Business planning tools come in various forms, and they’re typically recommended for both beginners and experienced entrepreneurs alike nowadays. If you’ve never used one before, it can take a while to get your bearings, but in the end most tools on this market follow some common paradigms, making it easy to find your way around once you’ve figured out how the most popular tools work. It’s also the kind of market where you want to spend some time comparing products until you’ve found the one that fits your needs best, as there is a lot of variety.
Enloop is a great utility that allows you to effectively plan your business in many aspects, from marketing, to finances and more. It’s a competent package that includes various features you may find useful, and it’s offered at a reasonable price, complete with a free trial. That said, Enloop is clearly aimed at more experienced users who’ve already gone through similar tools in the past, as it doesn’t come with too much built-in help. For many people though, Enloop should do a fine job at allowing them to plan the next steps of their companies more adequately.
Plans and pricing
Enloop comes with a free 7-day trial, which can give you a good rundown of all features provided by the application. It can take a while to explore everything Enloop can do fully, which makes the free trial a nice feature compared to other tools on this market. The premium version costs either $19.95 or $39.95 per month, depending on the tier you choose. The advanced tier (called “Performance”) allows you to do more in-depth analysis, but both limit you to three business plans in total.
You can pay monthly or annually, and you can get some nice discounts in the latter case. Check the pricing options at the company’s website to see what the best deal for your specific needs is. Sometimes, you may be able to get everything you need from just a few months of using the application.
Features
Enloop offers various features to help you plan your business, especially the financial side of its operations. You can generate plans from default suggestions and have them automatically populated, only changing details that are relevant to your specific situation. You can also plan your finances in different aspects, and get a preview of how things are going to develop down the road.
The program is very advanced in terms of customization, and you can tweak every little detail that you might be interested in until the plan matches your needs exactly. This can be a particularly useful feature for cases where you want to deviate from the norm in some way and experiment with some more unique business ideas. Not every business planning tool on the market allows you to do that right now, so Enloop already manages to stand out nicely among the competition.
Interface and in use
The program is offered through a web interface and works entirely in your browser. It’s lightweight and easy to navigate, although the site is occasionally not very responsive on the backend. This can lead to some frustration when you’re trying to quickly get from one menu to another, and you may want to keep several tabs open for different parts of the program. Other than that, you shouldn’t encounter any issues with the interface of Enloop, and it should feel very familiar if you’re coming in from other similar tools.
Support
The developers provide adequate customer support and your requests will be answered in a relatively short time. However, the application could use more tutorials and guidance in general, as it’s pretty barebones in this regard, expecting the user to already know how to navigate a similar interface. This may not be a problem to those who’re already used to other tools of this type, but new users may find themselves confused in the beginning.
The competition
LivePlan is the main competitor to Enloop, and while the two tools are quite similar in their basic functionality, they also approach the problem from different perspectives. As we mentioned above, Enloop is more suited for people with more experience in the field, while LivePlan could be a better choice for those who need more guidance and are not too confident about their next steps. However, Enloop can fit that bill as well with a little bit of additional research.
Final verdict
Enloop doesn’t shine with anything original, but it does its job well enough, and offers everything you might expect from an application of its type. The price for the premium version may be a bit too steep for some, but it’s a small investment compared to the benefits it brings to the table for the average business owner. Don’t underestimate the benefits of planning your operations with an advanced solution like Enloop, as this can often lead to some surprising insights that you wouldn’t come across on your own in most cases.
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