No Magic MagicDraw vs erwin Data Modeler comparison

Why PeerSpot?

Quest Software and Dassault Systèmes are both solutions in the Business Process Design category. Quest Software is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.1, while Dassault Systèmes is ranked #14 with an average rating of 8.5. Quest Software holds a 3.2% mindshare in BPD, compared to Dassault Systèmes’s 2.4% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of Dassault Systèmes users who would recommend it.

erwin Data Modeler

Read 61 erwin Data Modeler reviews

10,421 Views
2,814 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

No Magic MagicDraw

Read 19 No Magic MagicDraw reviews

2,905 Views
2,702 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

erwin Data Modeler

No Magic MagicDraw

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

No Magic MagicDraw and erwin Data Modeler are products competing in the modeling software category. No Magic MagicDraw excels in pricing and support, while erwin Data Modeler provides superior features, justifying its higher cost.

Features: No Magic MagicDraw supports UML, SysML, and BPMN, enabling diverse systems modeling. It offers a streamlined design facilitating efficient conceptual modeling and integration with tools like Teamcenter. erwin Data Modeler excels in metadata management and integration, supports advanced enterprise data architecture, and aligns data across platforms.

Room for Improvement: No Magic MagicDraw could enhance collaboration features as its flexibility may lead to inconsistencies in team settings. It lacks strong coupling needed for large teams and could improve in offering pre-deployment guidance. erwin Data Modeler, while rich in features, can refine its support in pre- and post-deployment phases. Its setup process is complex and can be streamlined for efficiency.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: No Magic MagicDraw offers a flexible deployment model suited for various project scales and maintains responsive customer service. erwin Data Modeler, known for its complex setup, provides comprehensive guidance. However, it could benefit from improved pre- and post-deployment support services.

Pricing and ROI: No Magic MagicDraw offers a cost-effective solution with competitive pricing translating to a promising ROI. erwin Data Modeler, despite a higher setup cost, offers extensive features and enterprise capabilities, representing a sound long-term investment with substantial value.

To learn more, read our detailed No Magic MagicDraw vs. erwin Data Modeler Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

No Magic MagicDraw vs. erwin Data Modeler

September 2026

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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

erwin Data Modeler

Ranking in Business Process Design

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Architecture Management (1st), Data Governance (10th)

No Magic MagicDraw

Ranking in Business Process Design

14th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Business Process Design category, the mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 3.2%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of No Magic MagicDraw is 2.4%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Process Design Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
erwin Data Modeler	3.2%
No Magic MagicDraw	2.4%
Other	94.4%

Business Process Design

Featured Reviews

Sushree Panigrahi

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.

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reviewer2080611

System Engineer at a consultancy with 51-200 employees

Ease of use and real-time collaboration empower effective teamwork and streamlined development

For CAMEO, it's not only the ease of use, it's versatility, its communicability, but Rhapsody is the worst tool I've ever used. It is very difficult, not user-friendly, and very expensive. It works only with its IBM counterparts. SPARX Enterprise Architecture is very easy to use, but it's limited. It gives you an idea of how your model is developing, so this feature helps maintain integrity or correctness of system models. It's really a good feature to have. You've got to have the simulation toolkit installed to be able to do that, and that works really well. The MagicDraw or CAMEO system is good on its own, but it should be integrated and should come out of the box with the simulation toolkit because there are some things you can't do without it, making it very difficult to have to look for another license to be able to do that. I would prefer that it come with the simulation toolkit.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Out of all of the modeling tools, erwin is a 10 out of 10."

"The solution is excellent in providing a visual representation of a database and can generate DDL for implementing changes. We use DDL for logical purposes to review with business people, ensuring they have the required fields for processing. We also use it as a data dictionary for the physical data model to understand all the purposes of the terms. This helps us map the logical and physical terms with the business definition to understand our data."

"Overall, erwin DM's support for Snowflake is very good."

"The modeling portion of the tool is the most valuable. There are some notes, naming standards, and other functions that we use as well. There's a whole boatload of functionality in this thing and we use maybe 10% of it. It seems to be pretty common that not all the functionality is fully utilized. But it's just got gobs and gobs of stuff that you can implement if you so choose to."

"The product lets us import different types of models from various databases."

"We find that its ability to generate database code from a model for a wide array of data sources cuts development time. The ability to create one model in your design phase and then have it generate DDL code for Oracle or Teradata, or whichever environment you need is really nice. It's not only nice but it also saves man-hours of time. You would have to take your design and just type in manually. It has to take days off out of the work."

"erwin Data Modeler has positively impacted my organization by helping to define models visually so that stakeholders can see them and understand whether the relationships among those entities are defined properly or not."

"We use the macros with naming standards patterns, domains, datatypes, and some common attributes. As far as other automations, a feature of the Bulk Editor is mass updates. When it sees something is nonstandard or inaccurate, it will export the better data out. Then, I can easily see which entities and attributes are not inline or standard. I can easily make changes to what was uploaded to the Bulk Editor. When taking on a new project, it can save you about a half a day on a big project across an entire team."

More erwin Data Modeler pros

"The most valuable features with No Magic MagicDraw are its ease of use; you can put this in front of a 12-year-old and they would know what to do right away."

"When you look at it, No Magic is an all-encompassing tool. You can use it for business architecture design. You can use it for deploying an ERP system across your enterprise. However, it was initially designed and developed for model-based systems engineering. That's the systems engineering required to either produce an IP system or product. It takes away the mounds of paper and puts it into a model. It enables you to generate significant savings by modeling that new product or that system before you ever start developing a prototype."

"The initial setup was not straightforward."

"We use it to build the physical and logical domains to hold requirements, specifications, use cases, and all the way down to class definitions."

"No Magic MagicDraw provides a lot of good features on functionality."

"The most valuable feature is the amount of flexibility that one has to model, which is great for an individual."

"There is a lot of documentation available on the Internet to understand its functionality."

"The MBFC capability of MagicDraw is higher than the other competitors."

More No Magic MagicDraw pros

Cons

"The solution's reporting side needs to be improved."

"This is a very complex product."

"I have seen some lagging, crashing, downtime, or instability in erwin Data Modeler."

"The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licensing process is painful and quite onerous."

"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."

"The one drawback is if you have an extremely large complex model, the compare process can take quite a bit of time, more than four hours."

"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."

"erwin generally fails to successfully reverse engineer our Oracle Databases into erwin data models. The way that they are engineered on our side, the syntax is correct from an Oracle perspective, but it seems to be very difficult for erwin to interpret. What I end up doing is using Oracle Data Modeler to reverse engineer into the Oracle data model, then forward engineer the DDL into an Oracle syntax, and importing that DDL into erwin in order to successfully bring in most of the information from our physical data models. That is a bit of a challenge."

More erwin Data Modeler cons

"The documentation for MagicDraw and the video tutorials compared to other competitors is an area for improvement."

"The UI UX of the tool is not really user-friendly and needs to be completely reformed."

"One potential area for improvement is the recommendation feature. At times, we face challenges in locating specific features, and we have to reach out for assistance in finding the information we need."

"I would like to see the ability to deploy live business process models and capture real-time data (without the need for another product tool) so you don't have to be dependent on other products for this functionality."

"There's lots of documentation. They process multiples of guides. They've got all kinds of guides and documentation out there, but it's kind of hard to find. There are a lot of videos. You can go to YouTube and find videos on how it's been used in different ways, but it just kind of scratches the surface."

"They don't really support code engineering, and that's why we have to move to Enterprise Architect. MagicDraw is stuck at C++03 standards, whereas most C++ programs today want to use the latest definition of the C++ standards. We were at C++11, and we wanted to do code engineering with C++11 or 17, but they didn't support it. That pushed us into a different tool, which is Sparx Enterprise Architect."

"The cost of upgrading the product should be lower."

"For the next releases, I would like to have them import requirements from other sources. They could make it very easy to do that because there are a lot requirements management tools like DOORS, D-O-O-R-S, Dynamic Object Oriented Management. A lot of folks use DOORS to create a requirement. For those requirements you allocate them to a component in the architecture and a verification method for that requirement. It would be good if we could import those into MagicDraw as components so you don't have to manually do these things."

More No Magic MagicDraw cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of erwin Data Modeler is very expensive, in particular for this part of the world."

"erwin Data Modeler by Quest is an expensive solution."

"There are two license options and the pricing is reasonable."

"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."

"It is not a very expensive solution. Only the licensing and maintenance fee needs to be paid."

"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."

"Price-wise, erwin Data Modeler is okay. You can purchase a single license and it is not 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."

More erwin Data Modeler pricing and cost advice

"I rate the pricing a ten out of ten. It is an expensive product compared to software for model-based system engineering."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis, and it's expensive."

"I would say licensing would be anywhere from $3,500 to $6,500 per person or per seat (it's a per seat style license)."

"In addition to the initial cost, you have to pay annually for support in order to get the upgrades."

"The price of No Magic MagicDraw could improve. The price of the solution is too expensive for smaller-sized companies. There should be a better pricing model."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Outsourcing Company

Manufacturing Company

Marketing Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

20%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	19
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	54

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

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.

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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...

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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 ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for No Magic MagicDraw?

Maybe the price is a little bit high for a small company to acquire this tool. However, they offer trial versions and trial licenses for members of INCOSE.

See all answers

What needs improvement with No Magic MagicDraw?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for No Magic MagicDraw?

I deal with DOD lifecycle acquisition sorts of things as some of the main use cases currently, and I expect to continue using it for more than 25 years.

See all answers

Comparisons

SAP PowerDesigner vs erwin Data Modeler

Compared 45% of the time

IDERA ER/Studio vs erwin Data Modeler

Compared 5% of the time

Visio vs erwin Data Modeler

Compared 4% of the time

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs erwin Data Modeler

Compared 3% of the time

Camunda vs erwin Data Modeler

Compared 3% of the time

More erwin Data Modeler Competitors

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs No Magic MagicDraw

Compared 17% of the time

Visio vs No Magic MagicDraw

Compared 11% of the time

iGrafx Process360 Live Platform vs No Magic MagicDraw

Compared 8% of the time

Visual Paradigm vs No Magic MagicDraw

Compared 7% of the time

erwin Evolve vs No Magic MagicDraw

Compared 5% of the time

More No Magic MagicDraw Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Modeler

October 2026

Download erwin Data Modeler product report

Buyer's Guide

No Magic MagicDraw

September 2026

Download No Magic MagicDraw product report

Also Known As

erwin DM

MagicDraw

Overview

Erwin Data Modeler provides an effective approach to visualizing and managing data models. It assists in creating, reversing, and synchronizing data models with ease, supporting logical and physical transitions while enhancing understanding across teams.

Erwin Data Modeler is a comprehensive tool designed for professional database management. It offers capabilities to organize and enforce standards, automating script generation with robust reverse engineering and DDL output. Users can manage complex data environments, capitalize on integration with data intelligence, and maintain large-scale databases smoothly. Despite its strengths, improvements in multi-language support, database integration, and reporting features are needed. Users benefit from extensive support for conceptual, logical, and physical database modeling, enhancing architectural design and data governance for platforms like SQL Server, Oracle, and Teradata.

What are the key features of Erwin Data Modeler?

Visual Representation: Facilitates clear visualization of data models, aiding comprehension.
Versioning and Editing: Enhance usability with versioning and bulk editing capabilities.
Reverse Engineering: Offers powerful tools for reverse engineering and DDL generation.
Integration: Aligns with data intelligence to streamline database management.
Naming Standards: Enforces consistency with automated script creation.

What benefits should users consider in Erwin Data Modeler reviews?

Collaboration: Promotes team understanding and collaboration through visual tools.
Automation: Reduces manual effort through automated processes and integration.
Scalability: Handles large database management efficiently, crucial for enterprise settings.
Data Governance: Facilitates effective data governance with structured modeling.

Erwin Data Modeler finds application in industries focused on robust data management, implementing it for enterprise data warehouses, business domain models, and operational systems. It supports architectural design and governance, aligning with business applications demanding precise data representation and visualization.

Quest Software

No Magic MagicDraw is a powerful modeling tool recognized for its flexibility and integration capabilities, especially suited for enterprise modeling and systems engineering. Featuring a user-friendly interface, it supports diverse modeling architectures with tools for testing and simulation.

Renowned for its compliance with OMG standards, No Magic MagicDraw excels in offering comprehensive modeling options that support model-based systems engineering. Its rich feature set enables digital model creation aimed at testing and simulation, backed by a strong suite of integration tools. The tool facilitates program management integration with systems engineering, making it suitable for complex enterprise projects. However, suggestions for improvement include a redesign for a more intuitive interface and enhanced documentation. Licensing costs are higher compared to competitors, and integration requests include compatibility with SAP and modern C++ standards.

What are the most important features of No Magic MagicDraw?

Flexibility: Adapts to different modeling needs and architectures with ease.
User-friendly Interface: Simplifies access and usage for modeling tasks.
Integration Capabilities: Seamlessly integrates with tools like Doors.
Standard Compliance: Aligns with OMG standards.
Traceability: Maintains visibility across project changes.

What benefits and ROI should users expect from No Magic MagicDraw?

Comprehensive Support: Access to excellent technical support.
Enhanced Collaboration: Facilitates model-driven documentation and teamwork.
Strategic Efficiency: Streamlines processes, reducing time in business transformation projects.

No Magic MagicDraw is widely deployed for tasks including business transformation, system architecture modeling, and supporting defense programs, proving invaluable in enterprise and system modeling. It aids in strategy integration, process design, and offers extensive features like simulations and lifecycle engineering.

Dassault Systèmes

Sample Customers

Premera, America Honda Motors, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, Dental Dental Cali, Cigna, Staples

Northrop Grumman, Labcorp, Deposco, ClearView Training, IT Services Promotion Agency, Intelligent Chaos, Metalithic Systems Inc., Sodifrance

Buyer's Guide

No Magic MagicDraw vs. erwin Data Modeler

September 2026

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