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SAP PowerDesigner 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

erwin Evolve
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
12th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (21st)
SAP PowerDesigner
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
2nd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.2
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of erwin Evolve is 3.5%, up from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP PowerDesigner is 8.6%, up from 8.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Architecture Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAP PowerDesigner8.6%
erwin Evolve3.5%
Other87.9%
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

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.
HemantKUMAR6 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect at Sopra Steria
Customer support has delayed successful upgrade to supported version
It was a long time back when my company purchased it, but I am now participating in upgrading it to the latest version. I found customer support to be tedious during the upgrade process to the latest version. I tried to upgrade to a trial version before purchasing a new license. During that process, I had some technical issues. When trying to go from 12.5 to 16.5, I could migrate but faced technical challenges. When I approached customer support, they informed me that even 16.5 is not supported. They stated I would need to go to 16.7 before they could look at my issue. They didn't spend any time on the issue because according to them, 16.5 is not supported. Until I get 16.7 and complete the migration, I'm not getting any help from them. I was not too happy with the customer support. This was my only interaction with customer support, and I haven't received any resolution to my issue. It can be rated as low as zero because that's the only time I approached them. I cannot even say zero out of ten because I approached only once. Perhaps they are correct that they don't support 16.5, so they don't want to spend any time on that.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I can send images in the PDF form, along with the relationships and the associations that are a very important part of what we do. It can show what is affected and what is impacted by a certain change in one area of the system architecture or enterprise architecture. I can very quickly draw those issues and topics to the fore."
"We use erwin Evolve to publish to the website. This allows us to enable publishing our website using parameterisation features. In a very fast, quick way, we can publish a table or chart onto a website."
"Evolve is like a tank; you can do whatever you want with the solution, but you need to customize it."
"One of the most valuable features is the website that sits on top of the database. There's a database of objects and how they are related, and you can make views and diagrams and visual elements out of that information on the website. The website is the part that is called Evolve and we use the Evolve Designer and publish the website out to our employees. They can click around and navigate and search, etc."
"Support for a broad range of data sources from relational to big data to the Cloud."
"Evolve is like a tank. You can do whatever you want with the solution, but you need to customize it. I think that it's not very aligned with the framework for enterprise architecture. MEGA is focused on these enterprise architectures, but it's only for that. With Evolve, you can do everything you want with professional services."
"Evolve's reverse engineering ability is quite useful."
"Erwin EA provides superior, exemplar capabilities to scale across all stakeholders."
"The most valuable feature is the way you can extend it and customize it. With most modeling tools, you fit your modeling process to fit the tool. In PowerDesigner, you can make the tool fit the way you want to work."
"The most valuable features of SAP PowerDesigner are the creation the flow charts and folders. It is a powerful tool."
"It has helped me to develop the as-is state, design its to-be state, and track the capital investment according to gap analysis."
"I previously used Erwin and I switched because PowerDesigner is a more powerful tool."
"It's a great tool for documentation."
"SAP PowerDesigner is an excellent tool that does what I need it to do. What I like most about it is that it's stable, fast, and easy to understand."
"This solution has good tools for big data, where you can manage large and complex databases."
"The main valuable features are the logical and physical data modeling capabilities, and our main purpose is to keep the data model in a repository and then be able to generate DDL files for Oracle."
 

Cons

"The solution's integration capabilities with other tools in our system has not been all that well done."
"With the Excel importing, the "up to date" part is the challenge. If we had a real-time integration, we could keep things up to date for whatever kinds of change points we had. With Excel, it is more that you have to export from one system then import it to another, so it's better for data that doesn't change that often."
"I would like it to be easier to make changes and then deploy them into production, especially when you have multiple web servers or front-ends. It would be nice to make a change and then have it propagate to the production servers in a more automated fashion."
"The solution needs to focus on allowing for more integrations."
"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."
"If it had fewer features to model all kinds of architecture, it would be less complicated."
"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."
"Few clients looking are going with Evolve these days because I don't think they even appear on Gartner's Magic Quadrant."
"The tool lags in the area of customer service."
"You have the possibility to complete a connection for abbreviations if you are creating columns or names of the tables. In the Citrix environment, this has been lagging to the point where the PowerDesigner was not usable."
"In terms of improvement, the pricing is a bit high."
"There are some minor things that could be easier. We're writing up procedures to bring all the modeling back into one group as this reduces delays in production."
"This product lacks artificial intelligence that should be very good in terms of automatically identifying the classification of elements."
"This product does not have a good BPMN Modeler."
"One disadvantage of SAP PowerDesigner is that you cannot reverse engineer the ALTER statements, so that's an enhancement or area for improvement I'm looking forward to seeing from the SAP team in the future. That should directly reflect on the physical data models my company builds."
"Pricing for small consultancies needs improvement. They sustain prices to competing tools. The competing tools tend to do special offers. PowerDesigner SAP doesn't pay much attention to the pricing of it and there are no special offers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"Yearly, our cost is €100,000."
"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."
"On a yearly basis, our licensing costs are 50,000 euro. There are no additional costs because we are on a SaaS model."
"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 think erwin is quite expensive. I have difficulty selling the portal, in fact."
"Unless you are a one person shop – always go with the Workgroup edition and Concurrent licensing."
"The price of the solution is too expensive. When we asked for certain licenses in different countries it was unattainable."
"When you purchase the license for SAP PowerDesigner, you have to buy one year of support. The tool is worth the money."
"PowerDesigner is not the cheapest solution on the market, so make sure that you are using it to its full potential."
"The price of the solution is low."
"I would like SAP to prove free licenses to professionals that are using the solution. The free version is limited."
"The ROI has been 43%."
"The pricing varies based on functionality and users."
"SAP PowerDesigner is cheaper than eriwin."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Outsourcing Company
14%
Construction Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Performing Arts
8%
Financial Services Firm
22%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Government
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise12
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise18
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What needs improvement with SAP PowerDesigner?
Synchronization is vital since I experience multiple problems, such as mismatched models and manual DDL handling. Improving the synchronization between models and databases can enhance integration ...
What is your primary use case for SAP PowerDesigner?
I use SAP PowerDesigner for data modeling, which greatly enhances the clarity of my data management processes. I manage data across multiple databases, including cloud databases, Teradata, and Orac...
 

Also Known As

erwin EA, erwin Business Process, erwin Enterprise Architecture
Sybase PowerDesigner
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about SAP PowerDesigner vs. erwin Evolve and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.