We performed a comparison between erwin Data Modeler by Quest and Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Enterprise Architecture Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Another feature of erwin is that it can help you enforce your naming standards. It has little modules that you can set up and, as you're building the data model, it's ensuring that they conform to the naming standards that you've developed."
"The product allows us to reuse entities and attributes."
"The solution’s code generation ensures accurate engineering of data sources, as there is no development time. Code doesn't even have to be reviewed. We have been using this solution for so long and all the code which has been generated is accurate with the requirements. Once we generate the DDLs out of the erwin tools, the development team does a quick review of the script line by line. They will just be running the script on the database and looking into other requirements, such as the index. So, there is less effort from development side to create tables or build a database."
"It's a safeguard for me because I'm always concerned that somebody is free handing it and will forget a key coming from the parent. The migrating keys are a great feature. Identifying relationships, non-identifying relationships, and being visually right there to understand the differences are great features. erwin is key to being able to visually understand whatever the customer is requesting. They'll give you words on a paper, but once they can actually view it as a picture, it really comes to life. The data comes to life to where they understand exactly what they're asking for."
"We had some data integration projects, where we needed to integrate it for about 100 databases. Doing that manually is crazy; we can't do that. With erwin, it was much easier to identify which tables and columns could be used for the integration. That means a lot in terms of time and effort as well as my image to the customer, because they can see that we are providing value in a very short time."
"It allows us to create logical data models. We can represent a database model in business terms, which is very useful for us."
"The most valuable feature is the physical or visual representation of the database, showing the tables, the columns, the foreign keys, and the ability to generate DDL, so you can physically implement databases."
"It's important to create standard templates — Erwin is good at that — and you can customize them. You can create a standard template so that your models have the same look and feel. And then, anyone using the tool is using the same font and the same general layout. erwin's very good at helping enforce that."
"Sparx offers good flexibility."
"Sparx has got a range of modeling features, and I am comfortable with all its offering. I've used a lot of tools over the phone. I found EA Spark, probably the most feature rich product all in all compared to other products. The solution is very cost-effective and that is its best feature. It's a very good delivery architecture tool, which also has enterprise architecture capabilities, and it's got full life cycle processes and software development. So for me, it's a pretty comprehensive tool"
"The TOGAF ADM model is most valuable. It is also very cheap as compared to other options in the market."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It is a very rich tool in terms of the functionality, and the types of diagrams, that you can create in this tool."
"The product offers very good support for all mainstream modeling notations and architectural frameworks."
"The solution is easy to use, supports SysML and UML, and is able to connect to MATLAB. This is very important for us."
"It is a very flexible product. It can do a lot. It is also a reliable product."
"Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM. Therefore, we manually make changes to those scripts and edit them, then reverse-engineer within the tool. So, it does take some time to edit these DDL scripts generated by the source operational systems. What I would suggest: It would be helpful if there were a place within the erwin tool to import the file and automatically eliminate all the unnecessary lines of code, and just have the clean code built-in to generate the table/data model."
"I would like to see the reporting capabilities be more dynamic and more inclusive of information. The API is very sparsely understood by people across the user community."
"I am not so happy with its speed. Sometimes, it can have problems with connections."
"The erwin Data Modeler is quite complex to use."
"Although Quest Software has made tremendous strides in recent years, they need to evolve more in the big data arena; erwin Data Modeler could use a little more work when it comes to big database designs."
"In terms of new features, it would be great to have a cloud base. We should be able to put it on the cloud for better collaboration and data models sharing."
"This is a very complex product."
"I would like to see improved reporting and, potentially, dashboards built on top of that. Right now, it's a little manual. More automated reporting and dashboard views would help because currently you have to push things out to a spreadsheet, or to HTML, and there aren't many other options that I know of. I would like to be able to produce graphs and additional things right in the tool, instead of having to export the data somewhere else."
"The UI could be improved and made a little bit more presentable."
"The Portfolio Management features can be added in the next release. As it helps you to manage more portfolio of projects and architectures of cost projects on a portfolio level. This would be an important feature in the next release."
"From a practical point of view, we need speed and reliability for creating a model and doing some really meaningful tasks such as application landscape, refactoring, etc. These are two primary criteria. Sometimes, when you import something, it creates the object duplicates, or it allows you to do something that you're not supposed to do. For example, validation is missing. This could be frustrating because when you work at a high speed, you need to come back and start fixing things that the tool allowed you to go with, which is not quite good. So, there should probably be some internal mechanisms to advise you about what you're doing and what is probably not the best idea."
"In a future release, they should improve portfolio planning."
"I would like to see integration with Confluence or any other TRM, and the capability to integrate with the data storage, such as a repository similar to GitHub."
"One room for improvement in Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is that it's not very friendly. Another room for improvement in the tool is that it doesn't enable you to import the metadata from a database very easily, so reverse engineering of a database was very difficult. Its database modeling and entity-relationship modeling functions need improvement."
"The initial setup of the Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect It's very complicated. It's very difficult to start with the right templates because there are many possibilities. The deployment took approximately two days."
"More challenging than other tools to maintain documents and document versions for an architecture board review."
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erwin Data Modeler by Quest is ranked 3rd in Enterprise Architecture Management with 37 reviews while Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is ranked 2nd in Enterprise Architecture Management with 97 reviews. erwin Data Modeler by Quest is rated 8.6, while Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of erwin Data Modeler by Quest writes "The product lets users import different types of models, but it is expensive, and the interface must be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect writes "Easy to set up and had no issues with stability, but it's not a very friendly tool, and its database modeling and entity-relationship modeling functions need improvement". erwin Data Modeler by Quest is most compared with SAP PowerDesigner, IDERA ER/Studio, Lucidchart, Visio and AWS Well-Architected Tool, whereas Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is most compared with Visual Paradigm, Visio, No Magic MagicDraw, LeanIX and iServer. See our Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest report.
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