We performed a comparison between SAP PowerDesigner 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."It allows us to have proper documentation in terms of the databases."
"I've used the reverse engineering feature a lot. I can take a look at the structure of the database and what relationships it has."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"It can automate many routine tasks and save human resources to focus on real problems."
"It has helped me to develop the as-is state, design its to-be state, and track the capital investment according to gap analysis."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a very fast reverse engineering process. It does a very expansive comparison."
"The feature I found valuable in SAP PowerDesigner is extraction. I also like that my company hasn't faced any issues because of the clear documentation about SAP PowerDesigner."
"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."
"Its ease of use and the breadth of the toolkit are most valuable. It has an incredible repository of artifacts to work with, and they're all cross-referenced. It works with a whole bunch of different standards. It works with BPMN, which is Business Process Modeling Notation, and it also works with something called TOGAF, which is the Open Group Architecture Foundation. There are different layers when you're dealing with architecture. There is the user interface, application, data, data servers, and all that kind of stuff. You have the infrastructure, hardware, and software layers, and then you have the application and business capability layers. You can model a business process and decompose it into all of the applications, data, and hardware to support it."
"The Business Process Modeling or BPM part is the most valuable. Its ability to simulate scenarios is also very useful. It can also create descriptions of the workflows. It has a feature in which if you create some BPMN process, a workflow diagram, and the description inside, you can actually simulate the whole scenario, and you get the description. That's very handy."
"There are a lot of features in Enterprise Architect. It allows us to take on a lot of tasks."
"The solution saved a lot of time, about 30%."
"Features good reporting facilities coupled with a concrete database."
"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 most valuable feature of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is the value streams."
"We use it to develop and maintain the Enterprise Conceptual Model, migrated from erwin a couple of years ago."
"The user interface could be more user-friendly."
"This product lacks artificial intelligence that should be very good in terms of automatically identifying the classification of elements."
"In terms of improvement, the pricing is a bit high."
"I've tried to use Power Designer to bring in images, which didn't work very well at all."
"There are many areas of this solution that needs to be changed."
"The tool lags in the area of customer service."
"The data governance should be improved, like ER/Studio."
"Connectivity can be improved because it's not very good."
"More challenging than other tools to maintain documents and document versions for an architecture board review."
"When the model is large, it is a bit slow to render."
"In general, we now have a problem with Sparx Enterprise Architect because many analysts think it's too complicated to use in a giant environment."
"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."
"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."
"I struggled with most of the features for this tool, as did the rest of our architecture team."
"What should be improved are the integration capabilities of the solution with Bizagi."
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SAP PowerDesigner is ranked 5th in Enterprise Architecture Management with 34 reviews while Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is ranked 2nd in Enterprise Architecture Management with 97 reviews. SAP PowerDesigner is rated 7.8, while Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is rated 8.0. 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". 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". SAP PowerDesigner is most compared with erwin Data Modeler by Quest, Visio, IDERA ER/Studio, LeanIX and MEGA HOPEX, whereas Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is most compared with Visual Paradigm, Visio, No Magic MagicDraw, Lucidchart and Avolution ABACUS. See our SAP PowerDesigner vs. Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect report.
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