Runway Alternative
Your financial plan is only half the picture.
Runway models the numbers. Forest connects them to the strategy, capacity, and teams delivering them.
Why COOs choose Forest over Runway
Runway is a best-in-class financial planning tool. It models budgets, forecasts spend, and gives finance teams a collaborative environment to plan together, and it does that well. But it stops at the financial layer. There’s no roadmap, no initiative tracking, no capacity planning, no governance workflow. When a budget line changes in Runway, someone still has to manually figure out what that means for the teams and strategies behind it.
Where Forest goes further
Forest connects the financial plan to the execution layer. Strategy, capacity, and finance in one place, so when something shifts, the full downstream impact is visible immediately.
Beyond the financial layer
Runway tells you what the numbers say. Forest tells you why they’re moving and what to do about it, connecting every budget line to the initiative, team, and capacity behind it.
Built for the COO, not just finance
Runway is designed for finance teams and CFOs. Forest is built for the COO who needs strategic planning, capacity planning, and budget planning connected, without running two separate platforms and reconciling them manually.
Strategy connected to delivery
Runway has no roadmap, no initiative tracking, and no milestone management. Forest ties every financial plan to strategic objectives and teams delivering it, so the gap between what was budgeted and what’s being built is always visible.
Compare Forest vs Runway
Every capability, side by side, so you can make the right decision.
| Capability | Forest | Runway |
|---|
Strategic planning
| Strategic objectives & themes |  | — |
| Scenario planning | | |
| Issue-to-strategy mapping | | — |
| Initiative & roadmap management | | — |
| Timeline & Gantt view | | — |
| OKR support | | — |
Capacity & resources
| Cross-team capacity planning | | — |
| Resource-to-strategy alignment | | — |
| Capacity heatmaps | | — |
| Employment type management | | — |
| Predictive demand modelling | | — |
Financial planning
| Live budget forecasting | | |
| Budget variance analysis | | |
| Multi-currency | | |
| Real-time re-forecasting | | |
Governance
| Initiative review & approval workflow | | — |
| Full decision audit trail | | — |
AI
| Agentic AI planning | Soon | — |
Platform
| No implementation fees | | |
| Guided onboarding | | |
| Unlimited free viewers | | — |
| SSO / SAML | | |
| API access | | |
Great businesses don’t run on disconnected plans
Discover how Forest connects strategy, capacity, and finance into one living platform, and what that means for the way you lead.