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Alfabet Enterprise Architecture Management vs erwin Data Modeler comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alfabet Enterprise Architec...
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
17th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.3
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
erwin Data Modeler
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
54
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (7th), Data Governance (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of Alfabet Enterprise Architecture Management is 2.2%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 8.4%, down from 8.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Architecture Management Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler8.4%
Alfabet Enterprise Architecture Management2.2%
Other89.4%
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

AlanJackson - PeerSpot reviewer
Partner: Enterprise Strategy & Advisory at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Great taxonomy support but raw business processing should be upgraded
Alfabet is not just a technology tool, it's also a business tool. And if a decision's made without the business involved, then Alfabet will not be in a position to deliver anything more than support for enterprise architect drawings and solutions drawings. It has to be the business. If you do that, it works well. If you don't and I've had the experience where they haven't evolved a business, then it just becomes a tech tool that the business doesn't care about. The stigma of having an environment that was so delayed in the maintenance caused lots of finger-pointing within the organization of who was right and who was wrong. It took a considerable period of time to move people past that point to actually look at it as a business tool supported by the technology team. I rate the solution seven out of 10.
Sushree Panigrahi - PeerSpot reviewer
Snowflake Data Engineer| Senior PLSQL Developer |Data Modeler|Assitant Vice Pre at Jp Morgan Chase & Co.
Data modeling has transformed regulatory reporting and collaboration across cloud environments
In erwin Data Modeler, areas that have room for improvement include performance improvements. I see that large models sometimes cause it to be slow when opening. Impact analysis can lag as well. Version control is another aspect. If we have developed a current version, it is not integrated with Git where we can easily compare different versions. UI modernization is also something we cannot utilize as it is primarily for development. Additionally, cloud-specific optimizations are needed when it comes to Snowflake or Databricks. When it comes to AI aspects, auto-suggestions for normalization or identifying primary, foreign, or surrogate keys are areas that can be improved.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The taxonomy support across all the phases is the most advantageous feature."
"The most valuable features are the completeness, and the repos included on the platform."
"For us, adopting this solution was the right decision."
"The initial setup was straightforward. It takes two to three days to set up the environment. One person was able to handle the implementation."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its customizability, and flexibility in the configuration."
"It's important to create standard templates — Erwin is good at that — and you can customize them. You can create a standard template so that your models have the same look and feel. And then, anyone using the tool is using the same font and the same general layout. erwin's very good at helping enforce that."
"It provides flexibility with the code. You can change the code as you want. Basically, you can change SQL based on what's best for your project."
"One of the ways Data Modeler has benefited our company is that it gives us the ability to engage with the business alongside IT, because it's friendly."
"When you're getting down to the database level, where you're building a design and you're creating DDL out of it, or you're going in the other direction where you're reaching into system catalogs and bringing things back, that starts to really require specialization. Visio isn't going to reverse-engineer that for you. Those features in erwin are valuable."
"The tool is also very intuitive and easy to use."
"In my previous company, there we had a really large return on investment from using erwin."
"Quest can create conceptual and physical data models to facilitate effective communication between business and IT. It can also integrate expertise from various engineering and database systems within your organization to enhance data management and administration."
"We use the Forward and Reverse Engineering tools to help us speed things up and create things that would have to be done otherwise by hand. E.g., getting a database into a data model format or vice versa."
 

Cons

"The product is not great at implementing security frameworks across an end-to-end supply chain."
"IT governance in this solution needs improvement. We would like to see the visualization of assets, as well as artificial intelligence techniques to assist us in making our decisions."
"The user experience, the layout and the different technologies behind the presentations are a bit old. These need to be updated. They should focus on web development. It's simply not supporting the current user experience guidelines."
"I felt that erwin Data Modeler is a bit of an outdated tool."
"The erwin Data Modeler is quite complex to use."
"I would rate the visualization feature in erwin Data Modeler a six out of ten because the visualization is somewhat poor and some of the features are not user-friendly."
"The solution's reporting side needs to be improved."
"Complete Compare is set up only to compare properties that are of interest to us, but some of the differences cannot be brought over from one version of the model to another. This is despite the fact that we are clicking to bring objects from one place to another. Therefore, it's hard to tell at times if Complete Compare is working as intended without having to manually go into the details and check everything. If it could be redesigned to a degree where it is easier to use when we bring things over from one site to another and be sure that it's been done correctly, that would be nice to have. We would probably use the tool more often if the Complete Compare were easier to use."
"I would like the solution to be more user-friendly to deploy."
"In terms of improvements, support could have been better in terms of installation, especially of workgroups. We struggled quite a bit to get it up and running. Collaboration could have been better from an installation perspective, but it is trivial as compared to what we use it for. Other than that, I don't have much feedback. It works pretty well, and the fact that we've been using it for more than a decade shows that it is quite solid."
"I would like to see the reporting capabilities be more dynamic and more inclusive of information. The API is very sparsely understood by people across the user community."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"Price-wise, erwin Data Modeler is okay. You can purchase a single license and it is not very expensive."
"The tool is expensive."
"An issue right now would be that erwin doesn't have a freely available browser (that I am aware of) for people who are not data modelers or data engineers that a consumer could use to look at the data models and play with it. This would not be to make any changes, but just to visually look at what exists. There are other products out there which do have end user browsers available and allow them to access data models via the data modeling tool."
"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"erwin Data Modeler by Quest is an expensive solution."
"erwin has this option where you pay a one-time fee and you have the license for six years, which makes sense because I don't upgrade my database engine every other year. I have an application that depends on it. This is something weird about PowerDesigner. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."
"There are two license options and the pricing is reasonable."
"There is either a one-year or three-year license. It is not a pay-as-you-go license like a SaaS solution. It’s more of a traditional licensing. They are a little bit on the pricier side."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Transportation Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business17
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise43
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licensing process is painful and quite onerous. The setup is okay, but there is room for improvement.
What needs improvement with erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
erwin Data Modeler could improve in a few ways, starting with the ability to not have to go out to the external Maven files to import and export the metadata from a different format. It could also ...
What is your primary use case for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
My main use case for erwin Data Modeler varies, but I use it for forward engineering and reverse engineering and documenting databases.I work with something that requires forward engineering or dat...
 

Also Known As

No data available
erwin DM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Metro Bank, Credit Suisse
 Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples
Find out what your peers are saying about Alfabet Enterprise Architecture Management vs. erwin Data Modeler and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,683 professionals have used our research since 2012.