Likelihood to Recommend Well suited for enterprise architecture modeling where the intent to document elements beyond processes as well, such as risks and controls, KPIs, systems, org charts, etc. It also has the excellent capability of creating custom reports, hence if looking for various views right from summary to detailed, this is a great tool. It is less appropriate for implementing the processes as it is not very strong in BPMN.
Read full review Enterprise Architect can be used to capture business requirements, design and management of all successive models, algorithms, process flows/workflows, design of business data objects and other artifacts. The strong point is the ability to link the items in all models with each other, the more time the analysts and designers "invest" into making nice and clearly defined models, the higher the future pay-off by any successive changes to the systems. Enterprise Architect is not a good tool for capturing rather unstructured business requirements, use e.g. Confluence or other solutions instead. EA should comprise the extracted models with very little unstructured information. Management of the changes process should not be done in Enterprise Architect, rather use JIRA/Confluence or similar.
Read full review Pros Query feature is excellent to extract information in a specific manner. Ability to create custom reports. Collaboration feature is very good. Semantic checks to check validation errors. cloud based central repository. Read full review Open Architecture - A wide and extensive set of options, plug-ins and customization options make Sparx EA more of a tool kit than just a tool. Most tools allow customization but Sparx EA is built from the ground up with this in mind. Wide variety of formats, lexicons, standards and data import export capabilities allow different roles to interact with the information in different ways. Automated report generation allows architects and designers to spend less taking on word processing and more time on performing architecture and design. Read full review Cons Defining databases, use of entities and relationship diagrams, define data, like data models, there is still a part they could improve. Providing more standard reports and improving on access rights and privileges functionality Read full review Needs someone that is very conversant with business modelling terminology Read full review Usability I am a BPM and Enterprise Architect Consultant and hence have been using different BPM and EA tools for consulting practice. Until now I have used Opentext Provision EA,Sparx EA, MS Visio and IBM Blueworks. All of the tools used are good and have their own unique features and capabilities. ARIS BPA is widely used by my current organization for different projects.
Read full review Support Rating It has good, even complex functionality that is provided by its library and ability to create relations between items, yet it is not hard to use. Anyone can use it in a short time. It provides reporting abilities and good documentation with the availability of exporting options. The only drawback I have seen was user management/login issues.
Read full review The support team of Sparx EA, based in Australia, is always willing to help and give direction.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The Service area, they have been very useful. ARIS suite is covering number of applications. ARIS engine is very powerful and robust. The tool can be configured in many ways which can be beneficial but can be a curse at the same time. As a user, you need to apply this flexibility with care.
Read full review BiZZdesign represents a different new concept to enterprise architecture, its gravity center is not technical modelling, but rather a view on capturing the whole end-user experience or customer journey. It also allows to grasp areas as internal company capabilities, required for adoption/changes and operation of the solution, uses the same Archimate modelling language. This solution is in my opinion a new generation enabling to not only design the solutions, but also manage the whole application portfolio with respect to capabilities and requirement parameters.
Read full review Return on Investment Documentation of processes made it possible for anyone to see who does what, how and using what systems. Dependency on specific people is eliminated. Read full review This program speed up the development process. It generates the actual code with my model classes after modeling Read full review ScreenShots