We performed a comparison between Avolution ABACUS and erwin Data Modeler by Quest based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Architecture Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"There are plenty of features available such as the ability to test applications for issues and a user-friendly dashboard."
"The product is easy to use and well-structured for the integrations we need it to make."
"The ease of modeling and the ease of showing interconnectivity and relationships is the most valuable. It is fairly simple and out of the box. It is customizable in many ways. It is a pretty good tool."
"Scalable and stable tool for roadmapping and modeling, with a good dashboard, end-to-end impact analysis, and portfolio management."
"There are a lot of different features, but the business/decision-maker feature, visibility, and dashboards are most valuable."
"The technical support is very good. They are responsive and the answers they provide are detailed."
"It's more than just an enterprise architecture tool as it has a lot of nice features, e.g. messaging, simulation, etc."
"It allows us to create logical data models. We can represent a database model in business terms, which is very useful for us."
"The most valuable features are the ability to reverse engineer and do model comparison. With the reverse engineering, I can understand the databases from third-party products. With the model comparison, I can track the differences between two versions of the same database."
"The generation of DDL saved us having to write the steps by hand. You still had to go in and make some minor modifications to make it deployable to the database system. However, for the data lineage, it is very valuable for tracing our use of data, especially personal confidential data through different systems."
"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."
"The modeling portion of the tool is the most valuable. There are some notes, naming standards, and other functions that we use as well. There's a whole boatload of functionality in this thing and we use maybe 10% of it. It seems to be pretty common that not all the functionality is fully utilized. But it's just got gobs and gobs of stuff that you can implement if you so choose to."
"The logical model gives developers, as well as the data modelers, an understanding of exactly how each object interacts with the others, whether a one-to-many, many-to-many, many-to-one, etc."
"There is absolutely no problem with the stability."
"They have a lot of features and the most up-to-date technology integration, which I haven't seen in other products."
"Their local presence in the Middle East could be scaled more, particularly in customer service. It would be good if they'd also have mobile dashboards for executive management out of the box."
"In the future, there could be improvements in integration and enhancements."
"It doesn't have the simulation capability, which would be helpful in doing some business process analysis and improvements."
"They should take more initiative to implement things that competing products have already come out with."
"The company needs to update the UML version they are using for the product as it is quite old."
"Having more control over page size is lacking in this product. Print utilization also needs to be improved."
"I use reference models, which are taxonomies, in my EA work. It is a reference model/taxonomy of things with capabilities, sub capabilities, and sub-sub capabilities, so you're working it down. I haven't yet found a simple way to implement that in Abacus. It could be that it is there, but I don't know how to do it."
"I still use Visio for conceptual modeling, and that's mainly because it is easier to change things, and you can relax some of the rules. DM's eventual target is a database, which means you actually have to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts, but in a conceptual model, you don't often know what you're working with. So, that's probably a constraint with erwin. They have made it a lot easier, and they've done a lot, but there is probably still room for improvement in terms of the ease of presentation back to the business. I'm comparing it with something like Visio where you can change colors on a box, change the text color and that sort of stuff, and change the lines. Such things are a whole lot easier in Visio, but once you get a theme organized in erwin, you can apply that theme to all of the objects. So, it becomes easier, but you do have to set up that theme."
"In terms of new features, it would be great to have a cloud base. We should be able to put it on the cloud for better collaboration and data models sharing."
"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."
"This is a very complex product."
"I am not so happy with its speed. Sometimes, it can have problems with connections."
"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."
"The erwin Data Modeler is quite complex to use."
"The only real complaint I have is the time it takes to do a database comparison on a large model. If they could speed that up, that would be the only thing I can think of that needs improvement."
Avolution ABACUS is ranked 5th in Architecture Management with 6 reviews while erwin Data Modeler by Quest is ranked 2nd in Architecture Management with 17 reviews. Avolution ABACUS is rated 8.0, while erwin Data Modeler by Quest is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Avolution ABACUS writes "Offers comprehensive product features; setup is straightforward and self configuring". On the other hand, the top reviewer of erwin Data Modeler by Quest writes "Improves accuracy for generating target databases, allows us to pull metadata from a database, and makes it easy to display information and models". Avolution ABACUS is most compared with Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, LeanIX, MEGA HOPEX, BiZZdesign HoriZZon and iServer, whereas erwin Data Modeler by Quest is most compared with SAP PowerDesigner, IDERA ER/Studio, Visio, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect and LeanIX. See our Avolution ABACUS vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest report.
See our list of best Architecture Management vendors.
We monitor all Architecture Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
