Likelihood to Recommend 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.
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 MS Office exporting UML modeling Transformation to code A reverse transformation from code Integrates with other IBM products 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 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 Read full review Needs someone that is very conversant with business modelling terminology Read full review Support Rating The support team of Sparx EA, based in Australia, is always willing to help and give direction.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
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 Clients like good modeling. A good diagram reduce costs in incidents and doubts of bad interpretations Reduce costs of recognition of old software. 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