draw.io vs. SAP PowerDesigner

draw.io can be more suitable for technical documentation for architectures, flow diagrams/charts, and conceptual images of an application infrastructure. However, this tool is not made for business intelligence work nor for dashboarding to monitor the technical components. From the administrative standpoint, this is not well suited for agile ceremony structures like retrospective boards or planning or even quarterly planning boards. The strength of draw.io lies strongly in being a lightweight diagramming tool.

Incentivized

SAP PowerDesigner allows our team of data modelers to work and collaborate from a single repository and single data dictionary. This helps enforce consistency as data elements are referenced in other objects. Prior to our use of PD, we might have an element named "ppt" in one table, "participant" in another table and "part" in a third table. By forcing everything to be used from the data dictionary, we avoid these situations because everyone has to go to the dictionary. And we are able to easily do peer reviews on models before they are released because we are collaborating through the use of the repository.

Incentivized

• Draw.io offers a lot of shapes and customizability of how the diagrams are laid out. We've been able to create a lot of different things with it, and have barely scratched the surface of the sorts of things that we could do.
• Draw.io is fairly intuitive in the way that you draw shapes and connect shapes together, I was able to figure it out without a tutorial.
• Draw.io is fast and performant for me compared with some of the alternatives.

Incentivized

• Impact Analysis
• The domain structure helps you to handle different data types to unify.
• Moving between from conceptual model to logical model and from logical model to physical model is so easy.
• It also excels at implementation of database vendor-specific physical options.
• The repository structure helps you to use in multi developer and architect based organizations by the check in and check out mechanism.
• It also has a fully configurable naming convention implementation.
• Coloring is simple with format copying and pasting option.

Incentivized

• When very elaborate diagrams are needed, it lacks the amount of tools and customization needed
• Since this is an online tool, it can freeze and that causes you to lose that work up to that point
• Performance can lag with very complex diagrams

Incentivized

• It took some time to figure out how to leverage the power of the repository. Some better examples in the documentation would have been helpful.

Incentivized

The UI is intuitive. It allows a new user to start diagramming almost instantly. Manipulating elements, linking them together, etc. are all easy to do. Draw.io nevertheless a broad variety of diagram templates to help get started and also of shapes to use in diagrams. Some situations can make it a bit tricky to use, such as when having multiple shapes on top of each other (e.g. shapes placed within swimlanes) but that's a minor issue.

Incentivized

The support for draw.io is pretty decent, considering it is a free website. I had a question one time when I was trying to do something, so I sent an email to their support email and got a response fairly quickly with an answer to my question. They also have some excellent support tools on their support website for helping you get more familiar with their program, and I found that very helpful.

Incentivized

We did have to reach out to support to learn how to properly utilize the repository feature and share the data model across many developers. Support was able to help us get this set up correctly. The downside was it took us several weeks before we gave up and contacted support. We should have done that earlier. I would say, however, the documentation wasn't clear on how to do this. So support was a great big help!

Incentivized

draw.io is open-source and free for many uses, which means minimal upfront cost and good value.It works in the browser, also has a desktop version (so you can use offline) which helps teams that may not always be online or want local backups. Useful when you want a diagram tool that “just works” without huge ecosystem lock-in.For organisations that value control, less vendor-dependency, this is a plus.

Incentivized

Oracle SQL Developer Data Modeler : Unfortunately this tool only supports Oracle Databases as a target database, but has many features similar to SAP Sybase PowerDesigner. erwin Data Modeler: Has some issues when switching from Conceptual Model to Physical Model, Impact Analysis, and formatting copy and pasting. Vertabelo: Only supports online models and from a governance perspective, it is impossible for me to connect my target database with an online application because of company policy and regulation requirements.

Incentivized

• draw.io has surely impacted our organization positively by saving some crucial time.
• It has not really impacted much monetarily to be honest.
• The ROI we got from draw.io is that it has made complex things clear for everyone in our organization.

Incentivized

• Standardization of models
• Impact Analysis
• Graphical User Interface
• Ease of deployment

Incentivized