Struggling to plan for market shifts?
Siloed financial data and manual reporting make it nearly impossible to adapt quickly. Your team is stuck compiling data instead of analyzing it.
This reliance on outdated information means you risk making poor strategic decisions. You are simply reacting to the past instead of preparing for the future.
This constant data wrangling eats up valuable time your finance teams could be using for strategic scenario modeling and forward-looking analysis.
Speaking of financial efficiency, my guide on best spend management software explores how to streamline your expenses.
The right EPM software changes this, giving you a unified view of your business to make faster, more informed decisions.
In this guide, I’ll review the best enterprise performance management (EPM) software. We’ll explore tools that automate planning and provide the real-time insights for true agility.
You’ll find tools that unify your data, improve forecast accuracy, and enable proactive scenario modeling for your entire enterprise.
Let’s dive right in.
Quick Summary:
| # | Software | Rating | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Workday → | Large enterprises with complex finance | |
| 2 | OneStream Software → | Mid-to-large unified finance teams | |
| 3 | Vena → | Finance teams using Microsoft tools | |
| 4 | Planful → | Agile finance leaders at mid-sized firms | |
| 5 | Anaplan → | Cross-functional planning teams |
1. Workday
Struggling to unify your strategic planning with operational execution?
Workday offers an AI platform designed to drive innovation and empower your people, streamlining finance and HR. This means you can manage costs and make smarter financial decisions with confidence.
You can reduce forecast cycles from weeks to just nine days, freeing your team to focus on higher-value work. This capability supports greater agility in dynamic markets.
How can you simplify complex processes?
Workday’s financial planning capabilities enable continuous, collaborative planning, integrating with any ERP/GL or data source. This allows for real-time scenario modeling and improved forecast accuracy, crucial for effective EPM.
The platform includes AI-generated insights for financial management, helping you to move from simply tracking value to actively creating it. Additionally, features like spend management give you complete visibility into your source-to-pay processes, improving operational agility and resource allocation. The result? You’ll drive flawless business operations that save time, money, and effort.
Make confident decisions for your enterprise.
Key features:
- AI Platform for People, Money, and Agents: Unifies human capital management and financial operations with next-gen AI for on-point decisions and peak performance.
- Financial Planning and Management: Provides continuous, collaborative financial planning, spend management, and AI-generated insights to drive innovation and manage costs.
- Integrated Solutions: Connects finance, HR, and planning systems to streamline workflows, automate reporting, and offer a flexible foundation beyond legacy ERP limitations.
Workday features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Workday stands out as a leading contender for best Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software, especially with its robust AI platform. It helps CFOs and finance directors gain agility by automating budgeting, enhancing forecast accuracy, and streamlining cross-departmental collaboration, as demonstrated by customers who saved $5 million in annual costs.
2. OneStream Software
Struggling with fragmented financial data and unpredictable planning?
OneStream Software addresses this by unifying your financial and operational data on a single platform. This means you can finally break free from data silos and simplify your financial close.
With OneStream, you gain the ability to streamline financial close and consolidation, ensuring accuracy and freeing up your team for more strategic work.
Ready to transform your finance organization?
OneStream solves your budgeting and forecasting challenges by delivering AI-powered planning. This allows you to improve forecast accuracy by nearly 30% and speed planning by 86%.
Plus, the platform’s infinitely extensible nature means it adapts to your unique needs, enabling data-driven decisions across sales and people planning. Additionally, purpose-built AI and machine learning features supercharge decision-making and boost productivity, empowering every employee to perform at their best.
The result is a unified approach to modern finance.
Key features:
- AI-Powered Planning: Leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to speed up planning processes and significantly improve forecast accuracy for better strategic decisions.
- Unified Data Platform: Consolidate all your financial and operational data into a single source of truth, eliminating silos for comprehensive insights and streamlined workflows.
- Integrated Business Planning: Convert your data into actionable strategy, from forecasts to financial goals, ensuring alignment across your entire organization.
OneStream Software features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: OneStream Software offers a uniquely unified and AI-powered platform for those seeking the best enterprise performance management (EPM) software. Its ability to integrate financial and operational data, coupled with advanced AI capabilities, empowers organizations like Polaris to achieve revolutionary financial planning and forecasting, significantly improving accuracy and collaboration.
3. Vena
Is EPM software evaluation overwhelming your finance team? Vena offers an AI-powered complete FP&A platform, natively integrated with Microsoft technology. This means you can drive growth with flexible modeling and accelerate analysis using interactive dashboards.
Here’s how you can gain control of your financial processes. You can align teams and maintain accountability with workflows, reminders, and real-time task tracking, all within an environment you know. This simplifies decision-making.
Ready to gain agility and precision?
Vena helps you plan better and achieve more, streamlining your most important processes on one scalable platform. The solution enables you to forecast revenue and expenses, project cash flow, and plan for new hires with precision. You can easily update your models when things change, ensuring your plans remain agile in dynamic markets. Additionally, you can build detailed budgets collaboratively, breaking down planning silos and analyzing variances by drilling into your data. Plus, Vena streamlines your financial close process, from consolidations and account reconciliations to tax provisioning. The result is real-time financial reporting and confident decision-making, leveraging AI agents and seamless Microsoft Teams integration.
Speaking of performance, if you’re also interested in boosting your customer experience, my article on best cloud contact center solutions covers that too.
Key features:
- Flexible modeling: Drive growth by easily flexing drivers and modeling unlimited “what-if” scenarios, making bottom-up or top-down adjustments directly within Excel.
- AI-powered insights: Turn everyday finance questions into FP&A insights, analyze, report, and collaborate with AI agents and seamless Microsoft Teams integration.
- Collaborative planning: Bring everyone into your planning process with full data transparency, centralized templates, co-authoring, and live chat to eliminate version control issues.
Vena features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Vena is the best Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software for CFOs and finance directors seeking to unify planning and execution. It leverages native Microsoft integration and AI for faster planning cycles (66% faster) and reporting (95% faster), saving weeks on budgeting and decreasing close times by up to 12 days.
4. Planful
Struggling with financial agility and strategic alignment?
Planful addresses your pain points with transparent data integrations and AI-driven insights. This means you can connect all your data for smarter decision-making.
The platform helps your team eliminate manual processes, providing better insights and confidence to guide business growth faster. Here’s how it empowers your team.
You can truly drive financial success.
Planful transforms how you plan, close, and report, empowering you to make more impactful decisions across your business. This solution helps align every team, inform every move, and change direction with a platform designed for improved financial performance. Additionally, you can leverage machine learning for budgets based on historical data. Plus, Planful AI detects anomalies, flags risks, and provides instant answers with its Help Assistant. The result is unparalleled forecasting accuracy from native AI-driven, real-time collaboration.
Your team can reach peak financial performance.
Speaking of driving business growth, ensuring your customers are successful is vital. My guide on best customer success software can help you master retention.
Key features:
- AI-driven insights: Elevate financial decision-making with intelligent AI features like Signals for anomaly detection and Projections for machine learning-based budgeting.
- Integrated planning: Connect your data with flexible, transparent, always-on integrations, enabling alignment of strategic objectives with financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting.
- Scalable performance management: Automate your close, reduce risk, and report faster, while scaling effortlessly to manage complex processes with trusted, role-based security.
Planful features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Planful stands out as an excellent choice for best Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software, especially for finance leaders seeking agility. Its AI-driven features like anomaly detection and machine learning-based budgeting, along with strong integration capabilities, directly address challenges in strategic alignment and real-time scenario modeling. Customers like PS Logistics have seen significant results, achieving 80% faster monthly close times and $2.4 million in annual savings.
5. Anaplan
Struggling with fragmented insights and slow decision-making?
Anaplan offers a unified platform to tackle these challenges directly, connecting planning across your entire business.
This means you can make silos a thing of the past, aligning strategic, financial, and operational plans for better agility.
Here’s how Anaplan helps you thrive.
Anaplan’s AI-infused scenario planning and analysis platform is designed to optimize decision-making across finance, sales, supply chain, and HR. Its data management and integrations allow you to connect planning data from any source, ensuring a complete and accurate view. Additionally, the platform provides predictive, generative, and agentic AI capabilities built for real-world complexity, helping you uncover hidden trends and accelerate time to insights. Plus, with purpose-built applications for various functions and industries, you can implement tailored solutions for your greatest challenges.
The result is precise, predictive insights quickly across your organization.
Key features:
- AI-infused scenario planning: Provides capabilities for predictive, generative, and agentic AI to optimize decision-making and uncover hidden trends.
- Integrated business planning: Unifies strategic, financial, and operational plans across finance, sales, supply chain, and HR to break down silos.
- Tailored industry solutions: Offers purpose-built applications for specific industries like financial services and manufacturing, addressing unique challenges.
Anaplan features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Anaplan is an exceptional choice for the best Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) software, especially if you need to unify disparate planning processes and leverage AI for better decision-making. Its ability to connect finance, sales, supply chain, and HR functions on a single platform significantly enhances agility and insight.
6. Board
Struggling with fragmented planning and siloed data?
Board’s platform unifies financial and operational plans, offering continuous planning and enhanced forecast accuracy.
This means you can drive confident, aligned decisions across your organization.
Gain agility and make smarter strategic decisions.
Board brings finance and operations together, eliminating silos and powering planning with real-time insights. You get capabilities like planning, simulation, reporting, and self-service analytics. Board also offers predictive and advanced analytics with MS Office® integration, helping you transform planning processes and reduce risk. Additionally, with Board AI and Signals, you can leverage expert-curated external data and AI-powered Planner Agents for dynamic data exploration and solving real business problems with Analytical and Generative AI.
The result is truly unified enterprise planning.
Key features:
- Continuous Planning and Forecasting: Accelerate business performance and drive greater forecast accuracy across financial, supply chain, and HR functions.
- AI-Powered Analytics: Utilize AI and ML for dynamic self-service exploration with massive datasets, enabling smarter, faster decisions for your team.
- Unified Enterprise Platform: Connect major data sources, ensure secure cloud infrastructure, and benefit from code-free development for various planning use cases.
Board features, pricing, & alternatives →
Verdict: Board stands out as a strong contender for best enterprise performance management (epm) software by offering an integrated platform that unifies finance and operations, providing battle-tested scalability and robust data connectivity. Its AI capabilities and continuous planning approach address pain points like fragmented data and improve forecast accuracy.
Conclusion
Future-proofing your enterprise is tough.
Choosing the right EPM tool is daunting. Disconnected financial data and slow, manual reporting processes only make it harder for your organization to adapt.
The cost of inaction here is immense. Sticking with outdated manual processes means your finance teams are constantly just playing catch-up, leading to slower strategic decisions and missed opportunities.
Here’s my top recommendation.
From my analysis, Oracle Cloud EPM is your best bet. It directly solves these challenges by connecting planning and providing a single source of truth for agility.
I’ve seen how its powerful predictive capabilities help enterprises model complex scenarios in real-time. It’s truly the best enterprise performance management (epm) software for gaining that competitive edge.
I encourage you to visit the Oracle Cloud EPM website to explore its comprehensive suite of features and see how it can fit your organization.
You’ll make faster, smarter decisions.
