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ARIS Cloud vs erwin Data Modeler comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

ARIS Cloud
Ranking in Business Process Design
17th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (31st)
erwin Data Modeler
Ranking in Business Process Design
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (1st), Data Governance (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Business Process Design category, the mindshare of ARIS Cloud is 2.9%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 3.0%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Design Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler3.0%
ARIS Cloud2.9%
Other94.1%
Business Process Design
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer1294968 - PeerSpot reviewer
Transformational Leader at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Mapping capabilities lag behind while requiring significant customization but is scalable
I worked with ARIS Cloud under SAP. The solution was deployed by an agile team and utilized daily by process engineers and business process owners. It was involved in the financial services industry, with thousands of users within the company The platform's capabilities are highly dependent on…
Sushree Panigrahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Snowflake Data Engineer| Senior PLSQL Developer |Data Modeler|Assitant Vice Pre at Jp Morgan Chase & Co.
Data modeling has transformed regulatory reporting and collaboration across cloud environments
In erwin Data Modeler, areas that have room for improvement include performance improvements. I see that large models sometimes cause it to be slow when opening. Impact analysis can lag as well. Version control is another aspect. If we have developed a current version, it is not integrated with Git where we can easily compare different versions. UI modernization is also something we cannot utilize as it is primarily for development. Additionally, cloud-specific optimizations are needed when it comes to Snowflake or Databricks. When it comes to AI aspects, auto-suggestions for normalization or identifying primary, foreign, or surrogate keys are areas that can be improved.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution's most valuable feature stems from its being very easy to use, making it a very user-friendly tool."
"The initial setup of this solution was straightforward."
"This solution has improved the way our organization does training."
"Aris Connect opens collaboration opportunities between team members within the organization where they can actually submit change requests, navigate processes, and offer comments. It opens up the potential for BPM within the organization. I didn't see such an angle of a BPM portal with any other products. So I would say that's the best selling feature."
"Signavio is more intuitive, allowing users with no prior knowledge to navigate and understand its functionality more readily."
"ARIS Cloud is scalable."
"From a total cost of ownership perspective, running this on the cloud is more efficient than having someone in the company take care of the infrastructure."
"The cloud version has the advantage that you can work on it from anywhere."
"Erwin Data Modeler is well organized, and the screen layout is intuitive."
"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 ability to collaborate between different members across the organization is the most valuable feature. It gives us the ability to work on the same model, regardless of where we are physically."
"It improved the way we were able to manage our models."
"It supports a wide variety of databases, including the latest ones. We have chosen to go for a cloud-based database, and it supports that, which is very useful."
"They have a lot of features and the most up-to-date technology integration, which I haven't seen in other products."
"The product itself is fantastic and it's about the only way to get an enterprise view of the data that you're designing."
"I compare erwin Data Modeler with other solutions such as ER/Studio and believe it stands out as an enterprise-grade data modeling tool capable of serving different industries, such as finance, healthcare, and telecom."
 

Cons

"Initial setup is rather complex. You have to find a way to isolate the complexity, and find common ground at a level where they don't need the details."
"I would like to see more support for architectural diagrams."
"It would be very helpful if this solution were more open and could integrate with other solutions like ServiceNow."
"I would like to see the cost of the licenses improved."
"They need to revamp a whole module. This module has been in place for 16 years. It hasn't been updated since then. It's actually a separate license on its own. It's a disaster."
"ARIS' flexibility and power add a certain complexity. And if ARIS could be more streamlined, I think customers would have a better handle on what to do with it in the end. So if you're not a tech geek, you might struggle to understand what you should do with it as a customer because it's that powerful."
"The price is quite high. This is one weak point of the solution."
"On an enterprise level, the ability to onboard somebody quickly is cumbersome because it just has too many things in it. It's got something like a hundred or more techniques and things in it."
"I felt that erwin Data Modeler is a bit of an outdated tool."
"I find the UI very clunky and very difficult to use."
"Erwin Data Modeler is a good product, but I recently experienced a problem where I was not able to open an erwin Data Modeler file because its version had automatically changed."
"The solution's reporting side needs to be improved."
"As erwin Data Modeler files get larger, the response time really slows down, and when I have multiple files open I sometimes get a glitch where a lot of the text fields get solid black and the first eight characters of column names might be blacked out with a rectangle."
"It would be nice to have it on the Linux platform, not just Windows. If they can support Linux, there would be a huge market for it."
"It does not have a cloud application."
"Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is a student version of this solution that can be used for free."
"The cloud deployment is not more expensive. In the cloud, you pay for what you use, and there's no need for maintaining infrastructure or additional personnel, making it cost-effective. On-premises deployment, on the other hand, involves infrastructure costs and maintenance expenses."
"The licensing model of ARIS Cloud is leaner and more beneficial to the customer. The new license model is great. With the on-premise, you needed to subscribe to many more types of licenses. Now there are licensed bundles available on the cloud."
"Though the solution is not cheap, it's worth the money."
"erwin Data Modeler by Quest is an expensive solution."
"The primary reasons that erwin was selected were that it was much more affordable for us [than Embarcadero] and it was easily maintainable."
"erwin is expensive compared to other solutions. We are paying almost $6,000 per seat a month."
"The price of erwin Data Modeler is very expensive, in particular for this part of the world."
"The tool is expensive."
"This company had bought the license for three years, and it's not an individual license. While you can buy a license for each individual, that would be very expensive. There is something called concurrent licenses where you can purchase licenses in bulk and 15 to 20 people can access the license and model. Concurrent licenses are scalable to the number of users and are proportional to the cost."
"The solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
11%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise38
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ARIS Cloud?
The price of ARIS Cloud is relatively high and not every firm can afford it, especially if the company is not mature enough to require such extensive process modeling and optimization.
What needs improvement with ARIS Cloud?
It would be beneficial for ARIS Cloud to add more customization options, such as having a landing page. Improving the importation script from Microsoft Visio ( /products/visio-reviews ) would also ...
What is your primary use case for ARIS Cloud?
I am currently working with both ARIS Cloud ( /products/aris-cloud-reviews ) and MEGA HOPEX ( /products/mega-hopex-reviews ), having switched from ARIS BPM ( /products/aris-bpa-reviews ) to MEGA HO...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
I have no idea about the setup cost because I did not buy the license.
What needs improvement with erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
The UI in erwin Data Modeler can be improved significantly because when any new person opens the tool, all the toolbars are kept open with many tools in view, making it appear chunky. If possible, ...
What is your primary use case for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
I primarly use erwin Data Modeler for modeling purposes. Once we have the business requirement, we create the models in erwin Data Modeler, and then we perform forward engineering to get the query ...
 

Also Known As

Process Live, ARIS Simulation, ARIS Aware, ARIS Connect
erwin DM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tesco, Weifu, Airbus, Siemens, Proximus, Alicorp, Sekerbank, Bancor, Philips,Sky, Emirates NBD, Dubai Municipality, Suva, U.S. Army, Australia Post, Westfalen Weser Energie - ARIS serves customers across all industries and of every size worldwide. Companies trust ARIS as the market leader for process excellence with more than 30 years of experience in the market and 10 million users worldwide, from 1 user companies to the Fortune 500.
 Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples
Find out what your peers are saying about ARIS Cloud vs. erwin Data Modeler and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
902,495 professionals have used our research since 2012.