We performed a comparison between Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect and Visio based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Visio comes out slightly ahead in this comparison. Sparx users mention performance difficulties when dealing with large volumes of data. Sparx does come out ahead in the pricing category, however.
"Using Sparx Enterprise Architect allowed my customer to detail and make the company's IT strategy visible and accessible to all. The system provided clear roadmaps for IT development and helped to keep up-to-date documentation of systems and processes."
"Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is very flexible and it is simple to define the metamodel. Additionally, it is lightweight on resources."
"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"
"Sparx offers good flexibility."
"Its most valuable feature is the Zachman Framework."
"It is simple to build the first model for the solution."
"The stability has been good and satisfactory. I would rate the stability a ten out of ten."
"Its traversability is most valuable. I can use ArchiMate, and I can create a UML model. ArchiMate is for logical enterprise architecture, UML is for software engineering, and BPMN is for business processes. I can build it to have multiple models, and they are also traversable, which is not something that every tool allows. If there is a huge organization, you can segment it and have separate models for business technology or internal resource management system. You don't need to keep them in one model, and you can decide to segregate them."
"The fact that it's on-premises allows you to get fantastic speed. It's got a faster response rate, it doesn't lag, and it doesn't have any latency when you're working on it."
"I enjoy the fact that I can go into detail with Visio. In shared communications, I can inspect for any fault in my processes."
"This is a very straightforward product and I don't think that anything needs to be simplified."
"A major benefit of Visio is its user-friendliness. Upon opening the program, you have access to a variety of pre-made templates, saving you time and effort. All you need to do is input your data into the template and you're ready to proceed with your project."
"It has a lot of great features."
"The solution is easy to scale."
"Drawing flowcharts is the most valuable feature of Visio."
"It is pretty easy to use if you are looking for this type of solution."
"The window froze for five or ten seconds. You can click and click again and it takes a second to come up. It might have been specific to a version."
"The areas of improvement should be focused on utility service such as producing better graphics, perhaps having a wider image library set and producing better models for working directly with customers."
"The database management area was not usable."
"Because its easy to create diagrams one needs to be vigilant on the housekeeping of orphaned fragments - I have written my own scripts to do this, maybe they are available now."
"For data modeling, it is not very mature when comparing with other data modeling tools."
"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."
"Not visually appealing."
"It took me a while to figure out how to use the report generation features effectively. So, it would be really nice if they had a way to make that a little bit more interactive and a little bit more straightforward."
"Integration with other software would be an area of improvement, so that it's not just used to document but also as a center plane for information sharing."
"The big downside to Visio is that it's very difficult to push the design through to Power Automate, to become a workflow that you can use."
"It is not flexible in terms of functions and modeling deliverables. When you speak of processes, the program has to describe the activities and the deliverables. You have to tell your robots how to deal with and input something, and you should have something more flexible from this point of view."
"Integration with other applications need improvement. Having the functionality to integrate with databases will also make this solution better."
"The price could be better."
"I would like to see better integration with external data sources."
"It thinks that it knows what you want to do, but it doesn't. It has a way of behaving that can be very frustrating from time to time. Either it moves things about because it thinks its placement should be at a certain place, or it's keeping track of things that you don't necessarily see, so it moves something elsewhere."
"Inventory feature could be improved."
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Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is ranked 4th in Business Process Design with 97 reviews while Visio is ranked 1st in Business Process Design with 101 reviews. Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is rated 8.0, while Visio is rated 7.8. 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". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Visio writes "A software for drawing a variety of diagrams which include flowcharts, org charts, building plans, floor plans, data flow diagrams". Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is most compared with Visual Paradigm, No Magic MagicDraw, Lucidchart, LeanIX and ARIS BPA, whereas Visio is most compared with Bizagi, Visual Paradigm, IBM Blueworks Live, SAP Signavio Process Manager and Lucidchart. See our Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs. Visio report.
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