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Serverless vs erwin Data Modeler 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

erwin Data Modeler
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
48
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (6th), Data Governance (9th)
Serverless
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.4
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 8.3%, down from 11.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Serverless is 0.2%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Architecture Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler8.3%
Serverless0.2%
Other91.5%
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Ivan Karpenko - PeerSpot reviewer
SRE at Akamai
Developers have deployed web apps faster and manage infrastructure directly with confidence
Serverless offers many best features; it is really easy to use, very developer-friendly, and has a great community. The developer-friendliness of Serverless shows up in my day-to-day work because it is easier for developers to understand what they are doing and what they need to do. Regarding features, it is scalable and has integrations with many things. Serverless has impacted my organization positively, but I used it on just one project, so it is difficult to judge at the organization level. For that one project, I noticed a specific positive outcome as a time saver because not all the infrastructure needs to be done by the architects. It can be done by developers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"We had some data integration projects, where we needed to integrate it for about 100 databases. Doing that manually is crazy; we can't do that. With erwin, it was much easier to identify which tables and columns could be used for the integration. That means a lot in terms of time and effort as well as my image to the customer, because they can see that we are providing value in a very short time."
"It reduces monthly savings by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Think about a company like Costco and all of the points of sale systems in Costco, all of the systems, the applications, but if all the applications in Costco all had their own data model, trying to integrate those, upgrade them and manage their different versions of the same model throughout the store, is an absolute nightmare. It's phenomenally expensive. This helps reduce that cost significantly. I'm talking on the orders of hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"It saves a lot of development time, and I think we are saving from two weeks to one month annually."
"The solution’s ability to generate database code from a model for a wide array of data sources cuts development time from two weeks to one day or even hours."
"It's important to create standard templates — Erwin is good at that — and you can customize them. You can create a standard template so that your models have the same look and feel. And then, anyone using the tool is using the same font and the same general layout. erwin's very good at helping enforce that."
"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."
"I have used most of the modeling tools available, but I found that erwin Data Modeler is the most suitable data modeling tool in our current industry."
"Serverless offers many best features; it is really easy to use, very developer-friendly, and has a great community."
"We are looking at Serverless for quick scheduling of these jobs, and the turnaround time for optimization has increased tremendously."
"The best features that Serverless offers include being without the server, which itself says we don't need to depend on the server maintenance, and so we don't need to worry about these server things."
"Serverless has positively impacted my organization as it has been a good experience for the team overall because it is a new framework that we had to learn, and cost-wise, it helps because moving to Serverless means you do not have resources spinning all the time."
 

Cons

"In terms of improvements, support could have been better in terms of installation, especially of workgroups. We struggled quite a bit to get it up and running. Collaboration could have been better from an installation perspective, but it is trivial as compared to what we use it for. Other than that, I don't have much feedback. It works pretty well, and the fact that we've been using it for more than a decade shows that it is quite solid."
"I am not so happy with its speed. Sometimes, it can have problems with connections."
"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."
"The solution's reporting side needs to be improved."
"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."
"Erwin Data Modeler is a good product, but I recently experienced a problem where I was not able to open an erwin Data Modeler file because its version had automatically changed."
"While I do not have knowledge about pricing for erwin Data Modeler, I think it could improve by having a feature that allows the publishing of models, similar to how Power BI allows for dashboard publishing for different users within an organization, not just data modelers."
"I would like to see improved reporting and, potentially, dashboards built on top of that."
"I choose eight out of ten because to go ahead with Serverless, we need to do YAML file creation and other format file creation."
"I struggled with wanting to put breakpoints throughout the code and then use the debugger."
"The reason I choose a seven is primarily resource-based scheduling. This is what we are not able to get around on Serverless."
"Improving Serverless is a difficult question because I am not deeply familiar with Serverless, so it is really difficult for me to judge."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"erwin is expensive compared to other solutions. We are paying almost $6,000 per seat a month."
"The solution is expensive."
"The pricing of the solution is cheap. I rate the pricing a five out of ten."
"Price-wise, erwin Data Modeler is okay. You can purchase a single license and it is not very expensive."
"The primary reasons that erwin was selected were that it was much more affordable for us [than Embarcadero] and it was easily maintainable."
"This company had bought the license for three years, and it's not an individual license. While you can buy a license for each individual, that would be very expensive. There is something called concurrent licenses where you can purchase licenses in bulk and 15 to 20 people can access the license and model. Concurrent licenses are scalable to the number of users and are proportional to the cost."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
Performing Arts
5%
Construction Company
46%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
7%
Transportation Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise35
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
I have no idea about the setup cost because I did not buy the license.
What needs improvement with erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
As we all know, AI is taking up a majority of things. I felt that erwin Data Modeler is a bit of an outdated tool. It needs a new look and integrating AI into it would be much better for learning. ...
What is your primary use case for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
For erwin Data Modeler, the use case was to create a data model for the organization. It articulates how data flows throughout the organization. For example, we have an employee table with two type...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Serverless?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that it is free, so I have no experience with costs.
What needs improvement with Serverless?
Improving Serverless is a difficult question because I am not deeply familiar with Serverless, so it is really difficult for me to judge. Probably they would introduce an alternative to the way the...
What is your primary use case for Serverless?
My main use case for Serverless is the deployment of web applications. For the deployment of web applications, I write the configurations, write the code, then execute it, and I get the lambdas dep...
 

Also Known As

erwin DM
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

 Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Serverless vs. erwin Data Modeler and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.