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BiZZdesign HoriZZon vs erwin Evolve comparison

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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

BiZZdesign HoriZZon
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
4th
Ranking in Business Process Design
5th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
erwin Evolve
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
12th
Ranking in Business Process Design
20th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of BiZZdesign HoriZZon is 3.9%, down from 4.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Evolve is 3.5%, up from 2.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Architecture Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BiZZdesign HoriZZon3.9%
erwin Evolve3.5%
Other92.6%
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2022765 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Consultant BI Z Zdesign Center Of Excellence at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
Targeted stakeholder views have improved decision making and reduced architecture costs
BiZZdesign HoriZZon offers various valuable features. The best ones, besides those I have mentioned, include the AI space with the Diagram Describer and the Explorer functionality. I understand that BiZZdesign HoriZZon is also working on the Diagram Importer, which complements the Diagram Describer feature, providing full import and export functionality. Together with the contributor role and targeted stakeholder management, these features are essential. BiZZdesign HoriZZon introduced the Dynamic Solution Intent, enhancing the solution architecture by engaging diverse stakeholders with architectural artifacts. It supports the development of holistic solutions using reusable repository components. The deployment is hybrid cloud-based, specifically using Amazon Web Services as the cloud provider. I have also seen the implementation of return on investment features that contribute significantly to the organization’s overall effectiveness.
ScottLawson - PeerSpot reviewer
Director IT Architecture at QAD
Enables us to present data and objects visually, in diagrams, and to make them available via the web. Also enables web-based editing of data.
We tried their collaborative web modeling and we used it with a few people but we tend to not use that piece. We tend to collaborate with the people and then my team of architects draws up the diagram using the modeling tool. We then iterate through those. I would like to use it, but it was a little clunky when they first rolled it out. Overall, it's more about the company having room for improvement. What they need to do is to consolidate more of their products. For example, I was just looking and I couldn't figure out what erwin DT is. It's on the website but it would help if they could put information together and make it more clear as to what products they have and how they work with other things. I hear them talking in the support forums and, when I talk to the representative, they say they're going to do a bunch of stuff but it seems the progress is slow. The changes they need to make are to take their old, legacy product, which we use, and focus a lot on it so they can transform it into a modern cloud tool so that we have fewer little pieces to deal with. They could also fix their security model. It's very confusing to get new people onto the tool and to make sure that your content isn't being exposed to the wrong people.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A big impact that BiZZdesign HoriZZon has on my organization is to improve the overview of the whole system for people around us."
"I used BiZZdesign HoriZZon at two organizations. At Manchester Metropolitan University, I used it with a small team for architectural modeling of the student record system. We modeled teams, process objects, and their interactions with applications. We also used it to model a gradual rollout with plateaus showing migration over time. At the BBC, I used it to model software services for publishing content online. I showed key model views to senior stakeholders using Horizon, allowing them to modify and score applications and services."
"The initial setup of this solution was very straightforward."
"The feature I find most valuable is that the start times and loading times are short. It takes only a few seconds to load the repository and whenever I want to open diagrams, they are there almost immediately."
"It is very easy to use. I can just click on an application component and find out if we are using this particular component. This provides us flexibility."
"BiZZdesign HoriZZon is a fantastic tool for enterprise architecture and capability mapping that helps map capabilities by turning complex engineering data into clear design documents, which is very important for cross-functional alignment and onboarding teams so they can onboard faster and it acts as a single source of truth."
"After that implementation, the way the architecture and inventory got streamlined, we did not need a really big architecture team, which helped the company overall save costs by repurposing the architects in different other departments where they were needed and helped streamline resourcing and save costs in enterprise architecture itself."
"BiZZdesign HoriZZon's visualization techniques help my clients make data-driven decisions."
"Evolve's reverse engineering ability is quite useful."
"Erwin has enabled us to build and manage a portfolio of over 1,000 large data models across more than 60 lines of business, many of which are related and synchronized."
"I really liked that it mapped out processes and was able to attach the data model to the appropriate process. You could map out the process, then when you got down to a specific couple of data elements, you could attach the table in the database that supported that process. You could connect it with erwin Data Modeler for that."
"Erwin EA provides superior, exemplar capabilities to scale across all stakeholders."
"The ERwin tool helped to reduce the rate of design and deployment errors and increased the ease of validation."
"Forward and reverse engineering were valuable features."
"This product is a cross platform database designer, data inventory control and metadata library, and supports soft link integration."
"The most valuable features for us are impact analysis, where I can easily visualize the impact of change."
 

Cons

"I have seen table charts where, if the chart is a little too big, it does not fit in HoriZZon and it is not at all visible... There have been several times where we could not publish a chart properly and we had to break the chart into small tables and create multiple artifacts, creating a complete mess. This should be seriously taken up by BiZZdesign because there is a lot of scope for improvement in terms of usability. It's not at all good, unfortunately."
"I do not recommend using BiZZdesign."
"Customer support for BiZZdesign HoriZZon could be better. On a 1 to 5 scale, I would rate it a 3.5."
"To improve BiZZdesign HoriZZon, I would say performance is crucial. We have had very bad experiences with performance over the years."
"Integration definitely needs improvement. There are some restrictions. We've seen that it doesn't integrate with everything we might expect."
"There's room for improvement. When I finished using it over a year ago, I discussed implementing C4 notation with BiZZdesign HoriZZon.They've likely done this now, but I haven't seen it. Setting up interactive views for stakeholders to score services was a bit difficult."
"The automatic data collection and interface need improvement."
"It lacks capabilities with regard to infrastructure modeling."
"The solution needs to focus on allowing for more integrations."
"erwin Evolve by Quest could have additional features to manage the architecture of enterprises and businesses."
"If it had fewer features to model all kinds of architecture, it would be less complicated."
"It could have had a more streamlined navigation. It seemed that when you went to the explorer panel, there were just so many different ways of doing the work that I could not remember, "How did I do this? How did I get to that point in that model to get back to it?" If I wanted to build a new one, where do I start? It just seemed like there was such a smorgasbord of ways of doing it that it was just overwhelming."
"The solution's integration capabilities with other tools in our system has not been all that well done. We have people who use ARIS, who use System Architect and, of course, Visio. erwin has very limited ways to import and export from those kinds of tools. It's not a very easy thing to do."
"Would like to see canonical modeling supported for web services."
"You can integrate it with almost everything, but you have to watch what you are doing because when too much is integrated it's really hard to manage your errors."
"The solution's integration capabilities with other tools in our system has not been all that well done."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If one is very cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price as a seven out of ten."
"We were customers and bought licenses from them. We used their remote instance initially but upgraded to the on-device version due to lag. For pricing, we paid about 2200 pounds a year per seat for the client installation at an educational rate. I'm not sure about commercial rates. I managed to get a free copy at BBC since it was for evaluation purposes."
"First and foremost within the scope of improvement for the solution would be the cost. It's very costly..."
"In terms of this particular product usage, my clients currently only use per-user licenses."
"[The] Orbus... pricing model was based on every single functionality having a price. The pricing was comparable but if we wanted to scale, it would have ended up being a lot more expensive. BiZZdesign gave us one price with all of the functionality, and we could scale as much as we needed."
"I haven't found any issues with the scalability and licensing parts that are access-related."
"The price is reasonable."
"The pricing model is slightly on the high side and could be more competitive for long-term partnerships."
"The licensing enables you to differentiate between people who edit the content and the people who consume it. We are able to keep the licensing costs down by keeping the "contributor" licenses to a minimum, and we then just roll out the content in a read-only version for the rest of our users."
"The cost is something like $15,000, per license. But I haven't looked at those numbers in three years. It was over $100,000 to initially set everything up and get it all configured."
"I estimate that we pay between $40,000 and $50,000 a year for the solution, not including the upfront costs to buy things the first time."
"I think erwin is quite expensive. I have difficulty selling the portal, in fact."
"On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are 50,000 euro. There are no additional costs because we are on a SaaS model."
"Unless you are a one person shop – always go with the Workgroup edition and Concurrent licensing."
"Yearly, our cost is €100,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Government
7%
Outsourcing Company
13%
Construction Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise12
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with BiZZdesign HoriZZon?
I noticed that there were times when the cloud version would get stuck or was not able to load. There were issues with the login capability, and that was some time ago, a few months ago. I am not s...
What is your primary use case for BiZZdesign HoriZZon?
There was a merger that the client entered into, and following that merger, we inherited a large technology inventory from the acquired organization. The acquired inventory from the organization ha...
What advice do you have for others considering BiZZdesign HoriZZon?
The real experience I have had and seeing the result of using it in a large team where a large scale enterprise architecture and merger is happening is a very unique experience I have had with BiZZ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

HoriZZon
erwin EA, erwin Business Process, erwin Enterprise Architecture
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

T-Mobile, Shell, HSBC, Erasmus University, VIVAT Insurance
AT&T, Bank of America, Chevron, Duke University, ESPN, Fidelity, GE, JP Morgan Chase, KPMG, McGraw Hill, NASA, Pfizer, Royal Bank of Scotland, Teradata, Union Pacific, Vodafone, Wells Fargo.
Find out what your peers are saying about BiZZdesign HoriZZon vs. erwin Evolve and other solutions. Updated: November 2026.
920,043 professionals have used our research since 2012.