Sparx Prolaborate is renowned for providing extensibility, real-time diagram access, and advanced modeling capabilities. With an intuitive interface, it facilitates effective modeling and linking of business processes to organizational goals.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Sparx Prolaborate | 1.7% |
| Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect | 8.9% |
| LeanIX | 7.6% |
| Other | 81.8% |
Known for its comprehensive documentation, Sparx Prolaborate allows organizations to align business processes with customer journeys and product features. It supports effective project descriptions through visual models, enhancing the prioritization of user stories. Despite its capabilities, improvements in cloud performance, quicker diagram updates, and visualization features are anticipated. Users seek enhanced editing features and a reduction in the complexity associated with its interface.
What are the most important features?Companies adopt Sparx Prolaborate for knowledge management and model-based engineering, often in enterprise and IT architecture applications. It is used to expose documents on collaborative servers, model solution and enterprise architectures, and support agile delivery by interfacing with tools like Microsoft ADL. In architecture and IT, it serves as a critical tool for organizational design and agile project execution.
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Technical manager at Koninklijke Bam Groep N.v. | 3.5 | We primarily use Sparx Prolaborate for model-based engineering, allowing us to effectively describe projects. Despite its steep learning curve and lack of user-friendliness, it provides a high return on investment, outperforming other available modeling tools. |
| Group IT Manager at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees | 3.5 | Our company utilizes Sparx Prolaborate for knowledge management, but real-time diagram updates can be slow, and occasionally require a manual refresh. We're exploring other tools offering more design sources and automation, as ROI hasn't been realized yet. |
| Senior Project Manager at Vaudoise Assurances Holding SA | 4.5 | I find Sparx Prolaborate user-friendly and stable for diagram collaboration, though it currently lacks direct editing functionality, which I anticipate in a future release. While setup requires organization, I recommend it for its good price and features, rating it 9/10. |
| Group Product Manager – Billing and Payments at MultiChoice Group | 3.0 | I value Sparx for its powerful ability to model complex business processes, linking them to objectives, features, and customer journeys. However, its poor visualization capabilities make it clunky and less effective for clear, high-level overviews. |
| President/CEO at dhara consulting group, inc | 3.5 | I found the solution highly extensible, scalable, and stable, with good support and a straightforward setup. However, it needs more cloud capabilities. I'd rate it seven out of ten. |
We use the product primarily for model-based engineering.
We create models of our projects. It allows us to give a better description of our project than using the written word.
The product is not very user-friendly. It takes time to learn the concept. The user-friendliness and the learning curve must be improved. It takes quite a lot of time for experienced engineers to use.
I have been using the solution for more than eight years. I am using the latest version of the solution.
We have no issues with the tool’s stability.
The tool is very scalable. The number of users depends on the project. Around 60 to 70 people use the solution. We have plans to increase the usage. It will be used more and more.
We used other solutions, too. We also use BIM as a modeling language.
The setup is relatively easy. It doesn’t take much time. Once it is rolled out, it's relatively fast.
We deployed the tool in-house. We have enough knowledge to get the packages installed. We do not require much staff to maintain the solution. Our consultant helps us with the model but not the packages.
Model-based engineering offers something written words can't do. There are no other tools for it. I would rate the return on investment a nine out of ten.
We use a floating license. We pay for the license yearly. The product is expensive. The price can always be improved, but I think it is okay.
People must start using the product as soon as possible. It certainly will be the way we engineer in the future. It's already the way we are engineering. Organizations must invest time and effort to set it up and get it running. I rate the user-friendliness a five out of ten. However, I rate the product’s functionality a nine out of ten. Overall, I rate the product a seven out of ten.
Our company uses the solution for knowledge management. We have a diagram and confluence site where we keep all knowledge for our company. The solution assists in showing these documents to the collaborative server.
Ten enterprise and IT architects at our company use the solution.
It is valuable to have diagrams available in real time.
Diagram edits take a few minutes to update or require a manual refresh. If we make a change in an enterprise architect diagram, then we want to assume everything is up to date on the documentation side. That isn't always the case after many minutes, so a manual step is required to refresh the link.
The solution could offer different sources for design. We currently use Lucidchart but would like additional options.
Some vendors provide support on the back end for things like verification of the reference architecture so you don't have to design it yourself.
I have been using the solution for four years.
The solution is stable so stability is rated a seven out of ten.
The solution is not highly scalable. Too many diagrams in one document can make it very heavy or even unable to open.
I rate scalability a six out of ten.
We have contacted support for certain technical situations beyond our side. Support knows everything about the solution and is able to guide us. Our internal team is very professional so is able to implement support's suggestions and guarantee quality.
I did not use another solution.
The setup is quite complex and takes about five hours. With configuration, the setup takes one full day.
A third party handled our implementation.
My company is small so I don't think it has yet realized ROI. My previous organization had over 1,000 licenses so likely had ROI cancellations.
The solution costs $2,500 for ten floating licenses and each license can be shared by 500 people. It is not very expensive.
The market right now includes more powerful tools that provide much more automation opportunities than the solution.
I recommend the solution and rate it a seven out of ten, only because there are more powerful tools in the market.
It really depends on use cases. Enterprises or very fast paced organizations might need more automations. Public services don't change much or have dynamic needs.
I use Sparx Prolaborate for exposing diagrams and collaborating around diagrams.
Sparx Prolaborate is user-friendly, easy to use, and has good documentation.
They are introducing a feature soon that I was expecting in the version that I have now for editing diagrams. However, you cannot, you can only translate documents, but I think this is a part of the new release that is coming at the end of the year.
In the next release, there should be more editable objects. We find Sparx Prolaborate very user-friendly, and having more features that are in the Enterprise Architect would be great, such as managing different versions of diagrams.
I used Sparx Prolaborate within the past 12 months.
Sparx Prolaborate is stable.
The scalability of Sparx Prolaborate is good.
I am satisfied with the technical support.
On paper, the installation seems easy. However, it took us some time to complete it. The process could be improved.
The implementation was done by our IT department.
The price of Sparx Prolaborate is good.
We are not running the newest version of the solution.
My advice to others wanting to implement this solution would be for them to be properly organized. The teams need to be familiar with the features and know how to structure the repositories and start things right at the beginning. It takes a long time to fix things if you didn't configure the governance properly at the beginning.
I would recommend this solution to others.
I rate Sparx Prolaborate a nine out of ten.
We are currently using Sparx for modeling the architecture. We use it for solution architecture and enterprise architecture. We also model all business requirements right down to the user story level by using Sparx. We then export the user stories to Microsoft ADL, which is our delivery tool. So, we use Sparx as the modeling tool for organizational designs, and we use Microsoft Azure as the delivery tool for agile delivery.
What is really powerful in Sparx is the way in which you can model business processes. You can link business processes to organizational objectives. You can also take those business processes and link them to specific product features that you want to deliver.
We even modeled our entire customer journey in Sparx. It allows you to model elements of the customer journey and map the journey to supporting business processes and right down to features and user stories that need to be delivered against those features. That's really powerful in Sparx. You can model your business outcomes, customer outcomes, and link all the user stories to those specific outcomes, which really helps in prioritizing the delivery pipelines.
A lot of product teams use a lot of visualizations for mapping out the product roadmap, brainstorming, or understanding the vision of the product, but Sparx is not a great visualization tool. Sparx has to improve the way for visualizing processes, journeys, software designs, etc. It would really benefit the product management teams or even enterprise architects.
It is a little bit clunky when it comes to visualization and the ability to see everything that you're modeling for your organization at a glance. We really need the ability to visualize the organizational structure at a high level and drill down to specific detail. It doesn't do that well.
We can model our entire customer journey in Sparx, but it is not visually compelling. It doesn't give you a nice visual high-level map of the customer journey like MURAL.
I have been using this solution for about two years.
We did have some issues. I don't know what was the root cause of those issues, but my business analysis team had frequent outages at one point in time, and there was a lot of slowness in accessing some of the diagrams. These issues were eventually resolved, but they were quite frequent over a couple of months.
It is highly scalable. We had a team of about 18 people at one time who needed access to the tool. They included process engineers, business analysts, and architects. Apart from those performance issues that we experienced, I found it quite scalable.
I am not too familiar with which licensing model we undertook. That was the domain of the architects, but when we needed to increase our licensing for the team and go up to 200 users, it wasn't prohibitive at all.
Their technical support is quite good. When we needed to escalate due to the performance issues, their support was quite good.
We also use Azure DevOps. For business process modeling where you are linking different objects in the modeling domains, Sparx is the most appropriate tool. You cannot model business processes in Azure DevOps.
Azure DevOps is more appropriate as a delivery tool for building out the feature roadmap and defining user stories, tasks, features, etc. It is well suited for taking the data and building it into a delivery pipeline. These two tools don't speak well together. A solution was developed to integrate these two, but it doesn't work very well.
It was a little bit complicated. There were areas that were a little bit complex, but that probably was because it was new to us. We weren't 100% familiar with the tool, and there was a little bit of learning that we needed to undertake.
Modeling tools have evolved in the marketplace, and today modern product development teams require a lot of online collaborations, and a part of that is the ability to easily visualize business processes. Sparx doesn't have great visualization. Tools such as MURAL, Figma, Lucidchart, and Lucidspark are much better than Sparx in terms of visualization. I know it wasn't designed for that, but as a modeling tool, it is important to be able to visualize a model in an easy way.
I would rate this solution a six out of 10.
Its extensibility is most valuable.
There should be more cloud capabilities.
We worked with this solution for two or three years.
There are no stability issues.
It is scalable.
Their support is good.
It was straightforward.
I would rate it a seven out of ten.
