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Arena: Highly useful, if somewhat limited
Updated March 20, 2020

Arena: Highly useful, if somewhat limited

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

We use Arena for revision control of mechanical parts and assemblies, PCBA hardware versions, various software versions, and manufacturing equipment.
  • Search Feature
  • Flexible Data entry and PNs
  • Ability to link, list BOMs, and find related items relatively easily
  • Should auto-select revisions when making a change
  • Should make selecting approvers more streamlined by default
  • Integration with other systems, such as Mechanical CAD version control software (ie. SOLIDWORKS PDM in our case)
  • Keeps company organized with hardware changes
  • Offers a reference in terms of changes, part history, and current state for a variety of things
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
I was not a part of the purchase, but I selected the options that I think made the biggest impact.
Relatively easy to deploy and make changes as time goes on. Requires heavy ongoing oversight by several owners, though.
These two products are extremely similar. Agile has better integration with certain systems, like JDE Enterprise One and is more rigid in terms of entering information.
Atlassian JIRA Align (formerly AgileCraft), Bitbucket, Wrike, Lucidchart, SOLIDWORKS
Arena is very competent software for revision control of hardware products. I would recommend it for small companies looking to begin cataloging. Unfortunately, it's not highly standardized in terms of submitting changes and reviewing, as these require some attention to detail to make sure everything is filled out properly, and it gives a few automated errors if things are filled out incorrectly.