Name: IDERA ER/Studio
Brand: IDERA
Rating: 4.2 (39 reviews)

it_user285069

Data Management Specialist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

Aug 4, 2015

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Data Dictionary Bindings is not very intuitive, but there are no stability issues.

What is most valuable?

Repository > Diagrams
Security > Security Center
Tools > Generate Reports
Entity > Notes
Attribute > Notes

What needs improvement?

Diagram Versioning is not very intuitive
Data Dictionary Bindings is not very intuitive

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for three years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Not with the current release.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

It's good.

Technical Support:

It's good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have personally used many modelling tools. My current company standardized on this one.

What about the implementation team?

We used a vendor team who were good.

What was our ROI?

None the enterprise does not utilize all its capabilities thus, much of the work done is ported to other tools.

What other advice do I have?

If using this tool to support a large team effort, get training for versioning

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user277956

Senior SQL Server Developer at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

Jul 26, 2015

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We're able to control check-in's of our onshore and offshore developers while maintaining schema views, but the current version does not properly generate SQL Server-computed columns.

What is most valuable?

Reverse engineering physical database
Compare and Merge utility

How has it helped my organization?

We have offshore developers/DBA who actively request/implement DDL changes vs. a development database. The changes are reversed-engineered into both logical and physical schemas with generated DDL for source control check-in/check-out and other environment synchronization. With both onshore and offshore development teams working 18x5 days, it is an easy way to control check-in's while also maintaining schema views.

What needs improvement?

This version does not properly generate SQL Server computed columns; future versions do this.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for eight months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

It was pretty good once the licensing phase was completed.

Technical Support:

It's good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I am relatively new to this company, but in previous companies I used CA ErWin and SAP PowerDesigner. ErWin is very easy to use, as is PowerDesigner. The latter also provides a free developer viewer tool. At this point, all three products seem pretty equal: I would look at the conceptual model (business process rule) capture/conversion/maintenance with dynamic links to logical/physical ER with data dictionary/MDM capabilities to possibly separate them.

What was our ROI?

Since we are just reverse-engineering existing databases, and not using it for primary design/deployment/communication, relatively low.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Review the total number of architects/DBAs who need full access and developers who need to view the model/data dictionary to determine number/types, and whether a stand-alone vs. repository version is needed.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

Buyer's Guide

IDERA ER/Studio

January 2026

Free Report: IDERA ER/Studio Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IDERA ER/Studio. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

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881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

it_user275646

Senior Consultant with 51-200 employees

Jul 26, 2015

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You can compare your models against the database, but the repository can be slow with big data sets.

What is most valuable?

Ease of use
It looks good enough
Ability to create HTML reports
Ability to compare the model against the database

What needs improvement?

Repository causes continuous problems, as it's slow and sometimes crashes.
Integration with Active Directory does not function perfectly.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used it for five years.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

If you use repository, it can get slow with big data models.

How are customer service and technical support?

I have received answers to issues within a week from a report.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Nope, and I hear that this is the best data modelling tool for data warehouse scenarios.

How was the initial setup?

It's straightforward without the repository.

What about the implementation team?

I did everything, from the installation to using it.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. We are partners with Embarcadero.

it_user277026

Senior Consultant with 501-1,000 employees

Jul 22, 2015

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We can maintain a data dictionary, enforce naming standards, and have a built-in macro facility, but printing ERDs on a plotter needs improvement.

What is most valuable?

Reverse and Forward Engineering are very important. The former provides a facility to generate the overall design from an existing database. The latter allows the user to 'round-trip' changes from the model to a database so as you make changes these result in actual physical changes to the database structure.

How has it helped my organization?

It allows for maintaining a data dictionary, to enforce naming standards, and has a built-in macro facility to make it easier to do complicated, repetitive tasks quickly and easily.

What needs improvement?

The print facility is a little lacking. It can be trying at times to get that perfect ERD printed on a plotter.

For how long have I used the solution?

I started using ER/Studio in 2003 - so about 12 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No issues encountered.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Very good. They're pretty easy to work with.

Technical Support:

Excellent. Over the years as I've had problems with their products I always get the same employee - a great guy who knows the product.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've used them all (I think). CA's ERWin is probably the nearest competitor. ERWin works OK, but at that time was $4,500 a seat vs. $1,800.00. It was no contest.

How was the initial setup?

It's very easy to get started. Anyone who can install a software product to a laptop or PC can install ER/Studio.

What about the implementation team?

It was done in-house.

What was our ROI?

We haven't calculated the ROI.

What other advice do I have?

There are only a few companies providing enterprise grade products in this area and Embarcadero is one of three. I think it's the best due to pricing and good overall support. It has the main features needed for this kind of work and is often seen as a leader.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user92238

Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 20, 2014

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Great product. Tedious implementation and maintenance. Ultimately worth it considering other options.

What is most valuable?

Strong graphic and formatting capabilities which can be used to stylize/classify tables of different uses/purposes. Reverse engineering function is useful in examining undocumented legacy databases. Object creation scripting tool has plenty of useful option with the ability to save configuration sets for consistent database builds. Intuitive user interface provides for quick learning curve.

How has it helped my organization?

Our company designs and builds databases in ER/Studio before other database builds or other development. This provides for identifying potential issues long before any code has been written. Data models are often the basis for functionality discussions between the business, analysts, and developers.

What needs improvement?

The deployment and licensing facets of this product are beyond maddening, requiring even small organizations such as ours to install and maintain two server apps to handle real-time license enforcement and centralized (Tool Cloud) product launching. The documentation is poor and new installations are tedious, to say nothing of the need for network operations resources to maintain the server apps.

For how long have I used the solution?

Nine years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

Countless licensing and app launching issues. Support was friendly enough, but that we needed them as often as we did was the real problem. We are a small company with four data modellers. No need for complicated licensing and deployment schemes.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The app itself is quite stable. On rare occasions, particularly where models grew large and complex over time, a model would go haywire and become corrupt or otherwise exhibit abnormal behavior. Luckily we could revert to the previous version from our source control system.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I've used Power Designer and ER Win in the past. PD was a decent app, if quirky. I'm not a fan of ER Win. It strikes me as a forgotten app that has been kicked around to too many owners over the years without proper investment in refactoring and improvement.

How was the initial setup?

Complex in that it requires installation of two server-based apps on the network for licensing and centralized launch/deployment. The server requires download and application of license files generated by Embarcadero and manual definition and maintenance of licensed users. On the deployment side, the app distribution server downloads updated versions of apps and serves them to the Java-based launcher app on client machines. This app (end user Java app) was tedious and often an extremely slow performer. We opted for full local install where possible to avoid interaction with the launcher app. Our company has no need for cloud-based application distribution and launching.

What about the implementation team?

Internal network operations team.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Over nine years, we have spent approximately $3K-$4K per year on each user (we have five data modelers currently).

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

ER Win and two others, although their names escape me as it was nine years ago.

What other advice do I have?

Great product. Tedious implementation and maintenance. Ultimately worth it considering other options.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user91548Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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May 4, 2015

I would like to whole-heartedly agree with issues concerning installation and setup. It has been very difficult to get ER/Studio to work properly with a server license for use in VDI. I work for a very large organization where the many groups we need to deal with are less than quick to get things done. Due to the restrictive nature of VDI, we had to go through a tedious process of changing firewall rules to allow ER/Studio to see the database servers used for reverse-engineering. We finally had to convince the powers that be (against their policy) to allow us to use VPN so that the application could run locally and access the network only as needed. Licensing this product can be a real pain, especially if you have to run a server license with the separate Embarcadero License Server installed. It definitely needs to be easier and simpler. It is a powerful and very functional product, but getting it to work correctly in VDI has been a real chore.

it_user92238

Director at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Mar 5, 2014

Great product however their delivery & licensing mechanisms are abysmal

I have been using it for the last eight years, after previously having used PowerDesigner and ERWin. It is a great product, no doubt.

Embarcadero's delivery & licensing mechanisms, however, are abysmal. Licensing servers, app distribution servers, sluggish Java apps to launch the actual tools and poor documentation of how to configure and use these requiring repeated CS calls.

This is not to mention that there are no slimline versions (read: cheaper) that could be used by smaller companies to do physical/logical modeling for a single platform. I bet this discourages many companies from adopting a design-first approach in favor of only creating data models as after-the-fact documentation on occasion with lesser tools.

Perhaps Embarcadero is not interested in anything smaller than the full enterprise market?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user91548

Infrastructure Expert at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 23, 2014

Huge advantage is that it gives you full access to its automation model.

What has proven to be a HUGE advantage of ER/Studio that was not really evaluated at the time we chose it is that it gives you full access to its automation model. This allows it to be controlled through code (VBA) in programs like MS Access. One reason this is helpful is that we work with huge models of around 1500 entities, 1500 tables, and 25,000 attributes and columns. We often find ourselves needing to make mass updates, and this is easily done with code in a tiny fraction of the time needed to do it manually. Another use is we can extract metadata in code and load it directly to an Oracle database (using MS Access) to publish for developers on the other side of the planet.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.