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Bonita BPM vs erwin Data Modeler comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 7, 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

Bonita BPM
Ranking in Business Process Design
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (26th), Process Automation (29th)
erwin Data Modeler
Ranking in Business Process Design
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
58
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (1st), Data Governance (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Business Process Design category, the mindshare of Bonita BPM is 3.1%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 3.2%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Design Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler3.2%
Bonita3.1%
Other93.7%
Business Process Design
 

Featured Reviews

Mohamed Guermazi - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Director / Project Manager at I-way
The user interface is easy to use, and the product performs well, but the dashboard and the monitoring features are limited
We use the product to design workflows. We model and install them on the server. We use the Community edition The modeling features are easy. The performance of the tool is good. The user interface is easy to use. I have used the product for complex processes and sub-processes successfully. The…
Sushree Panigrahi - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is stable. Even the older versions are stable."
"With Bonita BPM, you can run the process (as it will in the final stage) immediately after the design stage, giving you 100% control over the quality of your processes and flows."
"The user interface is better than all of the open-source BPMs that I have tried."
"Bonita is user-friendly, and the features are useful."
"Bonita BPM is simple and fast; it is very easy to install and use."
"We use the tool to validate and give access to the users. It is for access management."
"Bonita is user-friendly."
"I think Bizagi is a powerful software or tool for organization, but Bonita is user-friendly and easy-to-use — easier to use for development."
"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."
"erwin Data Modeler's ability to generate database code from a model for a wide array of data sources saves time in development, as utilizing the solution allows me to accomplish tasks in minutes compared to the extended time required for manual processes."
"Having well-documented and consistent schemas makes it easier to identify, understand, and prepare reliable data for analytics and new AI use cases, ensuring my data is AI-ready and reliable."
"The tool is also very intuitive and easy to use."
"It is a scalable solution...The technical support team is fine."
"erwin has versioning so you can keep versions, over time, of those models and you can compare any version to any version. If you're looking at a specific database and you want to see what changed over time, that's really useful. You can go back to a different version or connect that to your change-control processes so you can see what was released when."
"It's a safeguard for me because I'm always concerned that somebody is free handing it and will forget a key coming from the parent. The migrating keys are a great feature. Identifying relationships, non-identifying relationships, and being visually right there to understand the differences are great features. erwin is key to being able to visually understand whatever the customer is requesting. They'll give you words on a paper, but once they can actually view it as a picture, it really comes to life. The data comes to life to where they understand exactly what they're asking for."
"The value of understanding your data in a graphical way has been very rich in communicating to developers and testers when they recognize the relationships and the business rules."
 

Cons

"The community edition has limited module functionality. If they could release some of the functionality that's available in the enterprise edition that would be helpful to those learning to use the solution."
"Bonita can improve by offering more flexibility. The developer does not receive the code of the application to modify it. Most of the other solutions I have used allow the developers to change or improve the code that is generated."
"So Bonita is easy to use but it seems to be missing some powerful features that competing products have."
"The interface is advanced and quite good, but it could improve."
"The solution is stable. However, we have experienced a few bugs."
"Bonita must add a rule engine. We are a 360-degree partner of Bonita. We can integrate with any kind of rule engine. We have a dashboard related to engine performance, but getting a configurable dashboard for the Buildium or transactional data will add value."
"Scalability of the Bonita BPM Community version is low."
"I should be able to park the tasks that are within a process in a kind of container, and dynamically, a super admin should be able to connect these processes. This kind of feature might be helpful."
"It does not have a cloud application."
"The erwin Data Modeler is quite complex to use."
"I would like the solution to be less rigid in terms of its theory."
"I think erwin Data Modeler can be improved by adding the option to separate physical and logical models when extracting, as currently, I can only extract them together, and implementing this solution would be easy for erwin Data Modeler."
"erwin generally fails to successfully reverse engineer our Oracle Databases into erwin data models. The way that they are engineered on our side, the syntax is correct from an Oracle perspective, but it seems to be very difficult for erwin to interpret. What I end up doing is using Oracle Data Modeler to reverse engineer into the Oracle data model, then forward engineer the DDL into an Oracle syntax, and importing that DDL into erwin in order to successfully bring in most of the information from our physical data models. That is a bit of a challenge."
"I have seen some lagging, crashing, downtime, or instability in erwin Data Modeler."
"One area for improvement of erwin Data Modeler would be the overall user interface, which can feel dated and takes some time to get familiar with."
"erwin is not as robust as a data warehousing project I've been on in the past."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We are using the Community Version, which can be used free of charge."
"The product is not cheaper, not costlier; it is reasonable. Bonita’s license is very flexible, with options to meet the needs of different customers and clients. Previously, it was less flexible, but now, many different licensing options are available."
"Licensing cost for the Enterprise edition comes out to be around 40,000 a year. There is also a Community edition, which is free. Some customers can go for the Community edition, but some of them require the Enterprise edition. Big companies go for the Enterprise edition, which comes with a lot of additional features such as a mobile app."
"I am using the free version of Bonita."
"The Community Edition comes free of charge."
"Price to service ratio with Bonita BPM is good."
"You pay an annual fee and can have an unlimited number of processes and users."
"have installed the image of Bonita BPM on Amazon AWS and there is just one option to use and pay for."
"Price-wise, erwin Data Modeler is okay. You can purchase a single license and it is not very expensive."
"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"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 price of erwin Data Modeler is very expensive, in particular for this part of the world."
"I don't specifically know what we're paying now. About three years ago, in another organization, I have this memory of 6,000 AUD a seat or something like that, but I am not sure. In the mid-2000s, it was something like 1,200 AUD a seat. I get the impression that there was a price jump when it was spun off from CA as a separate company, which is understandable, but it could sometimes be a barrier in some organizations picking it up. I haven't talked to erwin people yet, but I'm going to suggest to them that they could perhaps think of having an entry-level product that is priced a bit lower, and then, you can buy the extra suite."
"Likewise, the solution is a little pricey."
"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."
"The primary reasons that erwin was selected were that it was much more affordable for us [than Embarcadero] and it was easily maintainable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise50
 

Questions from the Community

How does Bonita compare with Camunda Platform?
One of the things we like best about Bonita is that you can create without coding - it is a low-code platform. With Bonita, you can build the entire mechanism using the GUI, it’s that simple. You c...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licensing process is painful and quite onerous. The setup is okay, but there is room for improvement.
What needs improvement with erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
Regarding improvements, the first thing I would mention is that every release has some issues, some of which are related to current functionalities, which means they often seem not very well tested...
What is your primary use case for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
My main use case for erwin Data Modeler is to implement a single data architecture design department so everyone is using erwin Data Modeler for their data models to be a transactional application ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Bonita BPM
erwin DM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

With more than 1000 customers in 75 countries, and its ecosystem of more than 120,000 members, Bonitasoft is the largest provider of open-source Business Process Management, Low-code and Digital Transformation software worldwide.
 Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples
Find out what your peers are saying about Bonita BPM vs. erwin Data Modeler and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
915,817 professionals have used our research since 2012.