.
ISG Research asserts that by 2027, one-half of enterprises utilizing compensation planning tools will require them to support complex (salary increase and bonus) budget allocation modeling scenarios, rules and guidelines, by both P&L and talent segments. Workforce planning software supports multidimensional analysis across geographies, employment types and currencies. Modern platforms include analytics and AI that strengthen forecasting, automate data management and improve accuracy across distributed workforce data sources.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning evaluates software providers and products based on how well the software supports headcount forecasting, models the employee lifecycle, manages hiring and retention plans and aligns skills with business needs. This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of workforce planning as we define it: Anaplan, Board, IBM, Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, OneStream, Oracle, Pigment, Planful, Prophix, SAP, Unit4, Vena Solutions, Wolters Kluwer and Workday.
Key Takeaways
Workforce planning has become a critical function linking human capital management with financial and operational performance. Modern platforms integrate headcount forecasting, hiring and retention modeling, and skills planning into unified data environments that connect HR and finance objectives. AI and analytics automate data collection and improve forecast accuracy across distributed workforces, allowing enterprises to better align labor investments with business goals. As workforce planning becomes continuous and collaborative, organizations gain greater agility, visibility and control over their talent and resource strategies.
Software Provider Summary
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning evaluates 16 software providers offering products supporting headcount forecasting, hiring and retention modeling, skills alignment and workforce cost management. The research ranked the top three overall leaders as OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle. Providers were classified using weighted performance in Product Experience and Customer Experience for ISG quadrant placement. Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix and Workday were rated as Exemplary with IBM and SAP rated as Innovative. Pigment and Vena Solutions were rated as Assurance; and Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer were rated as Merit.
Product Experience Insights
Product Experience, representing 80% of the evaluation, focuses on Capability (30%) and Platform (50%) which includes adaptability, manageability, reliability and usability. OneStream, Anaplan and Oracle achieved the highest performance as Leaders in this category, supported by strengths in multidimensional workforce modeling and strong integration with HR and finance systems. Leaders demonstrated enterprise-grade platform capabilities across varied roles and contexts.
Customer Experience Value
Customer Experience, representing 20% of the evaluation, focuses on validation and TCO/ROI. OneStream, Anaplan and Board were the Leaders in this category, showing strong customer advocacy and clear investment in success outcomes. Providers with lower performance often lacked publicly available customer validation or failed to demonstrate structured ROI measurement and proactive lifecycle engagement.
Strategic Recommendations
Enterprises should adopt workforce planning platforms that unify financial, HR and operational data to improve forecast accuracy and cross-functional alignment. Integrating AI-driven analytics strengthens visibility into workforce composition and identifies skills gaps that affect performance. Organizations should choose platforms that scale globally and support continuous collaboration across business units. Workforce planning should be treated as a dynamic process that aligns talent strategy with enterprise growth and financial objectives.
The Findings – Workforce Planning
The software providers and products evaluated in the research provide product and customer experiences, but not everything offered is equally valuable to every enterprise or is needed to operate in business processes and use cases. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities in products may be a negative factor for an enterprise if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a more comprehensive set of capabilities in the product is important, and where they match your enterprise’s requirements.
An effective customer relationship with a software provider is vital to the success of any investment. The overall customer experience and the full lifecycle of engagement play a key role in ensuring satisfaction and long-term success. Providers with dedicated customer leadership, such as chief customer officers, tend to invest more deeply in these relationships and prioritize customer outcomes to TCO and ROI expectations. It is equally important that this commitment to customer success is clearly demonstrated throughout the provider’s website, buying process and customer journey.
Overall Scoring of Software Providers Across Categories
The research finds OneStream atop the list, followed by Anaplan and Oracle. Providers that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Anaplan and OneStream have done so in five categories; Oracle in four and Board in one category.
The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the software providers. Those providers whose Product Experience have above median weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the two product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the Customer Experience category determines placement on the vertical axis. In short, software providers that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.
The research categorizes and rates software providers into one of four categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation of software providers’ weighted performance in meeting the requirements in product and customer experience.
Exemplary: This rating (upper right) represents those that performed above median in Product and Customer Experience requirements. The providers rated Exemplary are: Anaplan, Board, OneStream, Oracle, Prophix and Workday.
Innovative: This rating (lower right) represents those that performed above median in Product Experience but not in Customer Experience. The providers rated Innovative are: IBM and SAP.
Assurance: This rating (upper left) represents those that performed above median in Customer Experience but not in Product Experience. The providers rated Assurance are: Pigment and Vena Solutions.
Merit: This rating (lower left) represents those that did not surpass the median in Customer or Product Experience. The providers rated Merit are: Infor, Jedox, Lucanet, Planful, Unit4 and Wolters Kluwer.
We advise enterprises to use this research as a supplement to their own evaluations, recognizing that ratings or rankings do not solely represent the value of a provider nor indicate universal suitability of a set of products.
Product Experience
The process of researching products to address an enterprise’s needs should be comprehensive and evaluate specific capabilities and the underlying platform to the product experience. Our evaluation of the Product Experience examines the lifecycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, software providers are not evaluated for the entirety of the product; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future.
The research results in Product Experience are ranked at 80%, or four-fifths, using the underlying weighted performance. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Capability (30%) and Platform (50%). OneStream, Oracle and Anaplan were designated Product Experience Leaders.
Customer Experience
The importance of a customer relationship with a software provider is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The evaluation of the Customer Experience and the entire lifecycle an enterprise has with its software provider is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that provider. The ISG Buyers Guide examines a software provider’s customer commitment, viability, customer success, sales and onboarding, product roadmap and services with partners and support. The customer experience category also investigates the TCO/ROI and how well a software provider demonstrates the product’s overall value, cost and benefits, including the tools and resources to evaluate these factors.
The research results in Customer Experience are ranked at 20%, or one-fifth of the 100% index, and represent the underlying provider validation and TCO/ROI requirements as they relate to the framework of commitment and value to the software provider-customer relationship.
The software providers that evaluated the highest in the Customer Experience category are OneStream, Anaplan and Board. These category leaders best communicate commitment and dedication to customer needs. While not a Leader, Oracle was also found to meet a broad range of enterprise customer experience requirements.
Software providers that did not perform well in this category were unable to provide or make sufficient information readily available to demonstrate success or articulate their commitment to customer experience. The use of a software provider requires continuous investment, so a holistic evaluation must include examination of how they support their customer experience.
Software Provider Inclusion
For inclusion in the 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Workforce Planning, a software provider must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least 50 million in annual or projected revenue verified using independent sources, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the relevant business unit’s revenue must be software-related, and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 12 months.
The software must have the ability to support workforce planning, including support for headcount, compensation, hiring, staffing scenarios, skills and forms of workforce-specific planning, embedded analytics, embedded AI, reporting and dashboards, and advanced planning techniques. The product must also support executives, participants and administration.
The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of software provider packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include providers that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a software provider is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and it is reflected on the provider’s website that the product is within the scope of the research, that provider is automatically evaluated for inclusion.
All software providers that offer relevant products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the evaluation process at no cost to them.
Software providers that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have a significant impact on classification and ratings, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those providers.
Products Evaluated
| Provider | Product Names | Version | Release Month/Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anaplan | Anaplan Platform | v. August platform release | September 2025 |
| Board | Board Intelligent Planning Platform | v. 14.4 | August 2025 |
| IBM | IBM Planning Analytics with Watson | v. 2.0.106 | July 2025 |
| Infor | Integrated Business Planning | NA | October 2025 |
| Jedox | Integrated Business Planning | v. 2025.1 | August 2025 |
| Lucanet | Lucanet CFO Solution Platform | v. 250624 | July 2025 |
| OneStream | OneStream Platform | v. 9.1.0 | August 2025 |
| Oracle | Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management | NA | August 2025 |
| Pigment | Integrated Business Planning, augmented with AI | NA | October 2025 |
| Planful | Platform | v. 25.8 | August 2025 |
| Prophix | Prophix One | v. 2025.7.1 | August 2025 |
| SAP | SAP Analytics Cloud | v. Q3 2025 | August 2025 |
| Unit4 | Unit4 FP&A | NA | October 2025 |
| Vena Solutions | xP&A | v. Summer’25 | October 2025 |
| Wolters Kluwer | CCH Tagetik Intelligent Platform | v.2025.3 | September 2025 |
| Workday | Workday Adaptive Planning | v. 2025 R2 | September 2025 |
Providers of Promise
We did not include software providers that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in this Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Providers of Promise.”
| Provider | Product | Capability | Revenue | Geography | Customers |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kepion | Kepion | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Modeliks | Modeliks | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Strata | StrataJazz | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
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