BiZZdesign HoriZZon vs erwin Data Modeler comparison

BiZZdesign and Quest Software are both solutions in the Enterprise Architecture Management category. BiZZdesign is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.3, while Quest Software is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.3. BiZZdesign holds a 5.2% mindshare in AM, compared to Quest Software’s 8.9% mindshare. Additionally, 78% of BiZZdesign users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 95% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

BiZZdesign HoriZZon

Read 18 BiZZdesign HoriZZon reviews

2,901 Views
1,770 Comparison Views

78% willing to recommend

erwin Data Modeler

Read 40 erwin Data Modeler reviews

5,123 Views
3,535 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

BiZZdesign HoriZZon

erwin Data Modeler

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 19, 2025

Erwin Data Modeler and BiZZdesign HoriZZon compete in the realm of data modeling and enterprise architecture management. Based on the comparison, Erwin Data Modeler seems to have the upper hand in database visualization and model management, whereas BiZZdesign HoriZZon excels in unified architecture management and strategic portfolio planning.

Features: Erwin Data Modeler provides extensive database visualization capabilities, robust versioning, and a powerful Bulk Editor for handling large data models. Its Report Designer allows users to create detailed reports for data model discussions. BiZZdesign HoriZZon offers a unified architecture management framework with strong integration options and an advanced set of analytical tools, adhering to ArchiMate and BPMN standards, making it ideal for enterprise portfolio management.

Room for Improvement: Erwin Data Modeler requires enhancements in big-data platform handling, multi-language support, and intuitive reporting features. Users suggest improvements in the Complete Compare tool's user-friendliness and better reverse engineering for diverse platforms. BiZZdesign HoriZZon needs improvements in user experience, integration capabilities, and business process documentation support, with noted high costs and a complex user interface as areas for refinement.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Erwin Data Modeler is mainly focused on on-premises deployment, offering responsive technical support, though consistency varies. It maintains high customer satisfaction with dedicated service teams. BiZZdesign HoriZZon supports both public and private cloud deployments, providing flexible deployment options. Its customer service is helpful, although users see room for improvement in technical support responsiveness and guidance during learning phases.

Pricing and ROI: Erwin Data Modeler's pricing is considered high, especially for individual licenses, though concurrent licenses offer some flexibility. Its ROI is deemed valuable due to its capabilities in data governance and model management. BiZZdesign HoriZZon is also perceived as high-cost, with licenses divided into designer, contributor, and consumer tiers. Its strategic capabilities deliver value, particularly for users focused on enterprise architecture management.

To learn more, read our detailed BiZZdesign HoriZZon vs. erwin Data Modeler Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

BiZZdesign HoriZZon vs. erwin Data Modeler

September 2025

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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

BiZZdesign HoriZZon

Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management

6th

Ranking in Business Process Design

9th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

erwin Data Modeler

Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management

4th

Ranking in Business Process Design

10th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Governance (16th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of BiZZdesign HoriZZon is 5.2%, up from 3.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Modeler is 8.9%, down from 10.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Enterprise Architecture Management Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
erwin Data Modeler	8.9%
BiZZdesign HoriZZon	5.2%
Other	85.9%

Enterprise Architecture Management

Featured Reviews

BijoyTalukder

Enterprise Architect at Tata Consultancy

Helps to get a clear overview of our enterprise architecture, especially when dealing with multiple departments

One area where BiZZdesign HoriZZon could use some improvement is in its REST APIs. While the platform offers REST APIs, they have limitations when it comes to retrieving and exporting data. Obtaining detailed information at the individual application or component level, including IDs, costs, and deployment-related data, can be challenging through these APIs. This limitation makes it difficult to smoothly export such granular data. I have raised this issue with the BiZZdesign team, and they expressed interest in addressing it, but I'm not aware of the current status of this improvement effort. Nonetheless, improving the usability and flexibility of the REST APIs for data extraction is an area that could enhance the platform's capabilities.

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JorgeSanz

Data Governance Senior Advisor at Abu Dhabi National Oil Company

Streamline data modeling and automate network changes for increased efficiency

The initial setup depends on the tool if you are using the data model environment. Stopping the server could be complex and require strong expertise. If you have everything set up and configured, Erwin is straightforward. You can deploy it in a few hours. In our case, it took a couple of months to address internal conditions, assign machines, and set up everything for the services. I rate the initial setup a six out of ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy.

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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

"The tool's most valuable feature is that its collaboration part is very good."

"One of the main advantages of this solution is that they have representation in the Open Group Forum, which means that any changes in ArchiMate are immediately implemented in BiZZdesign."

"It is very easy to use. I can just click on an application component and find out if we are using this particular component. This provides us flexibility."

"Among the valuable features is the ability to document standards. For example, we have mandatory operating standards that need to be followed by every application and every architecture. We use things like table charts and pie charts for documenting the costs incurred across the systems. All of these are good features."

"The initial setup of this solution was very straightforward."

"I used BiZZdesign HoriZZon at two organizations. At Manchester Metropolitan University, I used it with a small team for architectural modeling of the student record system. We modeled teams, process objects, and their interactions with applications. We also used it to model a gradual rollout with plateaus showing migration over time. At the BBC, I used it to model software services for publishing content online. I showed key model views to senior stakeholders using Horizon, allowing them to modify and score applications and services."

"The most valuable features of BiZZdesign HoriZZon include the diagrammatic representation of BPMN models, which I find good for modeling, and things such as capability maps."

"The feature I find most valuable is that the start times and loading times are short. It takes only a few seconds to load the repository and whenever I want to open diagrams, they are there almost immediately."

More BiZZdesign HoriZZon pros

"What has been useful, I have been able to reverse engineer our existing data models to document explicitly referential integrity relationships, primary/foreign keys in the model, and create ERDs that are subject area-based which our clients can use when working with our databases. The reality is that our databases are not explicitly documented in the DDL with primary/foreign key relationships. You can't look at the DDL and explicitly understand the primary/foreign key relationships that exist between our tables, so the referential integrity is not easily understood. erwin has allowed me to explicitly document that and create ERDs. This has made it easier for our clients to consume our databases for their own purposes."

"It allows us to create logical data models. We can represent a database model in business terms, which is very useful for us."

"The product allows us to reuse entities and attributes."

"One of the best aspects of the tool is its reverse engineering capability."

"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."

"Being able to point it to a database and then pull the metadata is a valuable feature. Another valuable feature is being able to rearrange the model so that we can display it to users. We are able to divide the information into subject areas, and we can divide the data landscape into smaller chunks, which makes it easier to understand. If you had 14 subject areas, 1,000 entities, and 6,000 columns, you can't quite understand it all at once. So, being able to have the same underlying model but only display portions of it at a time is extremely useful."

"Drag-and-drop data modeling and reverse engineering out of databases are the most valuable features of erwin Data Modeler by Quest."

"Another feature of erwin is that it can help you enforce your naming standards. It has little modules that you can set up and, as you're building the data model, it's ensuring that they conform to the naming standards that you've developed."

More erwin Data Modeler pros

Cons

"It should be more open to integrating with other existing tools. Although there has been progress in the past."

"There is room for improvement in making it more seamless between the modeling and the analysis pieces. Sometimes you have to do some work in the backend to ensure that the HoriZZon portal really gets all of the information the way you want it. They are working on the seamlessness between what they call Enterprise Studio and HoriZZon."

"It takes a long time to learn and understand, which is a learning curve you have to go through, but once you know how it works, it's very nice to work with."

"In HoriZZon, there are different matrices. In some of the cases, there is an option to aggregate them, but in other cases, we have not done this, e.g., to see the proper costs. For example, if I have 10 different matrices, then I need to create an aggregate view out of those 10 matrices somewhere. That is where we have been struggling a bit. We have a counterpart from the HoriZZon product team with whom we have bi-weekly discussions. We have suggested to him that this can be improved."

"There's room for improvement. When I finished using it over a year ago, I discussed implementing C4 notation with BiZZdesign HoriZZon.They've likely done this now, but I haven't seen it. Setting up interactive views for stakeholders to score services was a bit difficult."

"Integration definitely needs improvement. There are some restrictions. We've seen that it doesn't integrate with everything we might expect."

"The automatic data collection and interface need improvement."

"I have seen table charts where, if the chart is a little too big, it does not fit in HoriZZon and it is not at all visible... There have been several times where we could not publish a chart properly and we had to break the chart into small tables and create multiple artifacts, creating a complete mess. This should be seriously taken up by BiZZdesign because there is a lot of scope for improvement in terms of usability. It's not at all good, unfortunately."

More BiZZdesign HoriZZon cons

"I'd really like to see the PDF function become available. It would make my life much easier than what it is at the moment because whenever I need to collaborate with people that do not have erwin, I have to go through the wonkiness of going to Word and then save it from Word into PDF. There's a lot of differences between erwin 4.4 and 2020."

"Although Quest Software has made tremendous strides in recent years, they need to evolve more in the big data arena; erwin Data Modeler could use a little more work when it comes to big database designs."

"I would like the solution to be less rigid in terms of its theory."

"The report generation has room for improvement. I think it was version 8 where you had to use Crystal Reports, and it was so painful that the company I was with just stayed on version 7 until version 9 came out and they restored the data browser. That's better than it was, but it's still a little cumbersome. For example, you run it in erwin, then export it out to Excel, and then you have to do a lot of cosmetic modification. If you discover that you missed a column, then you would have to rerun the whole thing. Sometimes what you would do is just go ahead and fix it in the report, then you have to remember to go back and fix it in the model. Therefore, I think the report generation still could use some work."

"It is not a very stable solution. I rate the stability five out of ten."

"I would like to see improved reporting and, potentially, dashboards built on top of that. Right now, it's a little manual. More automated reporting and dashboard views would help because currently you have to push things out to a spreadsheet, or to HTML, and there aren't many other options that I know of. I would like to be able to produce graphs and additional things right in the tool, instead of having to export the data somewhere else."

"The erwin ETL functionality has room for improvement when it comes to mapping databases with a classic entity-relationship model to a data warehouse 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

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If one is very cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the product price as a seven out of ten."

"I haven't found any issues with the scalability and licensing parts that are access-related."

"The pricing model is slightly on the high side and could be more competitive for long-term partnerships."

"We were customers and bought licenses from them. We used their remote instance initially but upgraded to the on-device version due to lag. For pricing, we paid about 2200 pounds a year per seat for the client installation at an educational rate. I'm not sure about commercial rates. I managed to get a free copy at BBC since it was for evaluation purposes."

"[The] Orbus... pricing model was based on every single functionality having a price. The pricing was comparable but if we wanted to scale, it would have ended up being a lot more expensive. BiZZdesign gave us one price with all of the functionality, and we could scale as much as we needed."

"First and foremost within the scope of improvement for the solution would be the cost. It's very costly..."

"The price is reasonable."

"In terms of this particular product usage, my clients currently only use per-user licenses."

"The solution is expensive."

"The price should be lower in order to be on the same level as its competitors."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"I don't specifically know what we're paying now. About three years ago, in another organization, I have this memory of 6,000 AUD a seat or something like that, but I am not sure. In the mid-2000s, it was something like 1,200 AUD a seat. I get the impression that there was a price jump when it was spun off from CA as a separate company, which is understandable, but it could sometimes be a barrier in some organizations picking it up. I haven't talked to erwin people yet, but I'm going to suggest to them that they could perhaps think of having an entry-level product that is priced a bit lower, and then, you can buy the extra suite."

More erwin Data Modeler pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

Government

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Energy/Utilities Company

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	14
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	29

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BiZZdesign HoriZZon?

This is one of the best tools, especially because of its collaborative nature. Anyone using it can access previous projects and related data. It's definitely a strong collaborative tool.

See all answers

What needs improvement with BiZZdesign HoriZZon?

There is room for improvement in BiZZdesign HoriZZon. It's quite robust and has good online forums where people discuss it, though maybe the interface can improve, but I don't want to criticize it ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for BiZZdesign HoriZZon?

The typical use case with BiZZdesign HoriZZon is basically for enterprise architecture and also for business process modeling.

See all answers

What do you like most about erwin Data Modeler by Quest?

Forward engineering, DDL generation, reverse engineering, and reporting are the most valuable features of the solution.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Modeler by Quest?

The product is expensive. I rate the product’s pricing a nine out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with erwin Data Modeler by Quest?

As a documenting tool, it's solid, though its reporting could be more robust. The reporting mechanisms could be more intuitive regarding report creation. It can generate reports in CSV files, displ...

See all answers

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Compared 38% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs erwin Data Modeler

Compared 7% of the time

Visio vs erwin Data Modeler

Compared 6% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

BiZZdesign HoriZZon

September 2025

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Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Modeler

September 2025

Download erwin Data Modeler product report

Also Known As

HoriZZon

erwin DM

Overview

Make smarter decisions and optimize outcomes by unifying all your strategy, capabilities, operating models and change portfolios in a single platform.

With all the data about your business in one place you can see the big picture and make properly informed strategic decisions to drive growth. Bizzdesign Horizzon brings together strategy, IT architecture, operating models, data, capabilities, change portfolios and ideas into a single, intuitive collaborative business design platform. Real-time visibility of key metrics and trends allows you to take action more quickly. Accelerating the speed and accuracy of your operations now – and into the future.

Core Platform Capabilities:

Multi-discipline collaboration
Data Integration
Advanced analytics
Models and Roadmaps
Governance & Security
Business Insight Graph

BiZZdesign

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

Sample Customers

T-Mobile, Shell, HSBC, Erasmus University, VIVAT Insurance

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

Buyer's Guide

BiZZdesign HoriZZon vs. erwin Data Modeler

September 2025

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