ER/Studio vs. Hex.tech

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

Hex.tech is an excellent tool for a product intelligence or product analytics team that wants to enable widespread use of available data for decision-making. It requires some SQL experience in many cases but makes it possible to go far without complex querying skills.

Incentivized

• 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

• Powerful interactive notebook environment
• Balances the need of code and non-code users
• Provides free and easy sharing to viewers of analyses across the company
• Responds promptly to support requests and needs
• High quality native charting capabilities

Incentivized

• 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

• Limited support for R notebooks
• Limited sharing outside of the app (e.g., no slack integration)
• Some Python knowledge needed for highest levels of aggregations

Incentivized

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

Hex.tech is the easiest to use, most enjoyable experience, most powerful environment, and most cost scalable of all the above.

Incentivized

• 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

• Increased visibility into analyses with free membership tier across company
• Increased capacity for self-service analytics among R&D stakeholders (e.g., product managers)
• Improved productivity of data science team with ease of use

Incentivized