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ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Financial Planning Emerging Providers: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
Integrated Business Planning (IBP) connects operational and financial planning across business units by transforming budgeting into a continuous, collaborative, data-driven process aligned with business strategy that gives executives a unified view of performance and finance leaders real-time insight into enterprise results. While IBP represents the enterprise standard for connecting strategy and execution, many organizations seek simpler tools that modernize financial planning without the scale, cost or complexity of a full IBP platform.
ISG Research defines emerging providers within financial planning as those that support the traditional financial management process without the disadvantages of standalone spreadsheets and the operational overhead and cost of an IBP system. These emerging financial planning applications are designed to provide FP&A groups with software that preserves their existing budgeting process, is easy to implement and maintain, and requires limited training, while eliminating the issues caused by using a personal productivity tool for an enterprise-wide process. These applications serve the specific needs of the FP&A organization in the finance department by streamlining modeling, data gathering, analysis and reporting to improve visibility and decision support across planning cycles.
To achieve this level of simplification and ease of use, these applications exclude many of the platform and customer experience elements used to evaluate software that supports integrated business planning. However, they deliver measurable improvements in accuracy, control and productivity for finance teams seeking to modernize their budgeting approach. ISG Research asserts that by 2028, at least one-fifth of enterprises that use standalone spreadsheets to support their financial planning will adopt a simplified budgeting application to increase productivity and shorten budgeting cycles. As functionality and adoption grow, these tools may evolve toward broader planning ecosystems, offering enterprises a pathway to more integrated planning maturity. By examining this segment separately, ISG highlights the growing diversity of financial planning offerings and how emerging providers complement established enterprise platforms.
The 2025 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Financial Planning Emerging Providers covers software designed to facilitate budgeting and financial planning and highlights how these offerings fit within the broader enterprise planning landscape. This research evaluates the following software providers: Abacum, Centage, Cube, Datarails, Drivetrain, insightsoftware, Jirav, Phocas Software, Sage and Solver.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of financial planning emerging providers software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating financial planning emerging providers offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for Financial Planning Emerging Provider in 2025 finds Sage atop the list, followed by Abacum and insightsoftware.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
- insightsoftware.
- Sage.
- Abacum
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
- Phocas Software.
- Abacum
- insightsoftware.
The Leaders across any of the five categories are:
- Abacum, which has achieved this rating in five of the five categories.
- insightsoftware and Sage in four categories.
- Drivetrain and Phocas Software in one category.
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle financial planning emerging providers, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our financial planning emerging providers blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.
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