Best Finance FP&A Planning Platform: An Honest Comparison for 2026

Every EPM vendor will tell you they’re the best EPM platform UK businesses should choose. They’ll show you polished demos where data flows like water. Reports build themselves. Models are clean. Integrations work first time. Everything is smooth. Too smooth.

Then you implement.

The data is messier than the demo assumed. Your chart of accounts doesn’t match the template. Half your team struggles with the interface. The other half wants features that weren’t in the sales pitch. Eighteen months later, you’re wondering if you chose wrong. Or if all platforms would have been this hard.

We’ve implemented finance and planning tools at many businesses over 25+ years. That means we can tell you what vendors won’t: each platform shines in certain spots, and each will frustrate you in others. The question isn’t which is best overall. It’s which is best for your situation. The build partner matters as much as the platform choice - a lot more than vendors will let on.

Why Most Platform Comparisons Miss the Point

Vendor guides rank platforms on features. They’ll tell you Anaplan scores 4.5 for flexibility. Pigment scores 4.7 for user experience. These numbers mean nothing.

A platform’s fit depends on things that don’t fit into feature charts. Your existing tech stack matters. The skills your team already has matters. Your budget matters. And not just the licence cost. The build cost. The ongoing upkeep cost. The cost of consultants you may need when something breaks.

Reference calls with existing customers give insights that no demo can match. But vendors pick those references with care. You’ll speak to their happiest clients. Not the ones who struggled through an 18-month build that was meant to take 12 weeks.

Platform selection has become harder, not easier. The market offers many capable options. Anaplan has matured. Pigment has grown fast. Planful has carved out its mid-market spot. IBM Planning Analytics still serves organisations with heavy analytical needs. You have newcomers like Causal, Cube and Abacum trying to disrupt the market. None of them are wrong choices. But one of them is probably more right for your context than the others.

A slightly less capable platform that your team can implement well may deliver more value than a superior solution that proves too complex to deploy.

Anaplan: Power That Demands Respect

Anaplan’s modelling engine remains exceptional. For complex planning where you need to model intricate business logic, it offers flexibility that others may struggle to match. A £200M manufacturer with intercompany eliminations across 15 entities, currency hedging, and driver-based capacity planning will find features in Anaplan that are hard to replicate elsewhere.

But that flexibility creates its own problems.

Anaplan demands skilled model builders. Not just during the build, but forever. The platform gives you enough rope to hang yourself. Many organisations do exactly that. We’ve seen Anaplan models that started elegant become impossible to maintain within two years. Nobody enforced standards. The original builder left and their replacement made workarounds. Those workarounds got workarounds - and now nobody understands why the numbers are what they are.

For most £20M-£50M UK companies, Anaplan is overkill. The licence costs are high. The build complexity is real. And you’ll need ongoing access to Anaplan expertise that doesn’t come cheap.

Where Anaplan shines: complex multi-entity consolidations, sophisticated driver-based planning, organisations with dedicated FP&A teams who will own the platform long-term, businesses where planning complexity truly justifies the spend.

Where Anaplan struggles: mid-market companies without dedicated model builders, organisations wanting quick time-to-value, teams who need something that works out of the box rather than something infinitely flexible. Custom integration needs for real-time data sync.

Pigment: The Modern Alternative

Pigment has emerged as a strong option. It appeals to organisations that care about user experience and rapid deployment. The interface is genuinely modern and intuitive. That sounds shallow until you’re training 40 budget holders who have never used planning software before. Now of course, the adoption is only as good as the governance and enablement wrapper that goes around the implementation.

A platform nobody uses is worthless no matter its technical power. We’ve seen builds in other platforms where the finance team went back to Excel within six months because the model was too complex for casual users. Pigment’s design actively prevents that failure.

The platform uses AI to speed up analysis and simplify user interactions. Whether that matters to you depends on your use case. For some organisations, it’s a genuine edge. For others, it’s marketing gloss on features they’ll never touch. Agentic AI and the recent addition of the MCP capability in Pigment delivers a really intuitive experience accessible from areas even outside of Pigment. Just think about how much time you spend in ChatGPT or Claude - the MCP capability in Pigment allows you to interrogate your models directly within your favourite AI - with access and security built-in.

Pigment’s rapid growth means the platform is still maturing of course, and with it comes a different approach as regards vendor relationships. If you need specific and/or exotic features, it’s worth taking the time to check whether Pigment actually supports them before you commit. The roadmap looks good, but roadmaps aren’t features.

Where Pigment shines: organisations putting user adoption first, companies wanting faster timelines, PE-backed businesses needing quick wins. Native connectors to a variety of upstream systems.

Where Pigment struggles: highly complex planning requiring custom logic, organisations with unusual requirements that push platform limits.

Planful: The Mid-Market Workhorse

Planful provides financial planning with straightforward setup. It appeals to mid-market organisations seeking proven capability without enterprise complexity. If Anaplan is a Formula 1 car and Pigment is a Tesla, Planful is a well-built BMW. Not the flashiest option, but it gets you where you need to go.

The platform’s sweet spot is clear. UK companies in the £20M-£100M range, with standard planning needs, wanting something that works without a dedicated technical team to maintain it. Planful may not necessarily win awards for innovation. But it won’t leave you stranded either. They also are providing a lot of focus on integration of AI, but that’s still a bit earlier on the roadmap.

Build timelines tend to be more predictable than Anaplan projects. The platform is more opinionated about how things should work through their structured planning modules. That limits flexibility but also limits the ways things can go wrong. There’s something to be said for guardrails. If you need truly bespoke planning capability however, Planful can still hit the mark.

Where Planful shines: mid-market companies wanting proven features, organisations with standard financial planning needs, teams who value predictability over flexibility, businesses where the CFO wants something that just works.

Where Planful struggles: complex multi-dimensional planning (there is a limit to number of dimensions structurally - in reality rarely if ever will you hit it), organisations with unusual business models needing custom logic, companies who will outgrow mid-market features within 3-5 years.

The Questions That Actually Matter

Stop asking which platform has better features. Start asking questions that reveal fit.

What does your finance team actually look like? If you have two people in FP&A who are already stretched, Anaplan’s flexibility becomes a liability, Pigment and Planful could be viable options to consider. You need something that works without constant model upkeep. If you have a dedicated planning team with technical skills, then most of the tools on the market become accessible.

What’s your realistic timeline? PE-backed companies often face pressure to implement fast. We’ve written before about why rushing EPM builds creates problems. But if you genuinely need to show investor value within six months, that constraint should shape platform selection. Pigment’s faster deployment model might matter more than Anaplan’s superior flexibility. That’s not to say you can’t deploy an Anaplan modelling environment quickly - but there is a learning curve with all these platforms that really determines time-to-value - something that is often vaguely quoted on vendors and resellers websites, but rarely spoken about in depth.

What’s your actual budget? Not just Year 1 licence and build costs. Year 2 and Year 3 total cost of ownership. The consultants you’ll need for changes. The training for new hires. The model rebuilds when needs change. Anaplan builds routinely cost 2-3x what organisations first budget when you count everything.

How messy is your data? Every platform assumes cleaner data than you actually have. But some platforms handle mess better than others. If your chart of accounts is a disaster and your source systems don’t integrate cleanly, factor that into your evaluation. The platform that demos best with clean data might struggle most with your reality. It’s worth flagging these to your vendor before demo day so you can get into detail about the specifics of your situation. Better yet, an impartial deep-dive with a technology-agnostic expert could protect you from the glitter and shine, and steer you toward what actually matters.

What happens when your needs change? Because they will. Restructures, acquisitions, new product lines, changed reporting needs. How easily can each platform adapt? Anaplan’s flexibility helps here if you have the technical capability in-house. Planful’s structure might constrain you. Pigment probably sits somewhere between.

The Vendor Demo Problem

Vendor demos showcase platforms at their best. The data flows smoothly. Everything works exactly as intended. Real-world builds rarely enjoy such good conditions.

Ask vendors to demo scenarios that match your actual complexity. Bring your real chart of accounts. Ask about the edge cases that keep your finance team up at night. Watch how the platform handles exceptions, not just standard flows.

Better yet, talk to existing customers. Not the references vendors provide, but companies you find on your own. LinkedIn is useful here. Find finance leaders at similar-sized UK businesses who’ve implemented the platform you’re considering. Most will share honest feedback if you ask directly.

The build partner matters as much as the platform. A skilled partner can make a mediocre platform sing. An inexperienced partner or a partner who deploys junior resources can botch the best platform on the market. Ask vendors who implements in the UK. Ask those partners for their own references. Ask about projects that went badly and what they learned.

What We’d Actually Recommend

If you’re a £20M-£50M UK company with a small finance team and standard planning needs, look at Planful first. It’s not as exciting perhaps, but it works. You’ll be live faster, spend less, and avoid the complexity that derails larger builds.

If you’re a £50M-£150M company with a dedicated FP&A function, Pigment deserves serious thought. The user experience edge is real. The platform has matured a lot. Faster timelines mean faster time-to-value.

If you’re larger, more complex, or have genuinely sophisticated planning needs that simpler platforms can’t address, Anaplan remains the capability leader. But go in with eyes open about the investment required. Not just in licensing, but in skilled people to build and maintain your models.

And if you’re already invested in the IBM stack with heavy analytical needs, IBM Planning Analytics might be the pragmatic choice even if it’s not the fashionable one.

None of these recommendations are absolute. Your specific context might make the “wrong” choice right for you. A £30M company with unusually complex intercompany structures might still need Anaplan’s power. A £200M company with simple needs might find Planful sufficient.

Platform selection should reflect your specific needs rather than market popularity. The right choice depends on your current technology, user sophistication, timeline, and budget.

Trust your evaluation process. If you’ve invested properly in understanding needs, assessing options, and gathering evidence, the decision should be defensible even if it proves imperfect. Perfect foresight doesn’t exist. Informed decision-making does.

The best EPM platform for UK businesses isn’t the one with the most features or the best demo. It’s the one your team will actually use, configured in ways that support your specific processes, implemented by partners who understand your context. This is precisely what our technology-agnostic practice aims to resolve for clients unsure about the best path forward.

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