AWS CloudFormation vs. IBM Rational System Architect Designer

AWS CloudFormation

IBM Rational System Architect Designer

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudFormation	Score 8.7 out of 10	N/A	AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…	$0
IBM Rational System Architect Designer	Score 6.2 out of 10	N/A	IBM Rational System Architect is an enterprise architecture management platform, that enables the use of abstraction to preserve design intents and tribal memory, and to provide auditable evidence of conformance to policies.	N/A

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

IBM Rational System Architect Designer

Editions & Modules

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account: $0.00
Handler Operation: $0.0009
per handler operation

No answers on this topic

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	IBM Rational System Architect Designer
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudFormation	IBM Rational System Architect Designer
Top Pros	Pro Create multiple Pro Easy to build Pro Defined templates	Pro Ms office Pro Ibm products
Top Cons	Minus Use cases Minus Time to create Minus Live support	Minus Sql server Minus Not cheap Minus Good ui

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation	IBM Rational System Architect Designer
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Vagrant Score 10.0 out of 10	No answers on this topic
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 8.9 out of 10	IBM Blueworks Live Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 8.9 out of 10	IBM Blueworks Live Score 8.7 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation	IBM Rational System Architect Designer
Likelihood to Recommend	7.6 (5 ratings)	8.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	IBM Rational System Architect Designer
Likelihood to Recommend	Amazon AWS AWS CloudFormation is well suited for scenarios where all of your resources need to be provisioned on AWS but it is not suited for hybrid cloud deployments. It's very easy for someone new to learn. The level of customization offered as part of the template specifically for AWS services is great. There is also a UI tool where we can drag and drop the services we want and it generates an yaml file which is very easy to use. The visibility of stacks and its resources and one place where we can track and identify the issues in deployment is great. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	IBM If you need a whole infrastructure and architect view, IBM Rational System Architect is the way to go. If you need a single diagram or your business process is young enough to support hard documenting, you are fine with an open source tool. Incentivized Miguel Angel Merino Vega Analista de Sistemas Read full review
Pros	Amazon AWS SaaS Paas Iaas On promises Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	IBM MS Office exporting UML modeling Transformation to code A reverse transformation from code Integrates with other IBM products Incentivized Miguel Angel Merino Vega Analista de Sistemas Read full review
Cons	Amazon AWS Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved. Slow to create, delete or update. Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	IBM Always has a price. And IBM is not cheap Sequence diagrams can get messy (still has a good UI) Only support few databases as backend repositories like SQL Server and Oracle Incentivized Miguel Angel Merino Vega Analista de Sistemas Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Amazon AWS We didn't look into anything else as Cloudformation was "built-in" for AWS, it just kind of made sense to go with that. Terraform was something that we briefly looked into Terraform but decides to stick with Cloudformation because our task was relatively "simple". Apparently if it's a bit more complex, Terraform might be the way to go. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	IBM If you have a budget or the need for a complex modeler or need diagram transformation to code or vice-versa, IBM Rational System Architect is the way to go. If you need few diagrams or don't need the complexity or don't have a budget, Bizagi or Star UML get the things done. Incentivized Miguel Angel Merino Vega Analista de Sistemas Read full review
Return on Investment	Amazon AWS It has a positive ROI Less time inverted in bugs More stable source code Incentivized Manuela Jacqueline Mercado Rodríguez Senior Full Stack Developer Read full review	IBM Clients like good modeling. A good diagram reduce costs in incidents and doubts of bad interpretations Reduce costs of recognition of old software. Incentivized Miguel Angel Merino Vega Analista de Sistemas Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots