No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Bonita BPM vs erwin Data Modeler comparison

Why PeerSpot?
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 7, 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

Bonita BPM
Ranking in Business Process Design
16th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
27
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Management (BPM) (26th), Process Automation (29th)
erwin Data Modeler
Ranking in Business Process Design
4th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
62
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (1st), Data Governance (10th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Business Process Design category, the mindshare of Bonita BPM is 3.1%, down from 4.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 3.2%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Business Process Design Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler3.2%
Bonita3.1%
Other93.7%
Business Process Design
 

Featured Reviews

Mohamed Guermazi - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Director / Project Manager at I-way
The user interface is easy to use, and the product performs well, but the dashboard and the monitoring features are limited
We use the product to design workflows. We model and install them on the server. We use the Community edition The modeling features are easy. The performance of the tool is good. The user interface is easy to use. I have used the product for complex processes and sub-processes successfully. The…
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 solution is easy to use."
"Bonita is user-friendly, and the features are useful."
"The Connector implementation is a great addition to an out-of-box solution providing robust features for the developer to build hassle-free integrations."
"Bonitasoft helped us automate complicated and labor intensive processes"
"It is more than helpful, it is worth the effort of learning to better our company."
"The user interface is easy to use."
"I really enjoy using the workflow management tool."
"When there is heavy customization in the process Bonita is the best compare to other products in the market."
"It reduces monthly savings by hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"The modeling product itself is far and above anything else that I've seen on the market."
"Sometimes you have an initial idea for a data model and when you try to design it in Erwin you realize that you were wrong in how you approached it."
"The solution's ability to compare and synchronize data sources with data models is fantastic. We use it for that on a regular basis to make sure that changes haven't been made to the database outside of the modeling process. I can take existing databases and reverse engineer them and understand their structure within 15 minutes. If I didn't have Data Modeler it would take hours. It increases our productivity and helps in understanding our legacy application."
"My favorite feature of erwin Data Modeler is that we can export and import tables directly from the databases, and it is easy to map from table to table and column to column."
"It is an invaluable tool for us; it has been part of our data governance process in regards to database design for at least 15 years."
"It's a safeguard for me because I'm always concerned that somebody is free handing it and will forget a key coming from the parent. The migrating keys are a great feature. Identifying relationships, non-identifying relationships, and being visually right there to understand the differences are great features. erwin is key to being able to visually understand whatever the customer is requesting. They'll give you words on a paper, but once they can actually view it as a picture, it really comes to life. The data comes to life to where they understand exactly what they're asking for."
"They have a lot of features and the most up-to-date technology integration, which I haven't seen in other products."
 

Cons

"We are struggling a bit with integrations."
"At times Bonita BPM Studio crashes, intermittently."
"The initial setup is not easy compared to other products."
"BPMN 2.0 notations are not all supported, would love to see them all coming in (e.g. complex gateway)."
"The support is mandatory to access all features (Subscription), maybe they can have a different business model."
"So Bonita is easy to use but it seems to be missing some powerful features that competing products have."
"I should be able to park the tasks that are within a process in a kind of container, and dynamically, a super admin should be able to connect these processes. This kind of feature might be helpful."
"Bonita can improve by offering more flexibility. The developer does not receive the code of the application to modify it. Most of the other solutions I have used allow the developers to change or improve the code that is generated."
"The modeling product itself is far and above anything else that I've seen on the market. There are certain inconsistencies when it comes to keeping up with other platforms' databases in the reverse-engineering process. It should also support more database platforms."
"I find the UI very clunky and very difficult to use. If I add columns to a table the whole workflow could be so much easier. I get frustrated using it. I've tried other tools. I've tried to get off of erwin a few times. I always come back to it because every tool has its own set of problems, and it seems like if I have to pick my poison, I stay with erwin. But so many things that are clunky with it."
"The solution's model mark could be better because it crashes sometimes."
"We can only get licenses through partners."
"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."
"Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM. Therefore, we manually make changes to those scripts and edit them, then reverse-engineer within the tool. So, it does take some time to edit these DDL scripts generated by the source operational systems. What I would suggest: It would be helpful if there were a place within the erwin tool to import the file and automatically eliminate all the unnecessary lines of code, and just have the clean code built-in to generate the table/data model."
"I think erwin Data Modeler can be improved by adding the option to separate physical and logical models when extracting, as currently, I can only extract them together, and implementing this solution would be easy for erwin Data Modeler."
"This is a very complex product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I am using the free version of Bonita."
"I believe this is a very good financial choice."
"Price to service ratio with Bonita BPM is good."
"You pay an annual fee and can have an unlimited number of processes and users."
"The price of the solution is reasonable."
"Licensing cost for the Enterprise edition comes out to be around 40,000 a year. There is also a Community edition, which is free. Some customers can go for the Community edition, but some of them require the Enterprise edition. Big companies go for the Enterprise edition, which comes with a lot of additional features such as a mobile app."
"The product is not cheaper, not costlier; it is reasonable. Bonita’s license is very flexible, with options to meet the needs of different customers and clients. Previously, it was less flexible, but now, many different licensing options are available."
"The Enterprise edition is very expensive."
"The primary reasons that erwin was selected were that it was much more affordable for us [than Embarcadero] and it was easily maintainable."
"This company had bought the license for three years, and it's not an individual license. While you can buy a license for each individual, that would be very expensive. There is something called concurrent licenses where you can purchase licenses in bulk and 15 to 20 people can access the license and model. Concurrent licenses are scalable to the number of users and are proportional to the cost."
"erwin is expensive compared to other solutions. We are paying almost $6,000 per seat a month."
"We've continued to use the product for many years and compared it with others on the market. The pricing is reasonable considering what the solution offers and what we pay. There are cheaper tools, but they may not be as robust and easy to use, so it's worth the money."
"The price of erwin Data Modeler is very expensive, in particular for this part of the world."
"Likewise, the solution is a little pricey."
"There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"There are two license options and the pricing is reasonable."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Business Process Design solutions are best for your needs.
916,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise11
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business19
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise57
 

Questions from the Community

How does Bonita compare with Camunda Platform?
One of the things we like best about Bonita is that you can create without coding - it is a low-code platform. With Bonita, you can build the entire mechanism using the GUI, it’s that simple. You c...
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?
Regarding improvements, the first thing I would mention is that every release has some issues, some of which are related to current functionalities, which means they often seem not very well tested...
What is your primary use case for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?
My main use case for erwin Data Modeler is to implement a single data architecture design department so everyone is using erwin Data Modeler for their data models to be a transactional application ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Bonita BPM
erwin DM
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Ofelia, the company formerly named Bonitasoft, was founded in 2009 and serves more than 130 organisations across 40 countries. It has two products, Ofelia Agentic and Bonita BPM. Bonita BPM is available in an open source community edition and in a commercial subscription edition.
 Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples
Find out what your peers are saying about Bonita BPM vs. erwin Data Modeler and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
916,771 professionals have used our research since 2012.