FP&A Tooling: Anaplan vs Pigment vs Power BI

The tools an FP&A function uses shape what it can do, how efficiently it can do it, and how much of its time goes to producing analysis versus wrangling spreadsheets. As FP&A has matured and the demands on it have grown, a range of specialist planning and analysis tools has emerged to replace or supplement the spreadsheets that FP&A has traditionally relied on, and choosing and using these tools well has become part of the FP&A professional’s remit. Anaplan, Pigment and Power BI are three of the tools frequently considered, each with a different character and different strengths, and understanding what each is for — and, more broadly, how to think about FP&A tooling — helps the FP&A function make sound choices and use its tools effectively.

This guide is written for FP&A professionals thinking about their tooling, whether choosing a new tool or understanding the landscape. It covers the limitations of spreadsheets that drive the move to specialist tools, the different categories of tool and what each is for, a perspective on Anaplan, Pigment and Power BI specifically, and how to think about choosing and using FP&A tools well. It is written at the level of the tools’ purpose and character rather than their specific features, because features change rapidly and the durable understanding is about what each category of tool is for. The aim is a sound way of thinking about FP&A tooling that helps the function choose and use its tools to genuinely improve its work.

Why FP&A Outgrows Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are the traditional and still ubiquitous tool of FP&A, and for good reason: they are flexible, familiar, and capable of a great deal. But as an FP&A function and its demands grow, spreadsheets reveal limitations that drive the move to specialist tools. Spreadsheets become fragile and error-prone as they grow in size and complexity, with errors easy to introduce and hard to find, and the integrity of a complex spreadsheet model genuinely difficult to assure. They struggle with collaboration, where multiple people need to work with the same data and model, and with the maintenance of a single source of truth, leading to the proliferation of versions that plagues spreadsheet-based FP&A. And they handle large volumes of data and complex multi-dimensional planning poorly, becoming slow and unwieldy at scale.

These limitations matter more as the FP&A function becomes more sophisticated and the demands grow — more data, more complex planning, more need for collaboration, more need for reliability. A function whose planning has outgrown what spreadsheets handle well faces real costs: the fragility and error risk, the version-control problems, the time consumed managing the spreadsheets rather than doing analysis. This is what drives the move to specialist tools, which are designed to address exactly these limitations — providing the robustness, the collaboration, the single source of truth, and the capacity for scale and complexity that spreadsheets lack. The FP&A professional considering tooling should understand the limitations driving the move, because they define what a good tool needs to address and help assess whether the move is justified for the particular function. Recognising when FP&A has genuinely outgrown spreadsheets is the starting point for thinking about specialist tooling.

The Categories of FP&A Tool

FP&A tools fall into broad categories with different purposes, and understanding the categories is more useful than focusing on individual products, because it clarifies what each is for. One category is the dedicated planning platform — tools built specifically for financial and operational planning, modelling and forecasting, designed to handle the multi-dimensional planning, the collaboration, and the scale that complex planning requires. These tools are the specialist successors to the planning spreadsheet, built to do planning robustly at scale, and they are what a function with sophisticated planning needs typically moves to.

Another category is the business intelligence and visualisation tool — tools built for analysing and visualising data, producing dashboards and reports that present information clearly and allow data to be explored. These serve a different purpose from the planning platforms: they are about analysing and presenting data rather than building planning models, though the categories overlap and many functions use both. A third consideration is the broader finance system landscape — the underlying systems that hold the data the FP&A tools work with, and the integration between them. Understanding that FP&A tooling spans these categories — planning platforms, business intelligence and visualisation, and the underlying data systems — helps the FP&A professional think about what tools the function needs for its different purposes, rather than expecting a single tool to do everything. The right tooling often combines tools from different categories for their respective strengths, and understanding the categories is the basis for assembling the right combination.

A Perspective on Anaplan, Pigment and Power BI

Against this categorisation, the three tools named can be understood by their character and purpose. Anaplan is an established, enterprise-scale planning platform, built for complex, large-scale, multi-dimensional planning across the business, and it is often chosen by larger organisations with sophisticated, connected planning needs spanning finance and operations. Its strength is the robust handling of complex, enterprise-wide connected planning; its considerations are the scale of implementation and the investment it represents, which suit it to larger, more complex planning needs rather than simpler ones.

Pigment is a newer planning platform, also built for business planning and modelling, often noted for a more modern interface and flexibility, and positioned as a contemporary alternative in the planning platform space. It addresses a similar need to Anaplan — robust, collaborative business planning beyond spreadsheets — with its own character and emphasis. Power BI is a different kind of tool: primarily a business intelligence and visualisation platform, built for analysing and presenting data through dashboards and reports, widely used and accessible, and strong at the analysis and visualisation of data rather than at building planning models. It serves the reporting and analysis purpose rather than the planning-platform purpose, though it is often used alongside planning tools. The key point for the FP&A professional is that these are not simply competing versions of the same thing: Anaplan and Pigment are planning platforms serving the planning purpose, while Power BI is a business intelligence tool serving the analysis and visualisation purpose, so the comparison depends on what the function needs. Because the specific capabilities of these tools evolve continually, the durable understanding is about their character and purpose rather than their current feature sets, which should be assessed directly and currently when a choice is being made.

Choosing FP&A Tools Well

Choosing FP&A tools well is a matter of matching the tools to the function’s genuine needs, rather than adopting a tool because it is prominent or because others use it. The starting point is understanding what the function actually needs — the planning it must do, the analysis and reporting it must produce, the data it works with, the collaboration it requires, the scale and complexity it faces — because the right tool is the one that serves these needs. A function with complex, large-scale planning needs different tooling from one with simpler needs; a function whose main challenge is analysis and reporting needs different tooling from one whose main challenge is multi-dimensional planning. Matching the tool to the genuine need is the foundation of a sound choice.

The choice should also weigh the practical considerations: the cost of the tool and its implementation, which can be substantial for the enterprise planning platforms; the effort and disruption of implementation, which is a significant undertaking for a major tool; the fit with the function’s capabilities and the broader systems landscape; and the realistic benefit the tool would deliver against these costs. A common error is to adopt a powerful, expensive tool that exceeds the function’s genuine needs, incurring the cost and the implementation burden without a proportionate benefit; another is to persist with spreadsheets past the point where a specialist tool would genuinely help. The FP&A professional who chooses tooling well — matching the tool to the genuine need, weighing the costs and benefits realistically, and considering the practical fit — gets tooling that genuinely improves the function’s work; one who chooses on prominence or without this analysis may get a tool that does not fit. Sound tool choice is a matter of clear-eyed assessment of need against cost and benefit, and it is part of the FP&A professional’s contribution to building an effective function.

Using the Tools to Genuine Effect

Having the right tool is only half the matter; using it well is the other half, and a powerful tool poorly used delivers little of its potential. Using FP&A tools to genuine effect means applying them to do the planning and analysis better — more robustly, more efficiently, more insightfully — rather than simply replicating the old spreadsheet processes in a new tool. The opportunity of a good tool is to improve how the function works: to build more robust models, to enable better collaboration, to free time from the mechanics for the analysis, to produce better insight. A function that adopts a powerful tool but uses it merely to do what it did before, in a new wrapper, captures little of the value.

Using the tools well also requires the FP&A professional to develop the skills to use them, because a tool is only as good as the person operating it, and the sophisticated planning platforms require genuine skill to use to their potential. Investing in the capability to use the tools well — learning them properly, applying them skilfully — is what realises their value. And it requires using the tools for their strengths, combining tools where appropriate so each does what it does best, rather than forcing a single tool to do everything. The FP&A professional who uses the function’s tools to genuine effect — improving the work rather than replicating the old, developing the skills, applying each tool to its strength — realises the value that the tools offer; one who underuses the tools captures little of their potential. The tools are an enabler of better FP&A, but only when chosen well and used well, and the FP&A professional who masters both the choice and the use builds a genuinely more capable function. This connects to the broader modernisation of finance, including the use of AI, covered across this Knowledge Centre.

The Spreadsheet’s Enduring Place

Despite the rise of specialist tools, it is worth recognising that the spreadsheet retains an enduring place in FP&A, and the move to specialist tools does not mean abandoning spreadsheets entirely. Spreadsheets remain unmatched for flexibility, for ad-hoc analysis, for quick modelling, and for the countless tasks where their immediacy and adaptability are exactly what is needed. Even a function with a sophisticated planning platform will continue to use spreadsheets for much of its work, and the skill of building sound spreadsheet models remains a core FP&A capability that the specialist tools supplement rather than replace.

The right perspective is therefore not spreadsheets versus specialist tools, but the appropriate use of each — the specialist tools for the planning and analysis where their robustness, collaboration and scale genuinely add value, the spreadsheet for the flexible, ad-hoc work where its immediacy and adaptability are unmatched. An FP&A function that moves the heavy, recurring, collaborative planning to a specialist tool while retaining the spreadsheet for flexible analysis gets the best of both. The FP&A professional who understands the enduring place of the spreadsheet alongside the specialist tools, and uses each appropriately, has a more realistic and more effective approach to tooling than one who imagines the specialist tools replace spreadsheets entirely. Good FP&A tooling is usually a combination, used for their respective strengths, and the spreadsheet remains part of that combination.