We performed a comparison between SAP PowerDesigner and Visio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about LeanIX, Sparx Systems, erwin by Quest and others in Enterprise Architecture Management."I like the connectivity or the lineage between the models and usability."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a very fast reverse engineering process. It does a very expansive comparison."
"SAP PowerDesigner is an excellent tool that does what I need it to do. What I like most about it is that it's stable, fast, and easy to understand."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"The solution is a very pragmatic tool. It's quite easy to use."
"SAP PowerDesigner is fairly stable."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable features are process mapping and identifying responsibilities."
"The product efficiently visualizes various business processes, including building and networking architecture."
"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."
"What I like best about Visio is that it's flexible. Sometimes, if I need to draw quickly, I use Microsoft PowerPoint, but if I need icons, which Visio has, I use Visio. I also like that the solution gives me a much more powerful range of options."
"It is a scalable solution."
"I think the best part of Visio is that you can import drawings very well into Microsoft Word. For example, if you put the Visio drawing into Word, you can double click on it and it opens in Visio. It is a very useful feature and something which I miss switching to Enterprise Architect. In Enterprise Architect, if I import a drawing into Word it does not open the diagram in Enterprise Architect. This is one of the strongest features and the ability to create your own stencils."
"Architecture modeling software with satisfactory standard features. It's also stable and effective in facilitating communication with others."
"I like the way you can hypertext across tabs so you can actually create an interactive that you can export as a website. You can also extend it to a monitoring tool if you really wanted to."
"Not very intuitive or user-friendly."
"One disadvantage of SAP PowerDesigner is that you cannot reverse engineer the ALTER statements, so that's an enhancement or area for improvement I'm looking forward to seeing from the SAP team in the future. That should directly reflect on the physical data models my company builds."
"This product does not have a good BPMN Modeler."
"SAP PowerDesigner could improve by making the repository easier to understand. It is difficult to understand how the repository works because when I used logical models as part of the team, we wanted to use them together and update the older versions of the data model version but it was confusing. The repository needs to be explained."
"SAP PowerDesigner can improve the ease of use. It is not the best tool on the market because it is tough to navigate and use. A beginner would not be able to use it well, it requires some experience. If the solution was more user-friendly it would be able to be used by more audiences. I do not think many people are aware of this solution and they should use it."
"Pricing for small consultancies needs improvement. They sustain prices to competing tools. The competing tools tend to do special offers. PowerDesigner SAP doesn't pay much attention to the pricing of it and there are no special offers."
"Technical support needs improvement."
"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 solution's initial setup was a bit complex for me."
"I would like to see Visio become some kind of enterprise architecture, which it is not."
"The application grid seems to be unreliable which makes simple tasks complicated."
"Its support team could be well-equipped with the required information."
"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."
"Visio's scalability could be improved. I had a license through my school and it would have been great to be able to collaborate with more people."
"The export and import functionality from Visio to other tools and the import and export functionality from other tools to Visio are areas with shortcomings."
"The solution should be included in Microsoft Office 365. For some reason, it's not. It should be bundled in with everything else."
SAP PowerDesigner is ranked 5th in Enterprise Architecture Management with 34 reviews while Visio is ranked 1st in Business Process Design with 100 reviews. SAP PowerDesigner is rated 7.8, while Visio is rated 7.8. 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 Visio writes "A software for drawing a variety of diagrams which include flowcharts, org charts, building plans, floor plans, data flow diagrams". SAP PowerDesigner is most compared with erwin Data Modeler by Quest, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, IDERA ER/Studio, LeanIX and BiZZdesign HoriZZon, whereas Visio is most compared with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Bizagi, Visual Paradigm, IBM Blueworks Live and iServer.
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