We performed a comparison between Avolution ABACUS and erwin Data Modeler by Quest 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."There are a lot of different features, but the business/decision-maker feature, visibility, and dashboards are most valuable."
"The product is easy to use and well-structured for the integrations we need it to make."
"It's more than just an enterprise architecture tool as it has a lot of nice features, e.g. messaging, simulation, etc."
"It is a very stable solution...The initial setup of Avolution ABACUS is very easy."
"The tool's implementation is straightforward as everything is readily available. For instance, setting up a portal is seamless, allowing easy publishing and access to data. However, integrating with other tools like BI, Power BI, or Grafana requires setting up pipelines between them."
"The most valuable feature is the traceability, you can trace any object to the other."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a customizable meta-model, which is key."
"There are plenty of features available such as the ability to test applications for issues and a user-friendly dashboard."
"They have a lot of features and the most up-to-date technology integration, which I haven't seen in other products."
"The ability to collaborate between different members across the organization is the most valuable feature. It gives us the ability to work on the same model, regardless of where we are physically."
"It supports a wide variety of databases, including the latest ones. We have chosen to go for a cloud-based database, and it supports that, which is very useful."
"It reduces monthly savings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Think about a company like Costco and all of the points of sale systems in Costco, all of the systems, the applications, but if all the applications in Costco all had their own data model, trying to integrate those, upgrade them and manage their different versions of the same model throughout the store, is an absolute nightmare. It's phenomenally expensive. This helps reduce that cost significantly. I'm talking on the orders of hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"The solution is excellent in providing a visual representation of a database and can generate DDL for implementing changes. We use DDL for logical purposes to review with business people, ensuring they have the required fields for processing. We also use it as a data dictionary for the physical data model to understand all the purposes of the terms. This helps us map the logical and physical terms with the business definition to understand our data."
"The data lineage feature is very valuable."
"Being able to point it to a database and then pull the metadata is a valuable feature. Another valuable feature is being able to rearrange the model so that we can display it to users. We are able to divide the information into subject areas, and we can divide the data landscape into smaller chunks, which makes it easier to understand. If you had 14 subject areas, 1,000 entities, and 6,000 columns, you can't quite understand it all at once. So, being able to have the same underlying model but only display portions of it at a time is extremely useful."
"We find that its ability to generate database code from a model for a wide array of data sources cuts development time. The ability to create one model in your design phase and then have it generate DDL code for Oracle or Teradata, or whichever environment you need is really nice. It's not only nice but it also saves man-hours of time. You would have to take your design and just type in manually. It has to take days off out of the work."
"The tool doesn't have any intelligence built in. We have to design the dashboards ourselves, which is a challenge because we have to depend on the vendor for customizations."
"They should take more initiative to implement things that competing products have already come out with."
"Having more control over page size is lacking in this product. Print utilization also needs to be improved."
"I use reference models, which are taxonomies, in my EA work. It is a reference model/taxonomy of things with capabilities, sub capabilities, and sub-sub capabilities, so you're working it down. I haven't yet found a simple way to implement that in Abacus. It could be that it is there, but I don't know how to do it."
"The company needs to update the UML version they are using for the product as it is quite old."
"If they want to expand in the European market then they are going to have to improve their technical support."
"It doesn't have the simulation capability, which would be helpful in doing some business process analysis and improvements."
"It is vastly scalable but you can't run it on a Mac or Linux so it has limitations."
"I would like the solution to be more user-friendly to deploy."
"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."
"The only real complaint I have is the time it takes to do a database comparison on a large model. If they could speed that up, that would be the only thing I can think of that needs improvement."
"The solution's model mark could be better because it crashes sometimes."
"I love the product. I love the ability to get into the code, make it automated, and make it do what I want. I would like to see them put some kind of governance over the ability to make changes to the mart tables with the API, so that instead of just using the modeler's rights to a table -- it has a separate set of rights for API access. That would give us the ability to put governance around API applications. Right now a person with erwin and Excel/VBA has the ability to make changes to models with the API if they also have rights to make changes to the model from erwin. It's a risk."
"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."
"It is not a very stable solution. I rate the stability five out of ten."
"It would be nice to have it on the Linux platform, not just Windows. If they can support Linux, there would be a huge market for it."
Avolution ABACUS is ranked 8th in Enterprise Architecture Management with 14 reviews while erwin Data Modeler by Quest is ranked 3rd in Enterprise Architecture Management with 37 reviews. Avolution ABACUS is rated 8.0, while erwin Data Modeler by Quest is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Avolution ABACUS writes " An out of the box tool that creates reports on the fly that can help your client make better decisions". On the other hand, 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". Avolution ABACUS is most compared with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, LeanIX, MEGA HOPEX, Visio and Alfabet Enterprise Architecture Management, whereas erwin Data Modeler by Quest is most compared with SAP PowerDesigner, IDERA ER/Studio, Lucidchart, Visio and erwin Evolve by Quest. See our Avolution ABACUS vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest report.
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