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ARIS BPA vs Planview Portfolios comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

ARIS BPA
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
68
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (6th), Business Process Management (BPM) (8th)
Planview Portfolios
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (13th), Project Portfolio Management (7th)
 

Mindshare comparison

ARIS BPA and Planview Portfolios aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. ARIS BPA is designed for Business Process Design and holds a mindshare of 7.2%, down 8.9% compared to last year.
Planview Portfolios, on the other hand, focuses on Project Portfolio Management, holds 7.2% mindshare, up 5.9% since last year.
Business Process Design Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
ARIS BPA7.2%
Visio11.7%
Camunda11.6%
Other69.5%
Business Process Design
Project Portfolio Management Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Planview Portfolios7.2%
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management9.9%
Planisware9.6%
Other73.3%
Project Portfolio Management
 

Featured Reviews

Tamer Eldamanhouri - PeerSpot reviewer
Empowers teams with robust business process modeling capabilities
They should examine competitor solutions to identify differentiators. One issue related to ARIS BPA is its integration with AI; it has AI features for cloud solutions, yet many in the government sector in Kuwait do not view the cloud as viable. Software AG should focus on developing AI models for ARIS BPA on-premises, particularly in user interfaces, as well as creating predefined business processes for common areas such as HR and finance. This aspect is crucial for adapting to the market's needs and streamlining custom solutions. While they have been helpful regarding pricing, I cannot compare ARIS BPA to other business process modeling tools because I understand some competitors have significantly lower costs than ARIS BPA. To maintain market share, good discounts should be provided to customers.
EduardoMaya - PeerSpot reviewer
A solution that gives you all the information you need to plan detailed projects
The initial setup was just a little complex. I rate the initial setup a seven out of ten. Deploying the solution took two weeks. While deploying the solution, we had two instances, one for the IT team and one for the business team. And we had to connect the two and explain things to the team. Only two people were needed to deploy the solution, me and another person.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has allowed us to model our enterprise process architecture."
"ARIS Reporting – Helps download valuable content from the tool in multiple formats."
"The solution's basic features are easy to use, overall designed well, and it has good process mining analysis."
"The solution has come up with a web portal that makes it easy to model and show to clients."
"ARIS BPA has a good directory option, which helps to keep track of all of your metadata, and that's very useful."
"The most valuable features are business process modeling and reporting."
"It has the ability to scale up, as well as integrate with other systems within the organization to get real-time information from dashboards and reports."
"If you ever tried to draw a picture in a browser app or with a cloud service, it is normally a painful death. ARIS works perfectly on diagrams in the browser, so I was excited. I like it because there have been so many bad experiences in the past with drawing or doing something in a browser. Normally, it's always painful because it's coded badly. With ARIS, it is really well-implemented. It's simple."
"The sheer amount of information available in one single interface is valuable. Everything is there. It is also a lot of work to maintain all the information, but generally, you can find everything you need within this one tool."
"The resource management and assignment features are valuable. The timesheet management is also valuable because that is a requirement for us. So, the ability to see timesheet forecasting and timesheet actual submission from resources has been very useful and valuable to us."
"It has been effective for our delivery. It's given us much better visibility into what is being delivered and when."
"We provided whatever feedback we had to the Planview team, and they went in and built those additional features that we requested. For example, they created a great way for our users to search for a specific resource, project, program, or role. We were not using some of the features, and we wanted them to not be visible, and they helped us with that. They also brought a feature to provide visibility into when a resource was never assigned to any task. There was no visibility to this before. This feature was really very good for visibility into the resource portfolio."
"The financial planning capabilities are very useful. We have integration for an SAP system, and so we load financial data from SAP into Planview for prior months. And then we use the forecasting capabilities to get a complete picture of the cost of a specific project. The financial management is very useful."
"Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is one of the best features. They have very good data warehousing. You can put that out. You can tell that data warehousing from Planview Enterprise One is excellent."
"The most valuable features are the control and visibility that you have for portfolio management in terms of projects and capacity planning for resources along with strategies and outcomes, etc. It's so easy to access information for sharing analytics and reporting."
"I like that everyone is able to see the same data. All of our users who aren't just time reporters have read access to all the data that is out there. So, it is one source of truth where everybody can go in and see the exact same data that everybody else sees. It is transparent."
 

Cons

"Areas for improvement include sales, prospecting, shopping, customer service, after-sales (claims and advice for the client), and all processes pertaining to customer loyalty."
"I believe the solutions BPM tools are not very good and need improvements."
"Migration to the next release is very tricky. You can't do it without support from ARIS or from a software kit. And it takes a lot of time and a lot of money to migrate. My impression is that a lot of companies do not migrate regularly because of that issue."
"There are reports available in ARIS and you can modify them a bit if you want something more specific, but it's not that easy to adjust them and make modifications. It would be nice to have some kind of tool to do that, something that is more user-friendly for people who are not too technical, so that they could create reports the way they want them."
"The reporting and the information query features could do with some improvement."
"Some improvements have been done, after Software AG acquired ARIS, but I don't believe it's still integrated with the other tool WebMethods in a perfect way."
"The tool must provide more documents."
"They should make improvements as per customer requirements."
"The number one thing that needs improvement is the UI. It should be easy for a casual project manager. It should provide customizable screens that can be a choice for project managers to choose as a professional level, medium level, and a very easy level."
"Its ability to create summary reports across multiple projects is very limited. In terms of the out-of-the-box reporting for summary reports, the reporting that we typically leverage is around forecasting for resources, timesheets, and actuals, and just looking at what is the capacity. There is no real summary of what work is being done and how work is being accomplished. So, what we typically do is that we get a copy of the data files from Enterprise One daily, and then we have a team that manages the data mod outside of Enterprise One. They use data from Enterprise One as well as other additional sources to provide the reporting that we share with the management. So, we leverage a lot of Enterprise One data for reporting, but we don't use the reporting capabilities within Enterprise One. So, reporting can be improved, and they could help us make more customized reporting. I know it is very configurable out of the box, but we have to leverage an outside data mod that pulls in a lot of data from Enterprise One. So, the reporting function, and being able to customize reports, is the area that could be very beneficial."
"One big issue we have been having during our annual planning is that only the creator of a portfolio can edit it. This means that only the creator of a portfolio can edit which projects are included or excluded in it."
"I would like a bit more flexibility, as far as the configuration, and have additional capabilities to configure, making it more flexible for our use."
"The biggest room for improvement are the scripted dialogues. The scripted dialogues are a logic that you set up to force a certain workflow or process to happen. It's very old in respect that there are no clauses that you can apply to that logic. That definitely can use a lot of room for improvement."
"We had issues with the data rephrasing."
"Being the IT development manager who implements the upgrades for Planview, I would love to see more thorough testing of expenditures and more thorough testing in general. When we do an upgrade, we have to do quite a bit of testing because we can affect the bottom line."
"The financial piece of the tool could be better. While it may have to do with the complexity of the work that we do, it seems that the tool should be able to drill down a bit deeper into the financial area."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It depends on different parameters."
"This is absolutely not the cheapest solution in the market, but for large companies, the price is fine."
"The price could be better."
"The product is expensive."
"ARIS BPA is too costly from a licensing perspective."
"The solution has a fair price for the value it delivers."
"Pricing for ARIS BPA is average, not cheap or expensive. It's cost-effective and worth the money we pay."
"If you can afford it, it's the best so far."
"We recently did a new bundle for all of Enterprise One. It includes some of the newer pieces, like Projectplace and LeanKit. It bundled our CTM in with it as well. I think the total came out to be about $900,000 a year. This is for unlimited licenses."
"Our licensing costs are probably $150,000 to $180,000 a year with 270 licenses total."
"The licensing part is a bit costly in comparison with the other available PPM tools."
"The cost of other pieces and integrating them in needs improvement."
"Our licensing costs are about a quarter of a million dollars per year."
"We have portfolio managers, resource managers, project managers, and time reporting licenses. These are the licenses that we have."
"We overbought our licenses. We looked at our needs three to four years down the road and tried based our contract on that. However, we were over aggressive. We use about a third of the licenses that we have. We're looking to adjust the makeup so we can start utilizing the amount of money that we are spending. Right now, we're overspending, and my organization is not seeing the value in Planview because we are paying so much for licenses that we're not using."
"With the costs, they were very understanding. Knowing that we were an existing customer, they were very much willing to work with us to make sure that we were able to transition to Enterprise One from PPM Pro."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business32
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise47
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise58
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about ARIS BPA?
The most valuable features of ARIS BPA are its flexibility and reporting.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ARIS BPA?
Pricing for ARIS BPA is average, not cheap or expensive. It's cost-effective and worth the money we pay.
What needs improvement with ARIS BPA?
ARIS BPA needs to be more accurate when generating documents. While it covers many blueprints and functions that I need, the document generation feature could be enhanced for better accuracy.
What do you like most about Planview Portfolios?
Planview Management integrates seamlessly with other tools and systems used within the organization, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) syst...
What needs improvement with Planview Portfolios?
Enhancements are needed in: Advanced reporting and analytics: While Planview Management provides robust reporting and analytics capabilities, further enhancements could include more advanced data v...
What is your primary use case for Planview Portfolios?
We use Planview Management to assess the current project portfolio, evaluate resource availability, and prioritize projects based on strategic objectives, ROI, and risk factors. Planview Management...
 

Also Known As

ARIS, ARIS BPM
Planview Enterprise One, Troux
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Tesco, Weifu, Airbus, Siemens, Proximus, Alicorp, Sekerbank, Bancor, Philips,Sky, Emirates NBD, Dubai Municipality, Suva, U.S. Army, Australia Post, Westfalen Weser Energie - ARIS serves customers across all industries and of every size worldwide. Companies trust ARIS as the market leader for process excellence with more than 30 years of experience in the market, 10 million users worldwide, from 1 user companies to the Fortune 500.
UPS, NatWest, Ingram Micro, Canadian Tire, Viessmann, Volvo, NASCO, UNESCO
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Microsoft, SAP and others in Business Process Design. Updated: August 2025.
867,676 professionals have used our research since 2012.