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Atlan vs SAP PowerDesigner comparison

 

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
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Governance (11th)
SAP PowerDesigner
Ranking in Metadata Management
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Metadata Management category, the mindshare of Atlan is 4.0%, up from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP PowerDesigner is 2.7%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Metadata Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Atlan4.0%
SAP PowerDesigner2.7%
Other93.3%
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.
Kopparapu Venkatesh Prasad - PeerSpot reviewer
Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Data modeling tool improves data management and decision-making efficiency
The lineage analysis helps my organization understand data dependencies at an enterprise level. As a SAP PowerDesigner developer, I monitor data across the organization, creating data models that reflect not just one data warehouse but comprehensive organizational information. If you have a small company, lineage helps track employee data across different areas such as finance and HR. Data governance prevents duplicate records, so when tracking employee details, SAP PowerDesigner highlights where data exists in various areas, helping ensure we only use the appropriate sources. This functionality allows us to assess the impact of data deletions effectively. I utilize the reverse engineering capabilities in SAP PowerDesigner. Reverse engineering is helpful, especially since I have colleagues new to SAP PowerDesigner. They often do not know which columns are available where. In SAP PowerDesigner, we can reverse engineer existing data from its source and identify errors in production. For instance, by using Ali's example, if an error arises, I can trace it back to the table and environment it originated from using the reverse engineering feature. The best features of SAP PowerDesigner, from my perspective, are its ability to keep the connectivity between the source database and the new system, data redundancy and availability, and impact analysis. The first feature acts as a bridge between systems. The second allows us to see what data is already available and what new data can be brought in. The third, impact analysis, helps determine how many tables will be affected if a specific table is deleted. This critical point allows us to capture how much data will be lost if any table is removed. Currently, these features shape my daily work. SAP PowerDesigner primarily benefits business management units by offering three types of data modeling structures: conceptual, logical, and physical models. The conceptual model communicates high-level insights to top executives, while logical and physical models address complex queries faced by developers in analytics. SAP PowerDesigner enhances the clarity of our data management significantly, as around 80% of data can be searched quickly and maintained in our SAP systems. The tool enables mapping from end to end, making my work faster and more efficient than using other ER data modeling solutions. The interface allows easy creation of data models and searching for existing data, ensuring I can complete my tasks significantly quicker. The importance of SAP PowerDesigner's collaboration capabilities lies in fostering a unified data management approach. It acts as a unified tool, preventing the duplication of existing data in analytical processes, thus saving both effort and storage costs, which is essential for effective data management. We utilize collaboration capabilities in SAP PowerDesigner with various source systems such as PG admin, Postgres, Oracle, and Snowflake. Recently, we have added Snowflake for cloud data modeling and POC work, streamlining the collaboration process across different systems.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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 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."
"Overall, I rate Atlan a nine out of ten."
"The technical support services are good."
"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."
"Overall, I rate Atlan as a ten out of ten."
"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 through automation."
"SAP PowerDesigner is fairly stable."
"In PowerDesigner, I primarily use BPM and modeling standards. I find it beneficial for process analysis, although I use data modeling to a lesser extent."
"What I appreciate best about SAP PowerDesigner is that it is a very detailed and comprehensive tool."
"Apart from some improvements needed to integrate better with open source systems, SAP PowerDesigner is an excellent tool."
"The main valuable features are the logical and physical data modeling capabilities, and our main purpose is to keep the data model in a repository and then be able to generate DDL files for Oracle."
"This product is very useful when starting a new project."
"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."
 

Cons

"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."
"The challenge is in the lineage, where it requires improvement. Atlas needs to capture areas where organizations use less known applications."
"The product could be improved by offering scheduled email reports for managed assets."
"Working with templates, Excel import, export, and running automations is not self-explanatory, and you always need help from Atlan support team."
"Customer support for Atlan is not so proactive."
"One area that could be improved is the capability to find duplicates of datasets."
"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."
"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."
"I have found the solution not easy to use. When publishing you have to download the HTML, make adjustments against the updated HTML, convert it to HTML, then finally paste the HTML. There is not an on-the-fly function available to bypass the step-by-step converting process that other solutions have."
"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."
"However, the pricing for small consultancies needs to be improved. The competing vendors often have special offers that make the tool more affordable, which is vital for data management consultancies that have to buy the tools that their clients use."
"UI could be improved by enabling simpler navigation."
"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."
"I would like SAP to prove free licenses to professionals that are using the solution. The free version is limited."
"The solution is very, very expensive. It would be ideal if it was a more affordable product."
 

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."
"I would like SAP to prove free licenses to professionals that are using the solution. The free version is limited."
"The price of the solution is low."
"The ROI has been 43%."
"When you purchase the license for SAP PowerDesigner, you have to buy one year of support. The tool is worth the money."
"The price of the solution is too expensive. When we asked for certain licenses in different countries it was unattainable."
"SAP PowerDesigner is cheaper than eriwin."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Insurance Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Retailer
6%
 

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 Enterprise17
 

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 do you like most about SAP PowerDesigner?
It allows us to have proper documentation in terms of the databases.
What needs improvement with SAP PowerDesigner?
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 late...
 

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: March 2026.
885,286 professionals have used our research since 2012.