We performed a comparison between erwin Data Modeler by Quest and SAP PowerDesigner 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."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."
"Drag-and-drop data modeling and reverse engineering out of databases are the most valuable features of erwin Data Modeler by Quest."
"It is a scalable solution...The technical support team is fine."
"The modeling portion of the tool is the most valuable. There are some notes, naming standards, and other functions that we use as well. There's a whole boatload of functionality in this thing and we use maybe 10% of it. It seems to be pretty common that not all the functionality is fully utilized. But it's just got gobs and gobs of stuff that you can implement if you so choose to."
"The product allows us to reuse entities and attributes."
"The solution is good for organizing the data and the scripting part is very powerful. It's easy to create technical scripts for models."
"The principal feature that I liked is that the solution has a very graphic interface."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of SAP PowerDesigner is the testing of the models, it has the best function. Reverse engineering is very helpful too."
"The physical database model is definitely the most valuable feature because it describes normalization exactly the way you understand the data, and it deploys it perfectly with open source systems."
"It offers a lot of features in one solution. You would have to get multiple other products to bundle together all of the capabilities that you get in just this product."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"In terms of operational efficiency and cause savings or return on investment, I can say that with SAP PowerDesigner, our company saves a lot of time."
"This solution has good tools for big data, where you can manage large and complex databases."
"SAP PowerDesigner is fairly stable."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a very fast reverse engineering process. It does a very expansive comparison."
"It does not have a cloud application."
"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."
"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."
"It is not a very stable solution. I rate the stability five out of ten."
"In terms of improvements, support could have been better in terms of installation, especially of workgroups. We struggled quite a bit to get it up and running. Collaboration could have been better from an installation perspective, but it is trivial as compared to what we use it for. Other than that, I don't have much feedback. It works pretty well, and the fact that we've been using it for more than a decade shows that it is quite solid."
"The erwin ETL functionality has room for improvement when it comes to mapping databases with a classic entity-relationship model to a data warehouse model."
"The Bulk Editor needs improvement. If you had something that was a local model to your local machine, you could connect to the API, then it would write directly into the repository. However, when you have something that is on the centralized server, that functionality did not work. Then, you had to export out to a CSV and upload up to the repository. It would have been nice to be able to do the direct API without having that whole download and upload thing. Maybe I didn't figure it out, but I'm pretty sure that didn't work when it was a model that sat on a centralized repository."
"The interface must be improved."
"You have the possibility to complete a connection for abbreviations if you are creating columns or names of the tables. In the Citrix environment, this has been lagging to the point where the PowerDesigner was not usable."
"The focus is more on mainstream development environments, and I see a lack of focus on the open source world. I think SAP PowerDesigner probably interfaces better with SQL Server and Db2 but not with open source databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL."
"The portal of SAP PowerDesigner could be better. The tool also needs more features and integration with other products, such as Collibra. It would be interesting for SAP PowerDesigner to have more integration."
"Not very intuitive or user-friendly."
"Technical support needs improvement."
"Technical support could be better and more human."
"There should be a better usage of current hardware including multicore CPUs, higher resolutions, and multiple displays."
"Regarding improvements, I suggest enhancing the connection between objects in process and data models. It's crucial to define the structure of objects, especially when dealing with standard frameworks like VMM. There should be better visualization of arrows between BPM and data modeling objects, specifying their structure and impact. For future versions, a feature similar to Bizagi, allowing users to see forms or SQL representations of objects, would be valuable for demonstrating and presenting project details to stakeholders."
erwin Data Modeler by Quest is ranked 3rd in Enterprise Architecture Management with 37 reviews while SAP PowerDesigner is ranked 5th in Enterprise Architecture Management with 34 reviews. erwin Data Modeler by Quest is rated 8.6, while SAP PowerDesigner is rated 7.8. 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 SAP PowerDesigner writes "Effective in terms of validating everything, but sometimes they don't allow us some flexibility and GUI could improve". erwin Data Modeler by Quest is most compared with IDERA ER/Studio, Visio, Lucidchart, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect and AWS Well-Architected Tool, whereas SAP PowerDesigner is most compared with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Visio, IDERA ER/Studio, LeanIX and MEGA HOPEX. See our SAP PowerDesigner vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest report.
See our list of best Enterprise Architecture Management vendors.
We monitor all Enterprise Architecture Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
15 years ago was the one time I chose to use PowerDesigner over Erwin Data Modeler was for a project where we have hundreds of pl/sql ETL scripts that needed to be run in a specific order for specific tables. PowerDesigner had the ability to store the pl/sql within the data model and prioritize/order the script run sequence. This meant that we could count on PowerDesigner to automatically generate the ddl and pl/sql code in the correct run order, rather than manually maintaining a spreadsheet with the script order and running each script manually, a VERY labor intensive process. I don't know if PowerDesigner still has that capability.
With all of the ways we have to program and perform ETL, Erwin Data Modeler has been my tool of choice for any other project throughout the years. Protecting intellectual property and transparently sharing data model information with other modelers by saving the the models in a centralized location (i.e. Model Mart) is important for any company. Making the data model diagrams transparently accessible via Web Portal is another important step in ensuring both technical and business users understand the structure and relationships of the data contains within a data store. Lastly, making the data model metadata available via the Erwin Data Intelligence Suite enables both technical and business users to completely understand everything about the data and data store: Business Glossary, Reference Data, Governance, Data Quality, Data Mapping, and especially automating data lineage and impact analysis.