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.
Data Solution Consultant | Owner at a non-tech company with 1-10 employees
Consultant
Top 20
Aug 21, 2025
For collaboration, it's a two-sided coin. SAP PowerDesigner does pretty good at allowing you to compare models. If you have two or more people who work on the same data models, it has a capability of merging those two models. You can see the changes from person A and the changes from person B, and you can merge them together to get a result where all the changes are merged properly. What's not so great is that the SAP PowerDesigner repository, a product within SAP PowerDesigner that allows you to implement version control, is very user unfriendly. The performance is not that great, and it also has some issues that are really annoying if you work with it. SAP PowerDesigner does not have a cloud option. It's only on-premise.
Managing Partner at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 5
Jun 10, 2024
Based on my experience with SAP PowerDesigner, I'd like to see improvements in the DMM feature. Even if I have an ETL tool, I'd like the DMM options to directly connect to ETL tool repositories like Azure Sentinel, Informatica, or ODI, helping me map all object relationships, like source-to-target mapping, directly from the ETL tool's repository. Forward engineering in the DMM options is one area where PowerDesigner could add functionality. While it's excellent for showing source-to-target mapping and understanding data lineage, it would be helpful if it could also handle ETL functions and coding. I wish I could implement ETL operations within PowerDesigner, especially since I've already mapped and designed everything. Having everything in one place, including the ability to forward engineer databases and work on ETL coding, would be incredibly useful.
It's really effective in terms of validating everything, but sometimes they don't allow us some flexibility if we compare it with other tools in the market. So, it's doing too many validations that are not necessary. Also, on the graphic user interface, PowerDesigner could improve. There is room for improvement in the UI.
Head of Technologies Councel Services at a consultancy with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 5
Jan 12, 2024
Regarding improvements, I suggest enhancing the connection between objects in process and data models. It's crucial to define the structure of objects, especially when dealing with standard frameworks like VMM. There should be better visualization of AROs between BPM and data modeling objects, specifying their structure and impact. For future versions, a feature similar to Bizagi, allowing users to see forms or SQL representations of objects, would be valuable for demonstrating and presenting project details to stakeholders.
IT/IS architecture at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Real User
Aug 18, 2023
I think that the user experience could use a lot of improvement. It would also be good to have a connection with CMDB. In particular, the gap analysis. Usually, when we work on a project, on enterprise architect tools, we start with a paper version and then connect the CMDB. PowerDesigner cannot analyze the gap between reality and the theoretical schema we build.
The portal of SAP PowerDesigner could be better. The tool also needs more features and integration with other products, such as Collibra. It would be interesting for SAP PowerDesigner to have more integration.
Senior Data Warehouse Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Dec 29, 2022
SAP PowerDesigner could improve by making the repository easier to understand. It is difficult to understand how the repository works because when I used logical models as part of the team, we wanted to use them together and update the older versions of the data model version but it was confusing. The repository needs to be explained. It would be helpful to have a checking system on the objects that are generated from the physical data model on the specific database to help see if there is a difference on the database side and on the SAP PowerDesigner documentation side.
@Lasha Grdzelishvili if your model is connected to the target database you can execute DBMS/Apply changes in database.... That will give you the possibility to see what's the difference between your model and the actual implementation. The results can be generated as a file (to be revised later or applied by a DBA that has the rights) or, if your connection is admin, persist the changes.
Database Engineer at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Nov 16, 2022
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. I also want SAP PowerDesigner to be able to generate ALTER statements in the future.
@Bhargav Thota PD is able to generate with ALTER. You just need to go in 'Generate Database' , 'Options' tab and select 'External', instead of 'Internal' for the specific artefact (constraints, FK, PK ...). reverse engineer imports also the Alter command.
Data asset management engineer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
Top 10
Oct 11, 2022
I've tried to use Power Designer to bring in images, which didn't work very well at all. I think it's probably one of the best solutions, but it is not at all easy to deploy in a big organization. I think it's a problem because of internal processes, and you have to find the right person to help you. SAP as a whole is a very big, complex animal.
The focus is more on mainstream development environments, and I see a lack of focus on the open source world. I think SAP PowerDesigner probably interfaces better with SQL Server and Db2 but not with open source databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL. I'm an Apple user and not a Microsoft user, so I would love to have SAP PowerDesigner be available on macOS and not just on Microsoft. Right now, I am forced to install parallels and run a virtual machine on my Apple.
Principal Data Management Consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Aug 30, 2021
SAP PowerDesigner could improve by being more intuitive and user-friendly. It does not enforce some of the integrity of the model that we would like it to retain. There are many areas of this solution that needs to be changed.
DA at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Dec 20, 2020
Connectivity can be improved because it's not very good. I would expect data catalog types of products to connect to the database, the repository of PowerDesigner, and get the metadata out more easily. I think as a company, once Sybase purchased SAP PowerDesigner, SAP's investment decreased. I think the number of new features and the product's development is much slower than before.
The one issue I've found goes a long way back, especially from version 6.0 onward. In 6.0 there was a fantastic modeling functionality called "Process Analysis Modeling." It was very simple and very straightforward, yet it covered practically all of the three or four important components, which the software should have. Later, that capability was taken out of PowerDesigner. It got lost somewhere. Yet it was something that was very, very nice to have. SAP, they missed it somehow. Maybe it was removed in error? If they could bring it back, that would be amazing. When we had done some of the model icons to other models attached business process modeling, was far easier. The functionality has gone away. The solution is very, very expensive. It would be ideal if it was a more affordable product.
Manager, Data Architecture at DFS Singapore Pte Ltd
Real User
Aug 2, 2020
Although the presentation for viewing the models is good, I think it could be better. From my experience with other products, the SAP UI could be improved by enabling simpler navigation, especially for non-technical users. It would be ideal if there was a more seamless viewing experience of the models. Another improvement would be to adopt more industry models, especially from the enterprise architecture dimension. You could be adopting the industry standard as with made models, UML and other forms of industry enterprise architecture models. That would enhance the whole usability and enterprise nature of the modeling t Additional features could support other model types which would improve the connectors to the increasing number of software to service packages now that a lot of the applications are moving into the cloud. We need to connect on all fronts. There is still a lot of room for improvement on the web portals in terms of the usability and the visual.
Data Architect at a pharma/biotech company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jul 13, 2020
In terms of improvement, the pricing is a bit high. I didn't investigate whether we could run business process simulations like you can do with erwin's process modeling tool. I know you can do process modeling in PowerDesigner. I just don't know if you could run simulations of the process.
Senior Principal IT Architect -- MDM Architecture at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jun 30, 2020
Checking-in models to the repository, especially when working remotely, is a slow process than can sometimes have problems with models being corrupted. Between the client tool and the repository, the process is very chatty. Consequently, sometimes it takes forever to download a model and if it is corrupted then you won't be able to check it in or out again. It would be a nice feature if we had the ability to generate a JSON file from a model.
Better support for integration with open-source technologies is needed. For example, I try to use open-source databases such as Postgres and MySQL instead of Microsoft, DB2, or Oracle. However, I think it's lacking in capability from the tool to the database. In the future, I would like to see data manipulation capability where you can actually write SQL queries and manipulate data from directly within the tool.
PowerDesigner and ER/Studio Consultancy and Training Specialist at a tech services company with 1-10 employees
Real User
May 25, 2020
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. There's no deal for consultants, so if a consultant uses it two or three times a year they're not going to pay thousands for it. Like any product, it could do with being cheaper.
Team leader and Data / Information Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Feb 18, 2020
I don't know of any features the solution is lacking. It would be helpful if there were glossary, catalog and governance tools. It would help make it a true end-to-end product.
I would like to see better team collaboration in PD. Passing models (or objects in it) from one role to another. Today, we have to solve it by custom extensions and modelling rules just written on paper (and not enforced automatically). Support for ArchiMate would be an improvement. There should be a better usage of current hardware including multicore CPUs, higher resolutions (UHD, 4K), and multiple displays. I would also like to see better troubleshooting options for repository issues. In case of problems during check-in of the model to the repository, the error message just says "checkin was cancelled", but id doesn`t give you any details or hints where to look, what to repair.
This product does not have a good BPMN Modeler. Also, the simulations for BPMN modelers are not integrated well enough. If we want this functionality then we have to use another program. Compare this to Visual Paradigm, where we do have a good simulation for the BPMN modeler.
Enterprise Architect at a consumer goods company with 201-500 employees
User
Sep 29, 2018
* The UML simulation should be improved to avoid designing other tools out of the application. * The data governance should be improved, like ER/Studio.
SAP PowerDesigner is a valuable solution for developing several different types of data models according to business process needs. Data models can be logical, conceptual, and physical, and can also include dimensional and relational models. PowerDesiger has the ability to integrate a designed business process model with the actual database design to ensure that all the data process steps are included in the logical model. PowerDesigner is able to use the physical model to create the actual...
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.
For collaboration, it's a two-sided coin. SAP PowerDesigner does pretty good at allowing you to compare models. If you have two or more people who work on the same data models, it has a capability of merging those two models. You can see the changes from person A and the changes from person B, and you can merge them together to get a result where all the changes are merged properly. What's not so great is that the SAP PowerDesigner repository, a product within SAP PowerDesigner that allows you to implement version control, is very user unfriendly. The performance is not that great, and it also has some issues that are really annoying if you work with it. SAP PowerDesigner does not have a cloud option. It's only on-premise.
Based on my experience with SAP PowerDesigner, I'd like to see improvements in the DMM feature. Even if I have an ETL tool, I'd like the DMM options to directly connect to ETL tool repositories like Azure Sentinel, Informatica, or ODI, helping me map all object relationships, like source-to-target mapping, directly from the ETL tool's repository. Forward engineering in the DMM options is one area where PowerDesigner could add functionality. While it's excellent for showing source-to-target mapping and understanding data lineage, it would be helpful if it could also handle ETL functions and coding. I wish I could implement ETL operations within PowerDesigner, especially since I've already mapped and designed everything. Having everything in one place, including the ability to forward engineer databases and work on ETL coding, would be incredibly useful.
It's really effective in terms of validating everything, but sometimes they don't allow us some flexibility if we compare it with other tools in the market. So, it's doing too many validations that are not necessary. Also, on the graphic user interface, PowerDesigner could improve. There is room for improvement in the UI.
Regarding improvements, I suggest enhancing the connection between objects in process and data models. It's crucial to define the structure of objects, especially when dealing with standard frameworks like VMM. There should be better visualization of AROs between BPM and data modeling objects, specifying their structure and impact. For future versions, a feature similar to Bizagi, allowing users to see forms or SQL representations of objects, would be valuable for demonstrating and presenting project details to stakeholders.
I think that the user experience could use a lot of improvement. It would also be good to have a connection with CMDB. In particular, the gap analysis. Usually, when we work on a project, on enterprise architect tools, we start with a paper version and then connect the CMDB. PowerDesigner cannot analyze the gap between reality and the theoretical schema we build.
The portal of SAP PowerDesigner could be better. The tool also needs more features and integration with other products, such as Collibra. It would be interesting for SAP PowerDesigner to have more integration.
SAP PowerDesigner could improve by making the repository easier to understand. It is difficult to understand how the repository works because when I used logical models as part of the team, we wanted to use them together and update the older versions of the data model version but it was confusing. The repository needs to be explained. It would be helpful to have a checking system on the objects that are generated from the physical data model on the specific database to help see if there is a difference on the database side and on the SAP PowerDesigner documentation side.
@Lasha Grdzelishvili if your model is connected to the target database you can execute DBMS/Apply changes in database.... That will give you the possibility to see what's the difference between your model and the actual implementation. The results can be generated as a file (to be revised later or applied by a DBA that has the rights) or, if your connection is admin, persist the changes.
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. I also want SAP PowerDesigner to be able to generate ALTER statements in the future.
@Bhargav Thota PD is able to generate with ALTER. You just need to go in 'Generate Database' , 'Options' tab and select 'External', instead of 'Internal' for the specific artefact (constraints, FK, PK ...). reverse engineer imports also the Alter command.
I've tried to use Power Designer to bring in images, which didn't work very well at all. I think it's probably one of the best solutions, but it is not at all easy to deploy in a big organization. I think it's a problem because of internal processes, and you have to find the right person to help you. SAP as a whole is a very big, complex animal.
The focus is more on mainstream development environments, and I see a lack of focus on the open source world. I think SAP PowerDesigner probably interfaces better with SQL Server and Db2 but not with open source databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL. I'm an Apple user and not a Microsoft user, so I would love to have SAP PowerDesigner be available on macOS and not just on Microsoft. Right now, I am forced to install parallels and run a virtual machine on my Apple.
The solution itself does not need to be improved. However, they could add support for different languages.
SAP PowerDesigner could improve by being more intuitive and user-friendly. It does not enforce some of the integrity of the model that we would like it to retain. There are many areas of this solution that needs to be changed.
Technical support could be better and more human.
Connectivity can be improved because it's not very good. I would expect data catalog types of products to connect to the database, the repository of PowerDesigner, and get the metadata out more easily. I think as a company, once Sybase purchased SAP PowerDesigner, SAP's investment decreased. I think the number of new features and the product's development is much slower than before.
The one issue I've found goes a long way back, especially from version 6.0 onward. In 6.0 there was a fantastic modeling functionality called "Process Analysis Modeling." It was very simple and very straightforward, yet it covered practically all of the three or four important components, which the software should have. Later, that capability was taken out of PowerDesigner. It got lost somewhere. Yet it was something that was very, very nice to have. SAP, they missed it somehow. Maybe it was removed in error? If they could bring it back, that would be amazing. When we had done some of the model icons to other models attached business process modeling, was far easier. The functionality has gone away. The solution is very, very expensive. It would be ideal if it was a more affordable product.
Although the presentation for viewing the models is good, I think it could be better. From my experience with other products, the SAP UI could be improved by enabling simpler navigation, especially for non-technical users. It would be ideal if there was a more seamless viewing experience of the models. Another improvement would be to adopt more industry models, especially from the enterprise architecture dimension. You could be adopting the industry standard as with made models, UML and other forms of industry enterprise architecture models. That would enhance the whole usability and enterprise nature of the modeling t Additional features could support other model types which would improve the connectors to the increasing number of software to service packages now that a lot of the applications are moving into the cloud. We need to connect on all fronts. There is still a lot of room for improvement on the web portals in terms of the usability and the visual.
In terms of improvement, the pricing is a bit high. I didn't investigate whether we could run business process simulations like you can do with erwin's process modeling tool. I know you can do process modeling in PowerDesigner. I just don't know if you could run simulations of the process.
Checking-in models to the repository, especially when working remotely, is a slow process than can sometimes have problems with models being corrupted. Between the client tool and the repository, the process is very chatty. Consequently, sometimes it takes forever to download a model and if it is corrupted then you won't be able to check it in or out again. It would be a nice feature if we had the ability to generate a JSON file from a model.
Better support for integration with open-source technologies is needed. For example, I try to use open-source databases such as Postgres and MySQL instead of Microsoft, DB2, or Oracle. However, I think it's lacking in capability from the tool to the database. In the future, I would like to see data manipulation capability where you can actually write SQL queries and manipulate data from directly within the tool.
@Carel Van Der Merwe In the DBMS tab there is an 'Execute SQL' command... (sure you need to have your model connected to the database before :)
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. There's no deal for consultants, so if a consultant uses it two or three times a year they're not going to pay thousands for it. Like any product, it could do with being cheaper.
I don't know of any features the solution is lacking. It would be helpful if there were glossary, catalog and governance tools. It would help make it a true end-to-end product.
I would like to see better team collaboration in PD. Passing models (or objects in it) from one role to another. Today, we have to solve it by custom extensions and modelling rules just written on paper (and not enforced automatically). Support for ArchiMate would be an improvement. There should be a better usage of current hardware including multicore CPUs, higher resolutions (UHD, 4K), and multiple displays. I would also like to see better troubleshooting options for repository issues. In case of problems during check-in of the model to the repository, the error message just says "checkin was cancelled", but id doesn`t give you any details or hints where to look, what to repair.
This product does not have a good BPMN Modeler. Also, the simulations for BPMN modelers are not integrated well enough. If we want this functionality then we have to use another program. Compare this to Visual Paradigm, where we do have a good simulation for the BPMN modeler.
* The UML simulation should be improved to avoid designing other tools out of the application. * The data governance should be improved, like ER/Studio.