PivotXL enhances your Excel workflow, while Planful replaces it.
PivotXL integrates seamlessly with Excel, letting finance teams build on what they already know. In contrast, Planful moves your entire planning process into its proprietary platform—replacing Excel with its own in-app sheets.

1. Coordinating between finance departments and non-finance leaders often presents practical challenges. Finance teams typically export data from their tools into Excel and share these files with non-finance stakeholders.
2. This approach allows users to view reports offline, which is especially useful during air travel or in situations without internet access.
3. While some web-based spreadsheet alternatives claim to offer Excel-like functionality, they often come with a steep learning curve, resulting in continued reliance on consultant-driven support models.

Yes, this is one of the major differences, PivotXL makes it easy to sign up and provides open documentation. Whereas Planful makes it an expensive enterprise grade sale. 

There is a complete self-service option and we charge a fee only if we get involved. Depending on your use case, you can use the fee for training or implementation. Our hourly rate is $25/hr. 

Pricing starts at $100/month and goes all the way to $2000/month. This is generally less than half the price of Vena for the same functionality. Please check out our pricing page for more details.