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."Very good repository features."
"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."
"It's a stable system. It never crashes."
"Has a specific template that's very helpful for importing metadata."
"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 of SAP PowerDesigner is the testing of the models, it has the best function. Reverse engineering is very helpful too."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"The most useful feature has been the detailed possibility to model almost anything regarding physical databases."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and adaptability of Sparx Enterprise Architect."
"Its most valuable feature is the Zachman Framework."
"Ability to model and create view under same roof."
"There are a lot of features in Enterprise Architect. It allows us to take on a lot of tasks."
"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."
"It is simple to build the first model for the solution."
"It is a handy tool for visual modeling that provides opportunities for analysis, design, and support of models using ArchiMate, UML."
"It's a very practical solution. You don't need to do an advanced course to start using this tool."
"There are some minor things that could be easier. We're writing up procedures to bring all the modeling back into one group as this reduces delays in production."
"There are many areas of this solution that needs to be changed."
"The solution itself does not need to be improved. However, they could add support for different languages."
"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."
"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 is very, very expensive. It would be ideal if it was a more affordable product."
"This product lacks artificial intelligence that should be very good in terms of automatically identifying the classification of elements."
"I've tried to use Power Designer to bring in images, which didn't work very well at all."
"The Business Process Modeling or BPM feature can be improved to make it more interactive and user friendly because it is a tool for technical people. My current use is only for business process modeling notation and putting in the icons etc. You need to take them in as a class, which makes things very complex. Because of this complexity, it is not an easy-to-handle solution. Enterprise Architect is not very good for mockups. We cannot create user screens and other similar kinds of stuff, which is bad. For these things, we prefer to use Axure RP and other similar solutions. They should either remove this feature from this product or provide some kind of connectivity with Axure RP so that people can do better mockups of screens and import them. They need to augment and strengthen the BPM feature, which is the main feature. They need to put in some elements like artificial intelligence and augmented reality. They should look into such features because these things are coming up."
"Inconsistent UI elements must be tidied up with the toolbox gaps removed."
"From a practical point of view, we need speed and reliability for creating a model and doing some really meaningful tasks such as application landscape, refactoring, etc. These are two primary criteria. Sometimes, when you import something, it creates the object duplicates, or it allows you to do something that you're not supposed to do. For example, validation is missing. This could be frustrating because when you work at a high speed, you need to come back and start fixing things that the tool allowed you to go with, which is not quite good. So, there should probably be some internal mechanisms to advise you about what you're doing and what is probably not the best idea."
"The dashboard and connectivity could be improved."
"The initial setup of the Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect It's very complicated. It's very difficult to start with the right templates because there are many possibilities. The deployment took approximately two days."
"When the model is large, it is a bit slow to render."
"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."
"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."
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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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