Budgeting and forecasting software compared

A bookkeeper who reports on forty client companies and a finance director closing ten legal entities both need a budget, a forecast and a variance report. The tools they buy have almost nothing else in common. This page compares eight products that, on their own websites, offer budget models, forecasts with scenarios and variance reports: LivePlan, Fathom, Jirav, Cube, Prophix, Datarails, Workday Adaptive Planning and Pigment. We read each vendor's pages on November 4, 2026, and every product page links to the pages we used.

What the software has to do

Budgeting and forecasting software is sometimes called FP&A software, for financial planning and analysis. We list a product here only if its own pages describe all three jobs. A budget model sets the plan for a period, usually by department or account. A forecast projects results forward, often as a rolling window that moves ahead as each month closes. A variance report compares what happened with the budget or the latest forecast and shows the gap.

Prophix defines variance analysis as comparing actual results with budgets and forecasts, with dollar variance equal to actual minus budget and percentage variance equal to that gap divided by the budget. The arithmetic is simple. What a tool adds is the plumbing: actuals arrive from the ledger without retyping, and every line stays tied to the version of the plan it was measured against.

Why small businesses plan at all

The US Small Business Administration asks for financial projections in a business plan and describes them as forecasted income statements, balance sheets, cash flow statements and capital expenditure budgets. It suggests a five-year outlook, with quarterly or even monthly projections for the first year. When it explains how to calculate startup costs, it tells owners to plan for at least 12 months of expenses and to add roughly 10% to the break-even analysis for costs they cannot predict.

The 2024 Small Business Credit Survey, reported in the Federal Reserve Banks' 2025 Report on Employer Firms, shows why that matters. Of the firms surveyed, 75% named rising costs of goods, services or wages as a financial challenge, 56% named paying operating expenses and 51% named uneven cash flows. A budget that is never compared with actuals cannot show an owner which of those pressures is arriving first.

Two kinds of buyer, two kinds of price

The eight products split cleanly by who is expected to buy them. Three publish prices. LivePlan and Fathom list dollar amounts and Jirav lists both business and advisor pricing. The other five publish no prices: Cube, Prophix, Datarails, Workday Adaptive Planning and Pigment send buyers to a demo, a quote form or a sales contact. Where a price is missing we say so on the product page rather than estimate it.

LivePlan is the cheapest way in. Standard costs $15 a month on annual billing and $20 otherwise, and Premium costs $30 a month on annual billing and $40 otherwise. Each plan covers one active company, five contributors and unlimited guests. The page lists up to 10 full forecast scenarios and budget versus actual dashboards, and it promises a 35-day money-back guarantee with no contracts. It does not say how to cancel or whether plans renew automatically, so ask before the first payment.

Fathom charges for companies rather than for users. Pro costs $450 a month for 25 companies, with $17 for each extra one, and the Portfolio plan costs $67 a month for 100 companies. Forecasting, budgets and variance reporting belong to Pro, and Portfolio companies must be upgraded to use them. Billing is monthly with no minimum term, and the trial lasts 14 days. An accounting firm that wants forecasts for all 100 companies should price the Pro route before the $0.67 per company figure makes the decision.

Jirav sits in the middle. Its business price list shows Starter at $10,000 a year with up to 5 planning departments and Pro at $15,000 a year with up to 15, while Enterprise is quoted. A separate wholesale list for accounting and CFO advisory firms starts at $50 a month for Controller Essentials and $150 a month for CFO Enterprise. The page does not define the unit behind "starting at", so an advisor should confirm what counts as a client before comparing the two lists.

What a quote hides

Cube does at least explain how it prices. It sells Bronze, Silver and Gold by legal entity, with 1, up to 10 and up to 50 entities, and all plans include unlimited users. Companies with more than 50 entities or more than 1 TB of data go to a custom Strategic quote. Multicurrency consolidation is an add-on on Bronze and Silver, and premium support, extra modules and API access carry no published price. A group with entities in several currencies should therefore ask for the Gold quote and the Silver quote with the add-on and compare the two in writing.

Datarails works the other way round. Its three plans cap people and connections: Professional includes 2 users and 1 integration, Premium 5 users and 2 integrations, and Expert 15 users, 50 viewers and 3 integrations. The company's FAQ says exact pricing is not publicly documented. A team with a ledger, a CRM and a payroll system needs three connections before it counts a single user, so the tier is set by data sources as much as by headcount.

Prophix, Workday Adaptive Planning and Pigment show no tiers at all. Prophix points readers to a blog guide on what drives cost and to a demo. Workday's overview page offers a free trial, a demo and a sales contact. Pigment's homepage offers a free trial and a demo. In each case the number that matters is the one in the written quote, and the buyer should ask whether it covers implementation, extra entities and the modules named on the product page.

Scenarios and rolling forecasts

Scenario handling differs more than the feature lists suggest. Prophix says base, upside and downside cases can sit inside one model and be compared side by side, and Datarails describes cycle cloning to create new scenarios in seconds. Workday says scenarios can be personal and shareable inside a governed model. Pigment advertises one-click scenarios, though it marks its Planner Agent, meant to simulate scenarios and forecast, as coming soon.

At the small end, Jirav's wholesale list ties scenarios and horizon to the plan, with 5 active scenarios and a 7-year forecast on CFO Enterprise against a 1-year forecast on Controller Essentials. Its business list ties horizon to the plan too: model duration of 24 months on Starter, 48 on Pro and 84 on Enterprise. A founder preparing a lender's five-year outlook, the horizon the SBA suggests, needs a plan with at least 60 months of model duration, which on Jirav's business list means Enterprise.

Rolling forecasts are where the ledger connection matters most. Prophix describes a rolling 12 or 18 month view that extends each period as actuals arrive, and it suggests running a rolling forecast beside a budget, with the budget setting the target. A rolling forecast without automatic actuals turns into a monthly spreadsheet chore, which is the problem these products are sold to remove.

Variance reports

Variance reporting is the weakest claim on many vendor pages, and it decided who made this list. Several well-known products were left out because their own pages did not describe comparing actuals with a budget or forecast. The eight here do. LivePlan lists budget versus actual dashboards with more than 20 trend reports. Jirav says users can compare plan with actuals and add commentary to variance reports. Datarails says users can compare actuals with budget, with the latest forecast or year over year. Prophix says variance is calculated across entities, departments and cost centers as periods close.

Ask each vendor to show a variance report built from your own chart of accounts. A demo on sample data proves the screen exists, not that your account structure maps cleanly. Fathom's reporting lives in Pro, so the same test applies to a firm with a Portfolio plan.

Security and compliance claims

Security statements are uneven. Fathom's page says the company is GDPR compliant and holds SOC 2 Type 1 and ISO 27001 certifications. Prophix's security page states SOC 2 Type II and ISAE 3402 Type 2 attestations and ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018 certifications, but says nothing about GDPR or HIPAA. Cube states SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II certification and HIPAA compliance, with reports on request, and does not mention ISO 27001 on the pages we read.

LivePlan, Jirav, Datarails, Pigment and Workday did not state SOC 2 on the pages we checked, and their entries show the field as unknown rather than no. Workday's page does cite ISO/IEC 42001 certification for its AI management system, which is a different standard from a SOC report. A buyer handling client or employee data should ask for the current report or trust center link before signing, since a missing statement on a marketing page proves nothing either way.

Where location changes the price

Prices on this page are in US dollars. Fathom offers USD, AUD, NZD, CAD, GBP, EUR and ZAR and excludes sales tax, so a buyer outside the US should check the amount in the currency actually charged. LivePlan shows dollar signs without naming the currency. Location also shapes which accounting systems connect: Fathom lists Xero, QuickBooks, MYOB and FreeAgent, while Cube names Oracle, Sage and Dynamics 365 on the ERP side.

What to test during a trial

• Connect your own ledger and check that last month's actuals match the trial balance to the dollar.
• Build next year's budget for two departments and count how many steps a department head needs to submit inputs.
• Clone a scenario, change one assumption and confirm the forecast, cash flow and balance sheet all move together.
• Produce a budget versus actual report for a closed month and ask who can add commentary to it.
• Ask in writing what happens to your models and data if you cancel, and how they can be exported.