301 complaints extracted from 301 reviews of Anaplan between 2016-04 and 2026-02, average rating 4.62/5, grouped into the problems users report most. Each problem links to the market it belongs to and to startup ideas built on it.
The problems Anaplan users report
Opaque, expensive licensing nobody can track — 24 complaints about Anaplan; 26 complaints across 2 products · market pageUsers can't figure out what they're paying for or why costs keep rising. Complaints specifically call out the per-GB workspace charging model as confusing because it doesn't map to normal storage intuition, license types that are 'unclear and confusing' to both buyers and the partners reselling the product, and no easy way to see contracted licenses versus actually used ones. The result: organizations can't justify renewals, pilots never get approved, and expansion to other teams like Marketing or HR stalls because nobody can predict what adding seats will cost.
Bad Anaplan model architecture, caught too late — 17 complaints about Anaplan; 17 complaints across 1 product · market pageAnaplan gives builders enough rope to hang themselves. Users repeatedly describe models that become slow, bloated, or unmaintainable because architecture mistakes were made early and nobody caught them — 'can be implemented incorrectly making the tool slow and unusable' and 'easy to lose the simplicity and logical structure within a model.' The real damage happens quietly: a model that works fine at 10,000 rows falls apart at 100,000, or a release gets blocked because object-level migration doesn't exist and the whole model has to move together.
Anaplan chokes on large, complex data — 14 complaints about Anaplan; 14 complaints across 1 product · market pageUsers consistently hit walls when their models grow — slow recalculations, storage limits that require archiving old data, and capacity constraints on consolidation work that needs granular detail. The complaints range from 'importing large data sets could be faster' to 'high volume data can become overwhelming, requiring archiving of data templates to manage it.' The core issue is that Anaplan's architecture charges by data volume and degrades in speed as model complexity and size increase, so companies either pay more, simplify their models, or just wait.
SPM software won't connect to anything cleanly — 11 complaints about Anaplan; 14 complaints across 3 products · market pageSales performance management tools like Allego, Alysio, and Anaplan are islands. Users complain about manually entering data at end of day because syncs don't run automatically, wrestling with JavaScript-based APIs they describe as 'ancient', and doing significant extra work to pull in external data sources through custom API connections. The systems assume clean, structured data already exists — but when it doesn't, implementation stalls entirely.
Sales software too complex to onboard without handholding — 10 complaints about Anaplan; 20 complaints across 4 products · market pageUsers across multiple SPM tools describe the same experience: they open the product and immediately feel lost. Complaints range from 'so many features, it was overwhelming at first' to 'the learning curve made most users redundant from using this tool.' The problem isn't that the features are bad — it's that there's no structured path from zero to competent, and the tools assume either a dedicated admin or expensive vendor-led training to bridge that gap.
Confusing navigation buries core workflows — 9 complaints about Anaplan; 51 complaints across 4 products · market pageUsers across every product in this category struggle to find what they need without heavy upfront training. Complaints point to layered menus that require too many clicks, folder structures that are 'overly complex,' dashboards crammed with too much information, and the coexistence of old and new interfaces that leaves newer users stranded between two competing mental models. The friction isn't occasional — it's the default experience for anyone who hasn't been formally walked through the software.
Sales admin user and access management — 7 complaints about Anaplan; 19 complaints across 2 products · market pageAdmins in sales performance tools spend 15+ minutes on single role changes, have to type user names one by one to build ad-hoc groups, and can't create manager hierarchies or scorecards without filing a request to their customer success rep. The access control models are rigid enough that teams end up over-provisioning administrator roles just to let people do basic data access tasks — and the whole thing gets worse the larger and more complex the org gets.
Sales metric updates too slow to trust — 1 complaint about Anaplan; 34 complaints across 4 products · market pageAcross every product in this category, salespeople can't trust the numbers they're looking at right now. They describe hitting refresh compulsively, making wrong assumptions about where they stand in a competition or against a daily quota, and feeling genuine stress — 'slow updates cause me daytime stress' — because the lag between doing the work and seeing it counted can stretch from minutes to hours to days. The iPhone delay complaint ('consistently delayed for iPhone users by about a week') and the full-day downtime complaints show this isn't just a minor UX annoyance — it's a reliability failure that breaks the core reason people use these tools at all.
In their words
“The user interface needs to improve, as the row names are not frozen when adding information, making it hard to track the data.”2.5/5 · 2022-12-24 · Confusing navigation buries core workflows
“There are some capacity issues when working on extremely demanding use cases such as consolidation, where granularity is required.”3/5 · 2023-07-19 · Anaplan chokes on large, complex data
“Anaplan is not very accurate with its data until the very last minute, leading to jumbled data until the last day of a quarter.”3/5 · 2023-05-09 · Bad Anaplan model architecture, caught too late
“Can't handle huge implementations due to never ending toasters from model builders that makes development difficult.”3/5 · 2020-11-25
“Formatting capabilities of Anaplan are not its forte, making it a struggle when reports need to be fancy and output needs to be shown in pdf or excel format.”3/5 · 2017-11-16
“Role-based access is inflexible, necessitating many users to have administrator roles to manage dataset access.”3.5/5 · 2026-01-14 · Sales admin user and access management