LeanIX vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest comparison

Quest Software and SAP LeanIX are both solutions in the Enterprise Architecture Management category. Quest Software is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.2, while SAP LeanIX is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.0. Quest Software holds a 10.2% mindshare in AM, compared to SAP LeanIX’s 15.8% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of SAP LeanIX users who would recommend it.

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Read 39 erwin Data Modeler by Quest reviews

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3,669 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

LeanIX

Read 23 LeanIX reviews

6,848 Views
5,341 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

LeanIX

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

LeanIX and erwin Data Modeler by Quest are leading tools in enterprise architecture and data modeling, respectively. LeanIX stands out with its user-friendly approach and quick ROI, while erwin is known for its robust data modeling capabilities.

Features: LeanIX offers user-friendly interfaces for technical and non-technical users, enabling easy mapping of fact sheets and extensive customization. It provides powerful reporting and visualization, along with seamless integration with platforms like ServiceNow and Technopedia. Erwin Data Modeler excels in logical and physical data modeling, offering reverse engineering, versioning, and model synchronization to maintain database consistency across diverse environments.

Room for Improvement: LeanIX users suggest expanding its reporting capabilities, enhancing API integration and documentation, and improving data import functionalities. They also cite the high cost of third-party integrations as a concern. Erwin Data Modeler's users point to its outdated interface, less intuitive reporting, and poor integration with modern data platforms like big data, alongside sluggish performance on large models and a cumbersome comparison tool.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: LeanIX, being cloud-based, facilitates rapid deployment and easy scaling, coupled with excellent customer support through dedicated success managers. Erwin Data Modeler is primarily on-premises, which may hinder deployment in dynamic environments. While offering strong technical support, challenges arise in updating and managing complex setups.

Pricing and ROI: LeanIX's pricing is based on application count and may seem costly, but it delivers quick ROI through significant cost savings. Its competitive pricing model aligns well with its extensive functionality. Erwin Data Modeler is generally more expensive, especially with its concurrent licensing options, targeting specific user groups and providing value due to its robustness. However, its ROI may take longer to realize compared to LeanIX.

To learn more, read our detailed LeanIX vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

LeanIX vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest

July 2025

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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

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management

3rd

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Business Process Design (10th)

LeanIX

Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of erwin Data Modeler by Quest is 10.2%, up from 10.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of LeanIX is 15.8%, up from 14.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Architecture Management

Featured Reviews

JorgeSanz

Data Governance Senior Advisor at Abu Dhabi National Oil Company

Streamline data modeling and automate network changes for increased efficiency

The initial setup depends on the tool if you are using the data model environment. Stopping the server could be complex and require strong expertise. If you have everything set up and configured, Erwin is straightforward. You can deploy it in a few hours. In our case, it took a couple of months to address internal conditions, assign machines, and set up everything for the services. I rate the initial setup a six out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

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Umit Sengul

Enterprise Architect at E.ON

A platform that facilitates efficient IT architecture management and integration, improving organizational coordination and decision-making

LeanIX is primarily used to create and manage architectural models, link capabilities, activities, and products and generate comprehensive reports. It serves as a central platform for overseeing the IT landscape within EON, a large organization, streamlining operations and enhancing governance…

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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 good for organizing the data and the scripting part is very powerful. It's easy to create technical scripts for models."

"It is a scalable solution...The technical support team is fine."

"The solution’s code generation ensures accurate engineering of data sources, as there is no development time. Code doesn't even have to be reviewed. We have been using this solution for so long and all the code which has been generated is accurate with the requirements. Once we generate the DDLs out of the erwin tools, the development team does a quick review of the script line by line. They will just be running the script on the database and looking into other requirements, such as the index. So, there is less effort from development side to create tables or build a database."

"Any tool will do diagramming but I think the ability to put the stuff up in a graphical fashion, then think about it, and keep things consistent is what's valuable about it. It's too easy when you're using other methods to not have naming consistent standards and column consistent definitions, et cetera."

"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."

"I have worked with erwin Data Modeler for quite some time and familiarity is its most valuable feature."

"We use the macros with naming standards patterns, domains, datatypes, and some common attributes. As far as other automations, a feature of the Bulk Editor is mass updates. When it sees something is nonstandard or inaccurate, it will export the better data out. Then, I can easily see which entities and attributes are not inline or standard. I can easily make changes to what was uploaded to the Bulk Editor. When taking on a new project, it can save you about a half a day on a big project across an entire team."

"The principal feature that I liked is that the solution has a very graphic interface."

More erwin Data Modeler by Quest pros

"The usability is very high. It almost looks like a Facebook for Enterprise architecture, it's pretty nice. It's HTML5 based. The repository is very easy. It has 10 different ways of sorting the objects you have in your architecture repository. Maintaining new data or to add data to your repository is very easy."

"My favorite feature of LeanIX is its ability to induct attribute-driven surveys."

"The most valuable features include the reporting capabilities and the LeanIX Academy's educational resources."

"The most valuable features are the clean user interface and the fact sheet feature in Application Portfolio Management. The tool integrates well with ServiceNow, which is the usual CMDB platform."

"LeanIX has a great application information architecture."

"For the reporting capabilities, LeanIX provides dashboards for different levels, including CXO dashboards. There are plenty of dashboards for reporting."

"Ease of use is the most valuable feature. From an enterprise architecture perspective, it's not too cumbersome with too many functionalities, yet it has a lot of attributes for the content it covers."

"The solution provides a single window view of business, application, data, and technology views of the IT ecosystem."

More LeanIX pros

Cons

"The erwin ETL functionality has room for improvement when it comes to mapping databases with a classic entity-relationship model to a data warehouse model."

"I would like the solution to be less rigid in terms of its theory."

"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."

"Complete Compare is set up only to compare properties that are of interest to us, but some of the differences cannot be brought over from one version of the model to another. This is despite the fact that we are clicking to bring objects from one place to another. Therefore, it's hard to tell at times if Complete Compare is working as intended without having to manually go into the details and check everything. If it could be redesigned to a degree where it is easier to use when we bring things over from one site to another and be sure that it's been done correctly, that would be nice to have. We would probably use the tool more often if the Complete Compare were easier to use."

"The reverse engineering in Oracle Databases needs improvement, as there are issues."

"Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM. Therefore, we manually make changes to those scripts and edit them, then reverse-engineer within the tool. So, it does take some time to edit these DDL scripts generated by the source operational systems. What I would suggest: It would be helpful if there were a place within the erwin tool to import the file and automatically eliminate all the unnecessary lines of code, and just have the clean code built-in to generate the table/data model."

"The Bulk Editor needs improvement. If you had something that was a local model to your local machine, you could connect to the API, then it would write directly into the repository. However, when you have something that is on the centralized server, that functionality did not work. Then, you had to export out to a CSV and upload up to the repository. It would have been nice to be able to do the direct API without having that whole download and upload thing. Maybe I didn't figure it out, but I'm pretty sure that didn't work when it was a model that sat on a centralized repository."

"I'd really like to see the PDF function become available. It would make my life much easier than what it is at the moment because whenever I need to collaborate with people that do not have erwin, I have to go through the wonkiness of going to Word and then save it from Word into PDF. There's a lot of differences between erwin 4.4 and 2020."

More erwin Data Modeler by Quest cons

"I find LeanIX's pricing expensive for the functionality it offers. However, with the acquisition by SAP, the pricing might become more affordable due to scale and tiered application pricing. Currently, it offers different tiers for the first 400 applications: 400 to 600 and 600 to 1,000, making it expensive from a pricing standpoint."

"The modeling could be improved."

"Another area for improvement is that when you're starting to look into more advanced information, using the solution's APIs and its customizations, documentation for that specific aspect is not very good. There is not too much support built into the offering for that aspect, for a developer."

"Improvements in user interface simplicity could be made, particularly with the reporting and filtering capabilities."

"They're probably positioned pretty well. I hope that they would not focus that much on the business architecture, and they would focus more on the overall cloud strategy and how we can leverage multi-cloud and transition back and forth from other cloud providers. With a lot of current vendors, you get locked in with one cloud, and then you try to migrate to someone else, and it becomes very problematic. What they need to do is to look at the overall data strategy, and they probably need to amplify their data strategy, especially around multi-cloud."

"Adjustments related to specific organizational requirements are complex."

"The solution’s API integration needs to improve. I would like to see a digital screen watch feature also in the solution."

"LeanIX has limited in-build diagramming capabilities, requiring the purchase of another tool. That is the main drawback of LeanIX because they don't have a built-in add-on product for diagramming."

More LeanIX cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There is either a one-year or three-year license. It is not a pay-as-you-go license like a SaaS solution. It’s more of a traditional licensing. They are a little bit on the pricier side."

"An issue right now would be that erwin doesn't have a freely available browser (that I am aware of) for people who are not data modelers or data engineers that a consumer could use to look at the data models and play with it. This would not be to make any changes, but just to visually look at what exists. There are other products out there which do have end user browsers available and allow them to access data models via the data modeling tool."

"The tool is expensive."

"Though the solution is not cheap, it's worth the money."

"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."

"I wish it wasn't so expensive. I would love to personally buy a copy of my own and have it at home, because the next job that I'm looking at is probably project management and I might not have access to the tool. I would like to keep my ability to use the tool. Therefore, they should probably have a pricing for people like me who want to just use the solution as an independent consultant, trying to get started. $3,000 is a big hit."

"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."

More erwin Data Modeler by Quest pricing and cost advice

"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is competitive and in line with other products."

"I would rate the pricing a one out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."

"It cost me $91,000 a year for 300 applications. For any enterprise, 300 applications are minimal, as many have well over 1,000 applications."

"LeanIX uses application-based account licensing, where the cost is multiplied by the number of applications in the software implementation."

"As the tool is cloud-based, its cost is more affordable."

"The pricing is very good. We definitely get good value for the money."

"There is a sweet spot of where they need to be on pricing right now. They could go up a little bit in pricing, but it has to do with the cost savings, and it has to do with the practitioners using it. I use it where I get cost savings and I can justify it, but they probably have the ability to flex a 10% up channel on their sales on that. So, they could increase their settle price, not their offering price, when they sell. They can probably hold that up a little bit higher than it is because there are cost savings that we can drive from it."

"The tool needs to include more flexible licensing options. We do not use the tool all the time. So pricing should be considered only when we use the tool."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about erwin Data Modeler by Quest?

Forward engineering, DDL generation, reverse engineering, and reporting are the most valuable features of the solution.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?

The product is expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

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What needs improvement with erwin Data Modeler by Quest?

As a documenting tool, it's solid, though its reporting could be more robust. The reporting mechanisms could be more intuitive regarding report creation. It can generate reports in CSV files, displ...

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Any experience with Strategic Project Portfolio Management Solutions?

Hi @Cheryl Joseph Looking at the crossover between Project and Portfolio management with EA, then Planview could be a good choice. If looking at Portfolio Management from an EA perspective then Le...

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What do you like most about LeanIX?

The ability to import data and generate reports from it. That's where its power lies.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LeanIX?

LeanIX pricing ranges from moderate to high. Our usage and costs depend on the number of applications, and as the number of applications grows, so does the cost. We have aligned our usage with appl...

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Comparisons

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MEGA HOPEX vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Compared 2% of the time

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Compared 21% of the time

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MEGA HOPEX vs LeanIX

Compared 8% of the time

SAP PowerDesigner vs LeanIX

Compared 7% of the time

capsifi vs LeanIX

Compared 2% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

July 2025

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Buyer's Guide

LeanIX

July 2025

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Also Known As

erwin DM

No data available

Overview

erwin pioneered data modeling, and erwin Data Modeler (erwin DM) remains trusted, award-winning software for data modeling and database design, automating complex and time-consuming tasks. Use it to discover and document any data from anywhere for consistency, clarity and artifact reuse across large-scale data integration, master data management, metadata management, Big Data, business intelligence and analytics initiatives – all while supporting data governance and intelligence efforts.

Quest Software

LeanIX delivers collaborative Enterprise Architecture designed for modern IT. Our open, data-driven architecture management model helps organizations adapt to the evolving demands of digital. From agile to multi-cloud and beyond, architecture teams using LeanIX have the power to strategically support the business and report 45% reduction in time to value delivery. More than 90,000 users across enterprises worldwide rely on LeanIX to manage their IT landscape, including adidas, Bosch, 7Eleven, and Zalando.

SAP LeanIX

Sample Customers

Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples

adidas, Bosch, Chico's, Haworth, Helvetia, KuKa, Osram, Telekom, TUI, Santander, Swarovski, Vaillant, 7Eleven, and Zalando.

Buyer's Guide

LeanIX vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest

July 2025

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