We performed a comparison between ARIS BPA, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, and Visio based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Camunda, Sparx Systems and others in Business Process Design."you want to do modeling with the old notation form, ours was EPC, you can use the same object in the BPMN because the database is built in a way that you can use both things. So you only have to define it once, and if the notation form is BPMN and those kind of activities, you can use the same EPCs, so there is a connection between them."
"ARIS BPA has a good directory option, which helps to keep track of all of your metadata, and that's very useful."
"ARIS BPA is customizable as per specific business requirements."
"This solution has helped us in terms of discovering business processes."
"It helps to maintain a single source of truth regarding the processes followed within an organization."
"MFT is quite attractive. A large amount of data is passed in almost no time and it is quite easy to use."
"Business Process Analysis: We can simulate, optimize, and analyse business processes based on various business requirements. It assures our rolling out the best processes."
"Platform that it supports covers legacy and new. Caters to moving older objects into an integrated DB, relatively popular ones: SQL, Oracle, etc."
"It's a stable and scalable solution. I like that it's similar to Rational Rose."
"Scalable solution for modeling, project sharing, and collaboration. Support for it is good."
"A feature I like most about Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is its ease of use."
"It is an EA tool that is approved by Open Group. It is in the tool register of Open Group."
"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."
"I like Sparx's BPM features and the way it lets you create the diagram."
"The best thing about the tool is that its database is open."
"The initial setup is easy."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature of Visio is diagram creation. If you have a presentation, you can create your data model using Visio."
"It works really well for flowcharting, it can label."
"The tools tab within Visio has been amazingly useful, and it is updated quite frequently. Along with how Visio handles components and everything else, I would call it an easy-to-use tool."
"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."
"Putting details into the process flow and being able to link other objects into the diagrams are very helpful features."
"It is easy to learn and implement."
"Visio makes it easy to communicate your ideas from several areas of your imagination across several domains."
"The interface is a little archaic."
"The pricing of the solution can be improved and the initial setup should be made easy."
"Migration to the next release is very tricky. You can't do it without support from ARIS or from a software kit. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of money to migrate. My impression is that a lot of companies do not migrate regularly because of that issue."
"The reporting and the information query features could do with some improvement."
"The tool must provide more documents."
"The standard out-of-the-box solutions for modeling are not so good. You have to do some configuration to make it easier and more user-friendly."
"The solution's processes are huge and it is not easy to get an overview of how things work. It needs to improve the interface. I would like to see the product include a better overview of processes and improve search."
"There is not enough documentation provided for the tool's support or administration."
"This solution is quite complex to use. It would be nice if the learning curve wasn't so steep."
"It can be improved in the area of shared documentation. The idea is that the architecture tool can call back to an enterprise asset, pull that information, and link that as a sub-artifact."
"The integration could be improved."
"For data modeling, it is not very mature when comparing with other data modeling tools."
"The elements of the modeling sets can have better customization and visual representation. It would be great to have a mobile version."
"The user interface is not so good. It's not easy for someone to use it at first. The product takes some getting used to."
"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."
"What should be improved are the integration capabilities of the solution with Bizagi."
"There are a lot of patches that sometimes change how one version will interact compared to another."
"It would be nice if there is a database behind it. We have looked into this functionality, but all of the other solutions that have a database are very locked down, and you have to use them their way. You can't define your own stuff. For example, we have a system X, and I want to define system X myself and have it available. If I am ever going to make a change to system X, I want to pull up all the drawings that are associated with system X. I want to be able to search and pull all those drawings. Visio should have the ability to capture metrics associated with each step in the process. For example, based on a specific time, I should be able to link the data to a spreadsheet, which is kind of like the data analysis on the process."
"The behavior of the interface can sometimes be unpredictable."
"The solution could improve by making it more modern."
"The price could be lower because it is too expensive in South America when paying in dollars or euros."
"The one particular thing which I would like to see improved is in comparison to other products in the market, and is still lacking in Visio, is publishing on a web application. For example, there is a freeware application business process modeling tool, Bizagi."
"The user interface could be more robust."
"The only downside to Visio is the learning curve."
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