BiZZdesign HoriZZon (Enterprise Studio) vs. ER/Studio Data Architect

I would not recommend using BizzDesign. For Enterprise Architecture, like business strategy, business process modelling, IT architectures there are better and in most cases less expensive tools.

Data Architect is well suited at organizations of all sizes. It is never too early or unnecessary to enforce proper modelling and design standards on data solutions, and this tool will help that greatly by providing an industry leading data modelling tool, ability to import ETL mappings for data lineage, enforcing and managing naming conventions through the naming convention tool, and publishing of data dictionaries through the report publisher. I was successfully able to build models, provide traceability, and document source to target with lineage throughout for both the business (by providing business definitions in the descriptions), and technical teams (by documenting ETL instructions in text fields) along with field level mapping (by creating "Attachments" representing data sources, tables, and fields) providing easy search capabilities using business friendly terms

Incentivized

• Archimate support is as defined in the Archimate standard.

• ER/Studio has the ability to provide consistent field names and data types through domains, which are templates. This provides a way to have consistent naming of common fields, like CreatedBy and the data types for the fields. They also have the ability to change all the fields that use that domain to a different data type.
• ER/Studio provides the ability to create custom macros. These macros can be used to apply everything from standard fields based on domains to naming all constraints and indexes. I've also used a macro that comes with ER/Studio to spell check field and table names.
• My favorite feature is the ability to compare your data model to databases for deployments of changes, and to other data models.

Incentivized

• Usability of the tool is quite bad.
• It is tedious to even create simple reports. Created reports are published as image, so basically not usable for end users.
• Support of other model languages than Archimate is less supported. In ERD you do not even have a layout functionality.
• Any state of the art integrations like cloud stencils are missing.
• Import/export with Excel is tedious and SQL import not fully implemented.

• ER\Studio licensing can be cumbersome and upgrading from one version to another usually takes several phone calls and emails to the licensing group to get the update installed and running.
• The repository can be slow when the model count gets larger. By large I mean 20 to 30 models.
• A nice feature that I would like to see is table comments be displayed on the model along with the attributes. Currently you have to choose between the two.

Incentivized

Support for simple questions is okay. For some more elaborate things, also tool errors, you may not get even an answer for months/more than a year.

I can call or email support and both get quick turn around. The only issue is they are on the west coast (US) and have a west coast work schedule and I'm on the East coast.

Incentivized

ER/Studio is the most mature, reach in features and quality and therefore useful. Unfortunately, it lacks compatibility with AWS Redshift.

Incentivized

• We were not able to get much benefit from the tool. Some users and partner teams meanwhile moved on to other software.

• ER/Studio has had a positive impact on my project as we can develop the data model and have a clear understanding of business needs before we continue with the development phase.

Incentivized