The main competition for all planning products is the widespread use of the simple Excel spreadsheet, which many business users prefer to use as a straightforward, quick-to-deploy planning and BI tool.

However, we have already seen that companies using specialized planning products achieve far higher business benefits than companies using Excel as their primary planning tool, proving that Excel is not entirely suitable as a planning product.

This assertion is further supported when looking at how likely users are to recommend their software solution:

Percentage of users which would recommend Excel or a Planning Tool

Would you recommend your planning product to a similar company? All products (n=611) vs. Excel (n=273)

Not least because of the advantages outlined in our previous post, specialized planning products have a much higher recommendation rate than Excel for planning purposes. While 80 percent of users of specialized planning software would probably or definitely recommend their planning product to other companies, one-third of Excel users say they would probably or definitely not recommend the use of Excel as a planning tool to other businesses.