We performed a comparison between Planview Portfolios and Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Architecture Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"Its view into resource capacity and availability absolutely help us manage work. We can't plan out projects for delivery until we know if we have resources available to deliver them. That's been really critical. We look at our projects and see what availability of resources we have. That helps us to determine when we can start new work."
"In my opinion, the financial planning feature is the most valuable feature of Planview Enterprise One."
"We can view a project both at the top level and dig into the particularities. It's given us greater visibility into the work itself."
"Enterprise One has enabled us to eliminate Excel. We don't track financials anymore in an Excel format, which the company was doing before. Even now, being a new portfolio manager four months in, I'm able to just pick up my project. I'm able to see where I am right now. That improvised it to be more automated. The only missing part is the integration between tools. I'm not able to see my full schedule, but I know what are my important milestones are like watching the financials and all that stuff."
"The Kanban board has really helped us be more agile and we can keep track of everything that is ongoing."
"The sheer amount of information available in one single interface is valuable. Everything is there. It is also a lot of work to maintain all the information, but generally, you can find everything you need within this one tool."
"Its view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work. In reporting, we use this facility to help with resource capacity and availability. It also helps to see how much we are using. We derive that information from the work and resource management screen. That is very helpful."
"The solution view into resource capacity and availability helps us to manage work."
"I like Sparx's BPM features and the way it lets you create the diagram."
"The solution is easy to use, supports SysML and UML, and is able to connect to MATLAB. This is very important for us."
"A feature I like most about Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is its ease of use."
"Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect was easy to set up and it took just twenty minutes."
"The profiles and ready-made templates are an extremely helpful feature. This is one of the biggest features that I find very useful in Sparx."
"Its traversability is most valuable. I can use ArchiMate, and I can create a UML model. ArchiMate is for logical enterprise architecture, UML is for software engineering, and BPMN is for business processes. I can build it to have multiple models, and they are also traversable, which is not something that every tool allows. If there is a huge organization, you can segment it and have separate models for business technology or internal resource management system. You don't need to keep them in one model, and you can decide to segregate them."
"We could capture the process models around 24 countries with all their local variations."
"It provides good utilization and it's a convenient tool for building exact architectural work."
"The number one thing that needs improvement is the UI. It should be easy for a casual project manager. It should provide customizable screens that can be a choice for project managers to choose as a professional level, medium level, and a very easy level."
"The solution is stable. However, it's so robust, there's so much data, that it has the tendency to lag."
"Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is very limited. In terms of the out-of-the-box reporting for summary reports, the reporting that we typically leverage is around forecasting for resources, timesheets, and actuals, and just looking at what is the capacity. There is no real summary of what work is being done and how work is being accomplished. So, what we typically do is that we get a copy of the data files from Enterprise One daily, and then we have a team that manages the data mod outside of Enterprise One. They use data from Enterprise One as well as other additional sources to provide the reporting that we share with the management. So, we leverage a lot of Enterprise One data for reporting, but we don't use the reporting capabilities within Enterprise One. So, reporting can be improved, and they could help us make more customized reporting. I know it is very configurable out of the box, but we have to leverage an outside data mod that pulls in a lot of data from Enterprise One. So, the reporting function, and being able to customize reports, is the area that could be very beneficial."
"The solution out-of-the-box that we established was insufficient. We had to purchase and set up OData. I don't believe that it's a great solution out-of-the-box but eventually you can get there."
"The solution needs to be better at accepting new ideas for upcoming releases."
"Even though Enterprise One is easy and user-friendly, it could provide better training like a demo. Providing more tutorials or sessions would really help."
"We don't use the Progression feature. We will use it at some point in time. Until then, we want to have a way to set time to help decide what's in the past, present, and future. It is one of the things we've been discussing with Planview."
"The scheduling's kind of clunky in terms of its ability for us to see what stage work is at. They could have done better with that. It can be difficult to use."
"The Business Process Modeling or BPM feature can be improved to make it more interactive and user friendly because it is a tool for technical people. My current use is only for business process modeling notation and putting in the icons etc. You need to take them in as a class, which makes things very complex. Because of this complexity, it is not an easy-to-handle solution. Enterprise Architect is not very good for mockups. We cannot create user screens and other similar kinds of stuff, which is bad. For these things, we prefer to use Axure RP and other similar solutions. They should either remove this feature from this product or provide some kind of connectivity with Axure RP so that people can do better mockups of screens and import them. They need to augment and strengthen the BPM feature, which is the main feature. They need to put in some elements like artificial intelligence and augmented reality. They should look into such features because these things are coming up."
"I would like to see integration with Confluence or any other TRM, and the capability to integrate with the data storage, such as a repository similar to GitHub."
"The automatic creation of reports based on the model elements could be improved."
"It can be improved in the area of shared documentation. The idea is that the architecture tool can call back to an enterprise asset, pull that information, and link that as a sub-artifact."
"When many users are accessing the system at the same time, Sparx slows down. It can't easily support a large team."
"The UI is a little bit outdated. It should be more fresh and clean."
"Sparx can be a bit slow. If you are trying to design software architecture, sometimes we run into issues and need to refresh."
"The user interface is not so good. It's not easy for someone to use it at first. The product takes some getting used to."
More Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect Pricing and Cost Advice →
Planview Portfolios is ranked 3rd in Architecture Management with 16 reviews while Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is ranked 1st in Architecture Management with 36 reviews. Planview Portfolios is rated 7.6, while Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Planview Portfolios writes "Helps prioritize projects, share the big picture with management, and has a great planning capacity". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect writes "Great pricing with an easy initial setup and a comprehensive toolkit". Planview Portfolios is most compared with Planview PPM Pro, Broadcom Clarity PPM, JIRA Portfolio, SAP Portfolio and Project Management and Planview Daptiv, whereas Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect is most compared with Visual Paradigm, Visio, No Magic MagicDraw, Lucidchart and ARIS BPA. See our Planview Portfolios vs. Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect report.
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