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Zaloni Data Platform 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 Data Governance
10th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
51
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (1st), Business Process Design (7th)
Zaloni Data Platform
Ranking in Data Governance
42nd
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Data Preparation Tools (14th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 0.5%. The mindshare of Zaloni Data Platform is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler0.5%
Zaloni Data Platform0.8%
Other98.7%
Data Governance
 

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.
reviewer1476264 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Solid multi-ingestion tool but with poor exception handling
The major pain point with Zaloni is that their exception handling is not good. If any event happens (an event is when the job stops in the middle of the process), it doesn't tell you at which point it failed and it doesn't tell the operations team how they should take corrective actions unless you call Zaloni and then identify the issues. That is one issue. Another issue is that sometimes your jobs fail and if you run it a second time, it will go through. A third area it could be improved is the deployment process. When you want to deploy anything, it has a lot of manual processes. For example, you have to create your password in an encrypted format, and then you have to use a lot of manual deployment process. They should actually be building something else, like using Jenkins or automating their process. I have suggested to them that they have to improve their deployment process because they want everyone to run a manual deployment. It takes a lot of time, about half a day, for any single deployment. Then test it, then it might not work, and then reverting back is not easy because of the manual deployment process. I think in recent versions they added a lot of upgrades and additional features including a lot of integrations. Before it was just AWS, later they extended it to Azure. I'm not sure how they have extended it to GCP. It has some built-in features and a lot of improvements now because the UI and the features were not easy to navigate. Regarding showing the metrics, it's okay. I will say it's neither easy nor hard, there is whatever is required. Lastly, on the governance side, it's not very good. We faced some issues with the Ranger version. Ranger was an authentication tool on big data and Zaloni had some compatibility issues with the Ranger at that time. Later they said those are all going to be resolved, but at that time it had some issues. I'm not sure whether it was working with the Sentry or not.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The biggest lesson I have learned from erwin is the old cliche, that a picture is worth a thousand words, and when a person asks for a set of tables and they actually see that diagram visually, it really assists in any meeting that you will have."
"It is a scalable solution...The technical support team is fine."
"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."
"Another feature of erwin is that it can help you enforce your naming standards. It has little modules that you can set up and, as you're building the data model, it's ensuring that they conform to the naming standards that you've developed."
"This tool is beneficial to any organization as it is foundational; there is no better way than this, and it is a must-have for every organization, whether large or small."
"The process of creating visual representations of data structures using erwin Data Modeler allows you to see everything you are doing, and you have visuals to see what you are going to do and what has been done so far."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to map data and write workflows with logic inside them."
"You can create a lot of ingestions based on the file levels or based on the time."
"The entire need was to ingest it into big data and Zaloni was the fastest product to test and implement into production."
 

Cons

"As someone who has used it for a long time, I have seen stability vary from version to version."
"I find the UI very clunky and very difficult to use. If I add columns to a table the whole workflow could be so much easier. I get frustrated using it. I've tried other tools. I've tried to get off of erwin a few times. I always come back to it because every tool has its own set of problems, and it seems like if I have to pick my poison, I stay with erwin. But so many things that are clunky with it."
"We find erwin DM less valuable creating initial drafts and reverse-engineering databases and there are still a lot of extensions to the scripting language that are not included with the erwin product."
"It would be nice to have it on the Linux platform, not just Windows. If they can support Linux, there would be a huge market for it."
"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."
"There is a lack of local support in the China region."
"The Bulk Editor needs improvement."
"The solution only works with one server and one database, so I don't think it's scalable enough."
"The major pain point with Zaloni is that their exception handling is not good. If any event happens, it doesn't tell you at which point it failed and it doesn't tell the operations team how they should take corrective actions unless you call Zaloni and then identify the issues. That is one issue."
"The major pain point with Zaloni is that their exception handling is not good."
"Technical support is in need of improvement."
"When we have gone to the support team because something is wrong with the product, I would say that it has not been easy for them to sort things out and quickly give us a patch."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is expensive."
"It is not a very expensive solution. Only the licensing and maintenance fee needs to be paid."
"Though the solution is not cheap, it's worth the money."
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"The primary reasons that erwin was selected were that it was much more affordable for us [than Embarcadero] and it was easily maintainable."
"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."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise42
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?
The UI in erwin Data Modeler can be improved significantly because when any new person opens the tool, all the toolbars are kept open with many tools in view, making it appear chunky. If possible, ...
What is your primary use case for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
I primarly use erwin Data Modeler for modeling purposes. Once we have the business requirement, we create the models in erwin Data Modeler, and then we perform forward engineering to get the query ...
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Also Known As

erwin DM
ZDP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

 Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples
CDS Global, AIG,
Find out what your peers are saying about Zaloni Data Platform vs. erwin Data Modeler and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.