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Atlan vs SAP PowerDesigner comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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 Metadata Management
5th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Governance (13th)
SAP PowerDesigner
Ranking in Metadata Management
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Metadata Management category, the mindshare of Atlan is 4.5%, down from 4.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP PowerDesigner is 3.4%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Metadata Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Atlan4.5%
SAP PowerDesigner3.4%
Other92.1%
Metadata Management
 

Featured Reviews

Peter Neumann - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
HemantKUMAR6 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect at Sopra Steria
Customer support has delayed successful upgrade to supported version
It was a long time back when my company purchased it, but I am now participating in upgrading it to the latest version. I found customer support to be tedious during the upgrade process to the latest version. I tried to upgrade to a trial version before purchasing a new license. During that process, I had some technical issues. When trying to go from 12.5 to 16.5, I could migrate but faced technical challenges. When I approached customer support, they informed me that even 16.5 is not supported. They stated I would need to go to 16.7 before they could look at my issue. They didn't spend any time on the issue because according to them, 16.5 is not supported. Until I get 16.7 and complete the migration, I'm not getting any help from them. I was not too happy with the customer support. This was my only interaction with customer support, and I haven't received any resolution to my issue. It can be rated as low as zero because that's the only time I approached them. I cannot even say zero out of ten because I approached only once. Perhaps they are correct that they don't support 16.5, so they don't want to spend any time on that.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Overall, I rate Atlan a nine out of ten."
"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."
"Atlan has positively impacted the organization since it helps in discovering already available assets, allowing for reduction of redundant ingestion of external data and reduction of time to market for any project."
"By switching to Atlan, we have increased our productivity and saved a lot of business time through automation."
"Atlas is quite intuitive."
"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."
"By switching to Atlan, we have increased our productivity and saved a lot of business time."
"Overall, I rate Atlan as a ten out of ten."
"SAP PowerDesigner is fairly stable."
"The most useful feature has been the detailed possibility to model almost anything regarding physical databases."
"The most valuable feature is the way you can extend it and customize it. With most modeling tools, you fit your modeling process to fit the tool. In PowerDesigner, you can make the tool fit the way you want to work."
"It is more flexible than other tools and user-friendly, making it easy to adapt."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a very fast reverse engineering process. It does a very expansive comparison."
"It's a stable system. It never crashes."
"This solution has good tools for big data, where you can manage large and complex databases."
"By using SAP PowerDesigner, we are able to create a product that is always up to date, so the model always represents the implementation."
 

Cons

"The challenge is in the lineage, where it requires improvement. Atlas needs to capture areas where organizations use less known applications."
"Working with templates, Excel import, export, and running automations is not self-explanatory, and you always need help from Atlan support team."
"Certain UI changes could make Atlan more user-friendly."
"The product could be improved by offering scheduled email reports for managed assets."
"There are some improvements. There is a feature called Playbooks, which basically allows me to automate certain activities that would otherwise be manual. It's a very interesting feature, but there is room to improve it because, depending on the task you automate, the playbooks seem to have a hard time handling the task. So, it could be improved there. Even though it's a great feature, it can evolve further."
"In my experience, it might be less suited for collaboration across teams."
"One of the main areas for improvement is its governance capabilities."
"Atlan can be improved by integrating agents that can support users in finding assets of interest."
"This product lacks artificial intelligence that should be very good in terms of automatically identifying the classification of elements."
"The solution is very, very expensive. It would be ideal if it was a more affordable product."
"The portal of SAP PowerDesigner could be better. The tool also needs more features and integration with other products, such as Collibra. It would be interesting for SAP PowerDesigner to have more integration."
"You have the possibility to complete a connection for abbreviations if you are creating columns or names of the tables. In the Citrix environment, this has been lagging to the point where the PowerDesigner was not usable."
"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."
"UI could be improved by enabling simpler navigation."
"It also has a web portal feature, which is much more convenient for giving people access to look at entity-relationship diagrams, but that web portal is unstable and does not work. It freezes up all the time."
"The user interface could be more user-friendly."
 

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."
"I bought the software outright and do not pay a licensing fee."
"PowerDesigner is not the cheapest solution on the market, so make sure that you are using it to its full potential."
"The price of the solution is too expensive. When we asked for certain licenses in different countries it was unattainable."
"The price of the solution is low."
"When you purchase the license for SAP PowerDesigner, you have to buy one year of support. The tool is worth the money."
"I would like SAP to prove free licenses to professionals that are using the solution. The free version is limited."
"SAP PowerDesigner is cheaper than eriwin."
"The pricing varies based on functionality and users."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Insurance Company
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Retailer
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
 

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 ...
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...
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...
What needs improvement with SAP PowerDesigner?
Synchronization is vital since I experience multiple problems, such as mismatched models and manual DDL handling. Improving the synchronization between models and databases can enhance integration ...
What is your primary use case for SAP PowerDesigner?
I use SAP PowerDesigner for data modeling, which greatly enhances the clarity of my data management processes. I manage data across multiple databases, including cloud databases, Teradata, and Orac...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Sybase PowerDesigner
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlan vs. SAP PowerDesigner and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.