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Board vs Windward Core comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 4, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Board
Ranking in Reporting
20th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (23rd), Business Performance Management (10th)
Windward Core
Ranking in Reporting
25th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
36
Ranking in other categories
Document Generation Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Reporting category, the mindshare of Board is 0.6%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Windward Core is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Reporting
 

Featured Reviews

Wiboon Thabsuwan - PeerSpot reviewer
Easy to use and requires less time to learn or understand its features
I think the product is good in terms of ease of use. The interface looks really nice and very easy to use. Every command appears in the icon. It looks like you don't have to understand everything about the command. You do not necessarily have to know more, or I would say that there is less time for our study about the products. Functionality-wise, it is quite easy to use and requires less time to understand or learn about the product. I am a software vendor, so I do not use the tool myself. I use it for my clients. My clients mostly use it for budgeting and timing purposes. I would say that's really less maintenance at all because they can do everything by themselves. It is good in terms of ease of use.
HM
It has streamlined a lot of our reporting processes
Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same. We have gone back to Windward support a couple of times on a few issues, e.g., we had some issues with reports that had barcodes on them. The barcode wasn't displaying properly. It was displaying as a skewed image as opposed to an actual barcode. Therefore, we worked with Windward support, having some daily calls with them. Then, within the next release, they were able to resolve the issue. They even gave us a pre-release, so we could implement it into our code before the actual official release on the website. It would be nice to have some sort of workflow capability within the product. Anytime you generate a document, nine out of ten times there is something which precedes that document, whether it's entering parameters in, e.g., if I'm requesting the status report for a project. The first thing that I usually want from a status perspective is which project is the status report for and which week is it for, as those are some of the things that I have to supply before I can generate a document. From a workflow perspective, it would be nice to say, "This project belongs to this person, and this person is okay with me pulling information out of this document for whatever need I have." From a workflow perspective, I would like a wizard interface that goes step-by-step, like a questionnaire, where there are a bunch of things that you have to answer, "Yes or no," before it knows what to do or how to produce the document. Right now, we write our own custom UI for this.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"With the combination of 24/7 global support and their community, there was great customer service, tech support, and community support."
"Where it used to take me three days at the beginning of the year to create the new financial statement, now it is a matter of minutes because all the data is in the system."
"The benefits are getting the data in one spot, the ability to report dynamically, and version control."
"The tool seems to have a lot of ways to handle scaling."
"The flexibility and the user-experience are the most valuable features of the solution."
"BOARD technical support is knowledgeable and helpful."
"A lot of flexibility from the data modeling standpoint. It can add specific line items into our budget, for example, or if we want to make changes to the data model itself, we have that flexibility."
"The most valuable features are the reporting and the charts. The reporting functionality is handy for aggregation, when it comes to planning. That ability is fascinating and our users are very happy with it. The charts and the reporting allow our users to see all the data and to see how things are going this year or in the COVID situation. They're seeing everything. Instead of having to check data line by line, they're seeing it in a graph and they're seeing it in charts."
"We ended up going with Windward for the level of support we got from them during our proof of concept."
"The engine being able to sit inside of our firewall is the most important feature."
"The most valuable feature is the Rich Text or TinyMCE in fields. For example, you have a text field but it is not a regular text field, it is a link. Inside this link, you can copy/paste everything: images, text, and tables together. After saving this field, you can pull it into the document."
"It's very feature-rich. You can create tables, you can create graphs, you can import pictures, and those features are also easy to use."
"​Creating dynamic table of contents (TOC) based on dynamic data in different reports."
"The most valuable feature is that it provides good, dynamic document-generation performance and the documents are being generated reliably."
"The Windward solution was very fast to rollout, and it is proven."
"The design tool, with all of its features and sample output fidelity tests, and being able to work with JSON data and output PDF and HTML, were also both crucial."
 

Cons

"If we could upload other data, e.g., pivot tables which can be done in BOARD already, that we have pre-existing and have that data distribute to more complex spreadsheets​, I would like that going forward."
"What could be better is the manual... nowadays, most people use a web client, but on the Board manual website, a lot of the information is only about the Windows client. If they could update that, it would be helpful."
"In terms of scalability, I would say that there are some limitations in the solution. It cannot handle data that is too big."
"​We are looking for ways to distinguish zeros versus nulls in BOARD."
"It would be nice to have more connectors for other data sources. BOARD is a great tool to become the single source of the truth. Making it easier to connect data sources for niche software tools will make it easier to keep everything in one place."
"It would be nice to see truly transferable processes from model to model, as well as a method of building repetitive processes."
"Building similar models entirely from scratch could be made quicker with transfer abilities between databases and capsules."
"It can have more functionality for narrative reporting. They should also improve their training courses, which are currently very lightweight. When you get into more complex things, it is quite difficult to figure out what you're supposed to do, and you have to look at a lot of videos before you actually understand, which is a bit frustrating. Their training can be more comprehensive."
"Their PDF needs improvement. We've run into some issues when we tried to generate a Word document. If we try to generate the same document in PDF, sometimes it doesn't look exactly the same."
"It needs the ability to drill down in a single report (i.e., interactive)​ into data."
"Regarding AutoTag, we do notice that when you want to refactor a little bit of your template design or when you want to implement changes, sometimes you need a lot of clicks to get the change done. For instance... it would be helpful to be able to find all the identifiers with the old name and replace them with the new name. We haven't found a way to do that with the find-replace tool. Throughout the user-interface of Windward, you need a lot of clicks to get that done."
"There is always room for improvement in the speed, especially with the complex, multi-line Excel spreadsheets. They made some improvements in the last version that are quantum-fold faster than when I first started. But there is always room for improvement there. You always want reports faster and faster."
"I have to deal with VERY long lists of properties contained in our XMLs and it would be nice if Windward offered a way to alphabetize this property list."
"The only thing I can think of, that we'd like it to do, would be the ability to "burst out" reports, meaning one section of a report could be sent out as an email to a manager of a department, say, without having to run multiple reports to do it. As it sits now, we have to do multiple reports to do it."
"We would like to shrink these reports into one page, because there is a lot of free space on one page, but we cannot shrink it into the one page to be shorter. This is one thing we would like to change."
"They should add a document distribution solution on top of the document generation capability. It should allow us to send the generated document to a certain recipient (e.g. customer contact’s email address) based on a business-rules management system. That system would allow the end-user to manage a relationship between a document template and its recipient."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool's price is a bit high compared to other solutions."
"Find a partner who will take responsibility for the implementation, and be available for support."
"The solution is quite expensive, if it is made cheaper then we can have more clients. I rate it four out of ten."
"​In terms of the pricing, it was reasonable. BOARD is not the lowest in the market, but it was reasonable for us."
"It is not the cheapest product on earth, but you get so much. It provides good value for money."
"Pricing is a bit higher than normal desktop applications, but it's well worth it. The ROI is simple to understand and the monthly payment for an annual license is affordable and worth it."
"For what you're getting, it's an extremely good value."
"​They are fair and flexible. They are willing to work with your current architecture to make sure you have the best deal.​"
"We negotiated our prices many years ago, and while they go up a little bit here and there, they've been pretty steady."
"I'm starting to hear clients squeal about the price of their software. The cost of the software has gone up."
"Pricing is something I complain about. Production pricing is okay, but for a testing environment the pricing looks a bit high to me."
"The only problem with the pricing of Windward is the limitation on the number of reports generated. It is costly in that sense. If you want to increase, you have to pay more, based on the number of reports generated per day. It is not the same with Crystal Reports. With the latter, you buy a license at one point in time and that's it."
"The pricing is very reasonable for what it provides. The report builder is about one grand per user... We are paying for a support contract, which is 20 percent of the price, but because the licenses are perpetual, I think the pricing is very reasonable."
report
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Insurance Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
13%
Recreational Facilities/Services Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Is Board better than Anaplan as a Business Intelligence (BI) solution?
We've had several FP&A departments include Anaplan in their analytics discussions, and while BI information IS generated, the focus is generally on compiling input from various sources and simu...
What do you like most about Board?
All the reports are prepared automatically.
What needs improvement with Board?
Some of my company's customers are interested to see the predictive analytics part of the tool. Some customers would like to leverage or prioritize predictive analytics as the main feature, but som...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Windward, Windward Studios
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Coca-Cola, Puma, Desigual, Ricoh, KPMG, H&M, Groupe SEB
HAL, Inc., Axe Group, White Clark Group, Blueprint Software, Aspect Security, Nucleus Software, LeBlanc’s Food Stores, South Sound 911, Aegon, Barclays, Fidelity Investments, ArisGlobal LLC, USDA, RepLink, AON Hewitt
Find out what your peers are saying about Board vs. Windward Core and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,207 professionals have used our research since 2012.