Picture this: you’re the person who owns the model for three business units, each with its own messy spreadsheet. One wrong formula, and you're off by thousands. You need:
- Speed (so late-night crunches don’t become routine)
- Accuracy (so nothing slips through)
- Team alignment (so decisions don’t rely on email chains and memory)
Pick the wrong platform, and you risk slowing down your entire team or, worse, making the wrong call.
Let’s compare Runway and Causal, so you can find the tool that fits how complex your model is, and how your team actually works.
Overview
- Runway is a modern FP&A platform for forward-thinking finance teams and model owners inside companies of any size. It combines flexible, driver-based modeling, strong automation, and live data, all without sacrificing usability. Companies like Tixel swapped 23 spreadsheets for one shared model in Runway.
- Causal feels like a turbocharged spreadsheet, with no-code modeling, a slick sheet-like interface, and fast scenario testing. It’s great for spinning up a first model and dashboards quickly, though deeper, cross-functional modeling often depends on manual structure and coordination as complexity grows.
Forecasting & budgeting
Runway
- Driver-based modeling: Link assumptions like revenue growth, headcount, CAC to financial outcomes in real time.
- Live, linked drivers: Change your pipeline or hiring plan and see P&L, cash flow, and burn update instantly.
- Human-readable formulas: No proprietary language; write formulas in plain English, so anyone can read them.
- Sync actuals: As real data flows in, forecasts adjust automatically.
- Support for layered logic: Build forecasts that reflect both high-level strategy and detailed operational plans.
- Multi-dimensional modeling: Across entities, products, segments, and cost centers, without having to rebuild the model every time the business structure changes.
Perfect for teams where a model owner needs to answer “what if?” quickly and keep the plan in lockstep with the business.
Causal
- No-code, template-driven: Create simple budgets and models quickly.
- Formula-first yet accessible: Spreadsheets without coding.
- Connected to source systems: Pull live data from accounting, CRM, and other tools, with refresh behavior configured per integration and model.
Best for users who need lightweight models fast, are comfortable maintaining structure themselves, and may outgrow complexity later.
Scenario planning
Runway
- Auto-drafted scenarios: every model change auto-saves a version with audit trail.
- Side-by-side comparisons: review base, upside, risk, and more at a glance.
- Collaborative context: add notes to tables, surface rationales, and adjust assumptions, all in one place.
- Scenario locking and merging: you can lock a scenario to prevent changes, or merge it into the main plan once finalized.
- Proven impact: Superhuman saw 50×-100× efficiency gains using Runway.
Runway transforms planning into a live conversation grounded in a single shared model.
Causal
- Visual sliders and real-time outputs for fast experimentation.
- Scenario snapshots and comments, but with tier-based storage limits.
- No concept of plan timelines or scenario locking: scenarios remain editable without a formal “approved plan” concept.
Great for quick testing; less ideal when you need long-lived, audited scenarios that become “the plan” for the whole company.
Reporting and dashboards
Runway
- Dynamic dashboards: Live charts, KPIs, and editable databases, all in one place.
- Auto-updating reports: Once set up, dashboards always stay current.
- Accessible and understandable: Finance can empower other teams with curated, live data.
- Drill-down with dimensional layers: You can drill from Revenue to Revenue by Customer, Region, Class, or Product Line, all powered by database stacking.
With Runway, Finance teams can build a shared understanding of the business off the same live model they use to plan.
Causal
- Clean dashboards and charts, exportable to slides or docs.
- Quick build, quick share, but less depth for filtering or investor relations.
- Transaction-level drilldown: Causal lets you drill into raw transaction data from your ERP.
Ideal for snackable visuals, especially when the primary goal is sharing outputs, not collaborating deeply on the model itself.
Integrations and data sync
Runway
- 750+ system integrations including NetSuite, Salesforce, Workday, QuickBooks, and data warehouses.
- Automatic data syncs to keep your model and forecasts current.
- Structured data mapping and validation: ensures clean, consistent model inputs.
- Direct integration to Rippling: pull in HR and employee-level data with full structure and context.
Causal
- Live connections to major systems like accounting platforms, CRM, HRIS, and data warehouses.
- CSV imports and APIs for custom data sources.
- Auto-refresh is available, but not enabled by default.
Great for kicking off quickly, but may require more hands-on design in how each model pulls, structures, and uses source data.
Collaboration and permissions
Runway
- Role-based permissions: finance sees everything, department leaders see only relevant data.
- Entire version history & audit trails: who changed what, and when.
- Notes and edit control: eliminates email chains and replaces scattered P&L copies.
- Shared modeling infrastructure: teams can build on top of the same assumptions, and trust them.
Causal
- Multi-user editing and role-based permissions, suitable for small teams or a single finance owner sharing dashboards with stakeholders.
- Less opinionated about workflows and approvals, so you’ll rely more on process than on the tool itself to prevent conflicting edits and keep “the plan” clear.
Use cases and real-world examples
Runway handles heavy lifting:
- Rootly cut investor reporting down from a week to 10 minutes with Runway’s automations.
- 818 Tequila found instant answers to critical questions with Runway.
- Tixel replaced 23 spreadsheets with Runway.
- Indie.io improved forecast accuracy by 85% with Runway.
Causal works best for quick model building and internal plans. As a TrustRadius reviewer says: "Causal's spreadsheet-like interface lets us spin up scenario models in minutes without coding." For teams that need fast what-if analysis, it just works. When that model needs to turn into a shared planning surface across departments, many teams start to look for something like Runway.
Which tool makes sense for you?
It depends on how central the model is to decision-making, how complex your planning needs are, and who needs to touch the numbers.
- Planning style: If you want a single shared model that finance owns and everyone else can explore, Runway’s collaborative planning, dimensional modeling, permissions, and audit trails help you stay in control. If you’re comfortable with separate, lighter models per question and primarily need dashboards and quick what-ifs, Causal can work well.
- Integrations: If your systems don’t talk to each other, your team ends up doing manual cleanup. Runway automates the sync and lets you model directly from those data sources. If your stack is simpler and you mainly need accounting data and a handful of operational feeds, Causal’s integrations are usually enough.
- Modeling complexity: For quick what-ifs or lightweight forecasts, Causal works. But if you need a living model that reflects the whole business, with multi-entity, multi-product, and cross-functional plans in one place, Runway wins.
- Cost of error: Planning is strategy. Runway helps you catch issues early, test assumptions rigorously, and make decisions with context that’s shared across finance and operators, not trapped in a single person’s file.
If finance is mostly one person running a few models and sharing outputs occasionally, and your planning needs are still simple, Causal is a strong pick.
If the model is becoming the backbone of how your company plans, with more stakeholders, more entities, and more “what if?” questions, Runway is built for that.
What sets Runway and Causal apart?
- Runway: Forecasting power, scenario control, direct HR integrations (like Rippling), dimensional drill-down, version locking, merging, audit trails, and robust access control on top of a modeling surface that finance can own without engineering.
- Causal: Fast setup, visual modeling, transaction-level drill-down, and spreadsheet-style comfort that feels familiar to anyone coming from Excel or Sheets.
Causal helps you build fast. Runway helps you build fast and keep everyone aligned on a single source of truth.
If finance is a spreadsheet behind the scenes, Causal is fine.
If finance is the nervous system of the company, powering strategic decisions, you’ll want Runway.
Book a demo to see what planning with Runway actually looks like.