Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect Reviews

Using Sparx Enterprise Architect allowed my customer to detail and make the company's IT strategy visible and accessible to all. The system provided clear roadmaps for IT development and helped to keep up-to-date documentation of systems and processes.

I like to use this system, it is a handy tool for visual modeling that provides opportunities for analysis, design, and support of models using ArchiMate, UML. 

The system provides powerful tools for obtaining reports and documentation. 

There is a good community of users of this system, providing the opportunity to learn and share knowledge.

I would like the system to more "intellectually" build a scheme, place icons, and connect lines on the schemes.

No issues with stability.

No issues with scalability.

Good.

ARIS Business Architect, ARIS Business Designer. 

Sparx EA is better suited for small and medium-sized companies, cheaper and easier in terms of training. It is better suited to modeling on ArchiMate 3.0 notation.

Easy.

Pricing and licensing are suitable even for small companies.

I recommend connecting to the Sparx EA community.

• Standards development for OMG - IEPPV, EFFRA, SOPES, IEPPS
• Product development - ASMG implementation of the IEF framework
• Client EA activities - for multiple federal and provincial agencies

Simplified our task at maintaining architecture information and traceability with requirements.

Large variety of profiles and frameworks available out-of-the-box without the need for customization, and not locked into one way of doing architecture. Huge advantage as one works the architecture between business and technical communities.

• Document
• Report generation
• More challenging than other tools to maintain documents and document versions for an architecture board review.

Solution architecture and design, however the database management area really was not usable. I could not even send in a DDL to reverse engineer it. Also, adding referential integrity to existing fields from a reverse engineered database resulted in duplication of keys. 

Not really.

Unfortunately, only one of our solution architects was using this in the end, as the others resorted to Vision because it was more user-friendly. I ended up buying an Idera licence for ER/Studio and using that instead.

I struggled with most of the features for this tool, as did the rest of our architecture team.

The database part needs to be more like ERwin or ER/Studio. 

It really did not work for logical modeling. The look is very old-fashioned. You can't make the diagrams easy on the eye, so we ended up drawing them again in Visio anyhow.

Creating diagrams and sets of reusable artifacts using UML, Arhimate and other notations.

Using diagrams and artifacts to generate documentation.

We adopted Sparx EA more than six years ago. Before that, all models were created in MS Visio and were maintained independently without any tractability. That led to insufficient incomplete impact analysis and incomplete solutions. With Sparx EA, models became a maintainable and reusable asset of the corporation. Correct impact analysis became a matter of minutes. As a result the quality of solutions drastically improved. Not mentioning that all employees in any department can now clearly understand business processes with all related applications and infrastructure at any level.

• Great adaptability to modeling needs of all organization departments: Business, Architecture, Software Development, and Systems Support.
• Kind of all-in-one solution (in a good meaning of it), through support for many standard modeling notations used in most of domains of the IT/IS. The list of supported notation grows constantly.
• Effective for Enterprise, Solution, and Software architectures.
• Ability to maintain cross-references for all models in all levels - great tractability.
• Versioning for all elements.
• Very attractive pricing and simple licensing model.
• Good set of the add-ons that grow and improve.

The elements of the modeling sets can have better customization and visual representation. It would be great to have a mobile version.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

With very large projects, the loading time can become a bit longer, although not to the extent of becoming a great concern.

I would rate the level of technical support as "not bad". But I did not need to use technical support too much.

MS Visio was used for tractability and maintenance, and many other concerns, were the reasons that we switched.

The initial setup was very easy. After that, by following the best practices from the Sparx website, it is easy to organize the whole modeling process with versioning. You have the ability to reuse existing elements/projects and create customized project templates.

In my opinion, there is a great ROI on a product like this.

Pricing and licensing is very attractive, simple, and straightforward.

We evaluated other options such as Rational Software Architect, Visual Paradigm, and Altova UModel.

Plan and organize your elements and models using the best practices from the beginning and create customized project templates. That will benefit you greatly afterwards.

The RTF document generator and profiles.

The RTF document generator allows me to focus more of my time on architecture and less on word processing. I can produce up-to-date reports anytime at the push of a button and that is a (huge!) time saver.

The profiles allow me to customize the tool to the corporate environment instead of the other way around saving huge amounts of time and energy on trying to turn dozens of individuals into TOGAF, ArchiMate or Zachman experts, or even Sparx EA experts.

Various groups within the enterprise can now have access to a centralized and standardized repository.

Truth be told, like most products of its kind, it is not always an intuitively easy tool to use. In fairness, it is very hard to enable a non-expert user to do complex things in a totally easy intuitive way and I don’t know any tool that is intuitive.

If you just want to create some diagrams with shapes and arrows, then use Visio.

But if you want to create a well-structured, multi-layered, traceable model that can auto generate all kinds of documents, then you will need some expertise in both architecture and the tool.

I've used this solution for six years.

No.

No, and I’ve worked on repositories with well over a hundred users.

Excellent, not only do I get quick responses, but their people are well-equipped to handle complex and leading edge issues and questions.

I have used other tools (DOORS, Rational, etc.), but always found them more limited, clunky, and expensive.

Very straightforward.

It’s the best deal in town, by far.

I’m always keeping my eye on the tool landscape and there are a lot of good tools out there. But for the money, breadth of scope, depth of features, add-ons, customizability, and capabilities, it still ranks number one.

Carefully evaluate any tool before you buy it, as their product sheets and PowerPoints always look good.

Even more important, beg, borrow, or steal one person who is really an SME with the tool, but be careful, if you don’t have an SME how can you evaluate candidates? My advice, don’t rely on a big consulting firm as many of them hype up their “experts”. Hire your own rock star on staff/contract and if he doesn’t measure up, hire a new one.

Also, and this goes for any tool, don’t count on the tool to be a substitute for qualified modeling expertise. Think of it as MS Word in a legal firm. It can help you with formatting, spell checking and all kinds of other things to help create, organize, edit, modify and manage your information but if you know nothing about the law or writing legal contracts, MS Word isn’t going to provide you with that expertise.

Have good people lead the use of the tool.

It's like a repository. So far, we use it only for Information Modelling.

• Repository.
• Reuse of objects
• Making fewer mistakes in models (i.e., naming objects, attributes, etc.).

It would be great if we could decrease the use of different parts of the Toolbox. By doing so, forcing temporary consultants to use our Profile and no other items from other toolboxes.

Personally: Three years. The organization: about seven years.

No.

So far, no. We use the local database. In the future, we have to start using a central Database (Cloud?).

From 1–10: Nine (fast response).

Word (Microsoft Office), Visio.

Complex, because we used a profile.

No clue…Licenses are pretty low cost compared to, for example, ARIS.

My colleague did this before I started using EA. Dunno exactly, but I thought about Bizzdesign, ARIS, and one or two other products.

For the initial setup, get people with good knowledge from Sparx EA .

Ability to model and create view under same roof. The ribbon style editor coupled with capability to manage requirements, design and delivery in the same application simplified my life tremendously.

All requirements management is now moved to EA.

The templates for documentation should be enhanced to include complex documents such as template RFP, or Non functional requirements template. Currently, eixsting template documents are based on diagrams and needs to be combined and customized.

1 year

Excellent.

I was previously using Microsoft Visio and PowerPoint for creating visual models.

Very easy.

The pricing for ultimate version is steeply high. 

Automated document generation is a real time saver , no more cut and paste, no more keeping track of which diagrams are in which reports, no more last minute update panics. Just click a mouse and you've got an up to date report.

Customized profiles allow you to create entities that are custom engineered to your organization. Do you want to separate non-functional requirements into two types, say high and low priority, with each one having custom tags such as owner, why needed, history, date needed and authorizer for the high priority you can have it all built in to a tool set.

In one organization, it allowed teams and team members all over the world to collaborate and sync up on specific detailed parts of the solution or model easily with a minimum of fuss by sharing the repository instead of having to e-mail diagrams or search through SharePoint to find the right diagram. Its easy to bookmark a diagram in a repo so someone else can open their EA client and quickly find and even modify it directly, if appropriate

Sparx EA has always had one strong negative that has kept it from dominating the market ( not counting the fact that the big guns can out market Sparx).

Its best features are not intuitive or easy to learn. Most companies I have worked with, when I see what they are doing with it , are not using more than 5% of what they could and should be doing with it.

I've even seen reviews of the product by people who worked with it in which they complain that it can't do things that it most definitely can do(e.g. I've seen it referred to as an exclusively single user tool).

Yes there are courses available but it's counter productive to teach everyone everything, don't confuse a business analysts by teaching him about class diagrams and document templates, don't teach a programmer how to create BPMN diagrams.

The webinars and videos help , there has been big improvement in the reference material that Sparx has made available.

Six years

No

Very very rarely.

No.

Very good.

Very good although there is no phone support.

I actually used a tool called TCC, Together Control Centre many years back which was very similar. It was created by Peter Coad of the (Coad-Yourdon methodology).

Unfortunately, some ruthless venture capitalist got control of the companies and tore it to pieces trying to make it a do all be all tool ("It's a floor wax - its a dessert topping").

Straightforward.

In-house ( mostly myself)

Always hard to say because it depends how you measure it but 20% or more is quite feasible.

Use floating licenses strategically.

Power Designer, Corso, Rational,BIZZDesign

Take the time to learn the features well - it will pay off.

I have been using it for six years and I am still learning new ways to leverage its features - not because of new versions but because of gaining an even greater understanding of the tool and how it works.

The number one recommendation I have about using this tool is to invest some time to understand how to use it properly.

Most people will use MSWord or Excel by just diving right in and using it and learning as they go, tinkering here and there and that approach works fine.

Do not use this approach with Sparx EA, you will end up using it as a fancy version of Visio which is like buying a Porsche to use for storage space.

Also focus your learning on what you will be doing with the tool ( i.e. if you will be creating requirements models don't waste time learning how to auto generate documents).

• Data Modeling (conceptual modeling)
• XML schema design
• We use it to develop and maintain the Enterprise Conceptual Model, migrated from erwin a couple of years ago.

We used Sparx EA to document CCAR data lineage in response to an OCC MRA filing.

• Greater OMG UML and XMI compliance
• Better reporting

We have been using this solution for five years.

No problems with stability. It is a rock solid product, unlike erwin, which was unstable.

There were no issues with scalability. It handled increased volume easily, unlike erwin.

I would rate technical support as OK. The forum was great. The actual support was only so-so.

We used erwin. Erwin was unstable and didn't handle the model as the size grew.

The setup was straightforward.

The Corporate Edition, or one of the bundles, is the way to go. You don't save that much going with the personal or profession editions.

We evaluated MagicDraw.

Just get it. My elevator pitch was that it is cheaper than Visio and it provides a common tool and repository for all your development needs. Amazing solution for its price, but has its flaws.

• Open API, published database schema
• Report generation: Makes the tool easy to configure and easy to extract analytics/reports
• A large community with many examples and modeling standards supported, including UML, BPMN, and ArchiMate

I have used the BPMN modelling, reporting, and analytic capability with a number of clients to document their business processes. These have been used for staff training, change management, and regulatory reporting.

The tool lacks an interactive web interface. The HTML generated is static. Users can’t add comments, run reports, or query the generated HTML via a web browser. To do this with the out-of-the-box capability, users need to install the Sparx Windows client.

However, you can configure the generated HTML to invoke web services that you can code using the open API. The open API provides reporting and querying via a web browser. This is something that I have done for clients.

(Update on above comments: Sparx has just released an interactive web interface - see their site for

I have used it for 14 years.

There were no stability issues. The product uses a client-server model, so any issues would be due to the RDBMS that you deploy.

There were scalability issues. The HTML generation with very large models, over 4000 diagrams, can be problematic. It will take several hours to generate.

Sparx Systems provides tools and web/email-based support for licensed users. They are responsive, with queries typically answered within 24 hours.

They rely on a global network of third-party partners who provide local professional services. I can provide this in the UK. There is also a very active community that can answer most of your questions.

Technical support is good, with the limitations mentioned regarding customer service.

I’ve used many solutions over the years. I tend to come back to Sparx because it is the best value for the money.

The initial setup is simple. There are some advanced options related to source control and WAN optimization/cloud service (HTTP connectivity; not Sparx in the cloud).

However, the most complex consideration when setting Sparx up is how to structure the model to address your business requirements. This is key because the tool has no out-of-the-box model structure. You need to define it.

Sparx does not have a professional services team. They rely on a global network of partners. Medium/large organisations should engage one of these partners or bring in an experienced contractor, such as myself, to help them set up their model.

It has very competitive pricing/licensing. Spend the money you save on experienced support when setting up your model.

I have run tooling RFPs comparing BPM tools such as iGrafx, Aris, ADONIS, and Sparx. (Sparx was already being used by solution architects.)

We chose Sparx as it was the incumbent tool within the organisation. It was significantly less expensive than the other tools.

Get experienced help with the setup/configuration of your model so it can fully meet your business requirements.