Atlan vs erwin Data Modeler comparison

Atlan and Quest Software are both solutions in the Data Governance category. Atlan is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.3, while Quest Software is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.1. Atlan holds a 1.8% mindshare in DG, compared to Quest Software’s 0.5% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Atlan users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 96% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

Atlan

Read 10 Atlan reviews

2,884 Views
2,769 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

erwin Data Modeler

Read 51 erwin Data Modeler reviews

8,888 Views
622 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

Atlan

erwin Data Modeler

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Atlan and erwin Data Modeler based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Governance solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Atlan vs. erwin Data Modeler Report (Updated: August 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Atlan vs. erwin Data Modeler

August 2026

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Helped 909,725 peers since 2012

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

Atlan

Ranking in Data Governance

12th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Metadata Management (5th)

erwin Data Modeler

Ranking in Data Governance

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Architecture Management (1st), Business Process Design (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Atlan is 1.8%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 0.5%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler	0.5%
Atlan	1.8%
Other	97.7%

Data Governance

Featured Reviews

Peter Neumann

IT consultant at Pathfinder

Has struggled to meet business needs but supports technical data exploration and transparency

Atlan can be improved by concentrating more on business data since it is developed from developers for developers, and it needs to be more business relevant. For instance, when re-importing data model diagrams, Atlan provides some diagram automation that is not connected to the business glossary, which I consider a significant fault. Atlan needs to improve by focusing more on the business side of data, not only on technical aspects.If you want to focus on technical considerations, it would be beneficial to have an interface with a real business data modeling tool such as Erwin or other business data tools, since data modeling is not the same as Draw.io. Additionally, Atlan can improve its workflows, which are hard to understand. Working with templates, Excel import, export, and running automations is not self-explanatory, and you always need help from Atlan support team. If business people want to use it and run their own reports, it must be easier to customize for their business needs.

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Sushree Panigrahi

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"As a senior analytics engineer, Atlan's ability to show end-to-end data lineage is the most important feature for me."

"The best feature of Atlan is its integration with communication platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack, so business users don't have to go into a data catalog to see metadata about data assets."

"The interfaces and automated imports have helped me with transparency, as we have different sources from different techniques such as DBT, Snowflake, and other regular databases, making it effective to connect these sources and navigate through them, filter them, and enrich the data with additional meter information."

"The technical support services are good."

"By switching to Atlan, we have increased our productivity and saved a lot of business time."

"By switching to Atlan, we have increased our productivity and saved a lot of business time through automation."

"Overall, I rate Atlan a nine out of ten."

"Overall, I rate Atlan as a ten out of ten."

More Atlan pros

"It is a scalable solution...The technical support team is fine."

"In my previous company, there we had a really large return on investment from using erwin."

"The fitting model is very intuitive."

"The solution's ability to compare and synchronize data sources with data models is fantastic."

"They have a lot of features and the most up-to-date technology integration, which I haven't seen in other products."

"It reduces monthly savings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Think about a company like Costco and all of the points of sale systems in Costco, all of the systems, the applications, but if all the applications in Costco all had their own data model, trying to integrate those, upgrade them and manage their different versions of the same model throughout the store, is an absolute nightmare. It's phenomenally expensive. This helps reduce that cost significantly. I'm talking on the orders of hundreds of thousands of dollars."

"One of the best aspects of the tool is its reverse engineering capability."

"Drag-and-drop data modeling and reverse engineering out of databases are the most valuable features of erwin Data Modeler by Quest."

More erwin Data Modeler pros

Cons

"Working with templates, Excel import, export, and running automations is not self-explanatory, and you always need help from Atlan support team."

"The product could be improved by offering scheduled email reports for managed assets."

"The challenge is in the lineage, where it requires improvement. Atlas needs to capture areas where organizations use less known applications."

"Customer support for Atlan is not so proactive."

"Certain UI changes could make Atlan more user-friendly."

"One of the main areas for improvement is its governance capabilities."

"One of the main areas for improvement is its governance capabilities. Atlan supports only basic out-of-the-box workflows, and it becomes challenging to customize features like how data owners should approve access to data assets."

"One area that could be improved is the capability to find duplicates of datasets."

More Atlan cons

"As someone who has used it for a long time, I have seen stability vary from version to version."

"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."

"Complete Compare is set up only to compare properties that are of interest to us, but some of the differences cannot be brought over from one version of the model to another. This is despite the fact that we are clicking to bring objects from one place to another. Therefore, it's hard to tell at times if Complete Compare is working as intended without having to manually go into the details and check everything. If it could be redesigned to a degree where it is easier to use when we bring things over from one site to another and be sure that it's been done correctly, that would be nice to have. We would probably use the tool more often if the Complete Compare were easier to use."

"I would like the solution to be less rigid in terms of its theory."

"I would like to have more data sources from other, different vendors. In recent years, the vendor has reduced the number of data sources, and I would like to have more data sources for every brand. For example, with Oracle, I would like to have compatibility for many versions, including old ones, not just the most recent."

"The navigation is a little bit of a challenge. It's painful. For example, if you've got a view open and you want to try to move from side to side, the standard today is being able to drag and drop left and right. You can't really do that in the model. Moving around the model is painful because it doesn't follow the Windows model today."

"erwin is not as robust as a data warehousing project I've been on in the past."

"I find the UI very clunky and very difficult to use."

More erwin Data Modeler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay per-user license. It's a different classification model than with other solutions, where they usually charge you for resources. So, that was a better model for us. And because of this difference in models or classification, it was cheaper for us to go with Atlan."

"erwin is expensive compared to other solutions. We are paying almost $6,000 per seat a month."

"erwin Data Modeler by Quest is an expensive solution."

"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."

"erwin has this option where you pay a one-time fee and you have the license for six years, which makes sense because I don't upgrade my database engine every other year. I have an application that depends on it. This is something weird about PowerDesigner. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."

"The pricing of the solution is cheap. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."

"Likewise, the solution is a little pricey."

"There is either a one-year or three-year license. It is not a pay-as-you-go license like a SaaS solution. It’s more of a traditional licensing. They are a little bit on the pricier side."

"We've continued to use the product for many years and compared it with others on the market. The pricing is reasonable considering what the solution offers and what we pay. There are cheaper tools, but they may not be as robust and easy to use, so it's worth the money."

More erwin Data Modeler pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

Energy/Utilities Company

Insurance Company

Financial Services Firm

15%

Marketing Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	9

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	16
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	42

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlan?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licensing cost is a bit flexible but not affordable for smaller organizations. It might be way out of their budget, but it is very ...

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What needs improvement with Atlan?

Atlan can be improved by enhancing their support process by reducing the resolution time. They have really bad and incomplete documentation, so they should work on the documentation as well, especi...

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What is your primary use case for Atlan?

My main use case for Atlan is to define a flexible set of metadata, including measuring the quality of said data. Atlan is also a partner of ours, so we use it to integrate with our own tool. It al...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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, ...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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Compared 4% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Atlan

August 2026

Download Atlan product report

Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Modeler

August 2026

Download erwin Data Modeler product report

Also Known As

No data available

erwin DM

Overview

Atlan is a comprehensive data management platform designed to enhance data democratization, governance, and collaboration across departments in organizations. It offers a centralized data catalog, intuitive user interface, and robust governance framework to ensure data security and compliance. Users appreciate its efficiency in streamlining processes, promoting better communication, and providing insightful analytics, which drive organizational growth and success.

Atlan

Erwin Data Modeler provides an effective approach to visualizing and managing data models. It assists in creating, reversing, and synchronizing data models with ease, supporting logical and physical transitions while enhancing understanding across teams.

Erwin Data Modeler is a comprehensive tool designed for professional database management. It offers capabilities to organize and enforce standards, automating script generation with robust reverse engineering and DDL output. Users can manage complex data environments, capitalize on integration with data intelligence, and maintain large-scale databases smoothly. Despite its strengths, improvements in multi-language support, database integration, and reporting features are needed. Users benefit from extensive support for conceptual, logical, and physical database modeling, enhancing architectural design and data governance for platforms like SQL Server, Oracle, and Teradata.

What are the key features of Erwin Data Modeler?

Visual Representation: Facilitates clear visualization of data models, aiding comprehension.
Versioning and Editing: Enhance usability with versioning and bulk editing capabilities.
Reverse Engineering: Offers powerful tools for reverse engineering and DDL generation.
Integration: Aligns with data intelligence to streamline database management.
Naming Standards: Enforces consistency with automated script creation.

What benefits should users consider in Erwin Data Modeler reviews?

Collaboration: Promotes team understanding and collaboration through visual tools.
Automation: Reduces manual effort through automated processes and integration.
Scalability: Handles large database management efficiently, crucial for enterprise settings.
Data Governance: Facilitates effective data governance with structured modeling.

Erwin Data Modeler finds application in industries focused on robust data management, implementing it for enterprise data warehouses, business domain models, and operational systems. It supports architectural design and governance, aligning with business applications demanding precise data representation and visualization.

Quest Software

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples

Buyer's Guide

Atlan vs. erwin Data Modeler

August 2026

Free Report: Atlan vs. erwin Data Modeler

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