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ARIS BPA vs SAP PowerDesigner 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
66
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (5th), Business Process Management (BPM) (7th)
SAP PowerDesigner
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
35
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (5th), Metadata Management (4th)
 

Mindshare comparison

ARIS BPA and SAP PowerDesigner aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. ARIS BPA is designed for Business Process Design and holds a mindshare of 7.7%, down 9.2% compared to last year.
SAP PowerDesigner, on the other hand, focuses on Enterprise Architecture Management, holds 9.1% mindshare, up 8.1% since last year.
Business Process Design
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

Libor Černý - PeerSpot reviewer
I can usually find an answer to my issue on ARIS Community
From the start, there were some difficulties on how to create outputs since there wasn't a repository tool in version 6. However, in version 7, there has been a tool for creating standards for a company, and that tool has been very intuitive. While I have been using this tool for several years, other people just starting to use it find the learning curve steep. This tool is very robust and accommodates many roles, where people can participate from compliance, IT designers, etc. This can create problems for users who have no experience with similar tools. It took me a year before I felt comfortable with this tool, because when I came from university it was the first or second tool that I worked on. It took me a year to run every feature or use it for every possibility since this tool is very robust. We sometimes have to create the link to the server and the repository twice because it is deleted once for some unknown reason. Though, this is not a big problem. There should be a more intuitive tool when creating reports.
JorgeSanz - PeerSpot reviewer
Effective in terms of validating everything, but sometimes they don't allow us some flexibility and GUI could improve
I would recommend SAP PowerDesigner to others for data architecture management. It provides all the functionalities in terms of data modeling, so it's also a good tool for that. I see trends in terms of data classification, but I don't see this tool with the intelligence to do that automatically. So, like, with artificial intelligence. Overall, I would rate the solution a six out of ten because there are too many validations. Also, I found some gaps in terms of relationships; they didn't appear when you do reverse engineering. Also, this tool lacks artificial intelligence that should be very good in terms of automatically identifying the classification of elements and maybe also to incorporate some artificial intelligence in providing descriptions for each data element included in the solution.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"ARIS BPA provides very good visibility and control of processes because we have a concurrent license system. As a result, every person in our company and group is able to look at the published processes."
"ARIS has a good collaboration function. You create a portal where any authorized users can work on the models. There are simple flows for making and approving changes."
"Process Modeling or Process Mapping/Documentation. This is the most comprehensive tool for capturing the process details. Any organization who wants to embark on a BPM journey, process mapping/documentation, lays the foundation for the BPM led implementation."
"Object oriented modeling allows us to trace what's going on with the specified object."
"It provides the discovery functionality, and you can have a simulation on top of it to get your design corrected to ensure that it is within the right state of parameters. It is a complete package that you can use from strategy to execution because you have the design layer, and within the design, you can also do analytics."
"Objects can be reused across different BPMNs and processes, so we can design new processes quicker and easier.​"
"Platform that it supports covers legacy and new. Caters to moving older objects into an integrated DB, relatively popular ones: SQL, Oracle, etc."
"The ability to sort via multiple criteria to identify the relationships you need for a specific object."
"The feature I found valuable in SAP PowerDesigner is extraction. I also like that my company hasn't faced any issues because of the clear documentation about SAP PowerDesigner."
"I do a data-centric design, so for me, the data analysis and design tools are the most valuable features."
"The most valuable features of SAP PowerDesigner are the creation the flow charts and folders. It is a powerful tool."
"In terms of operational efficiency and cause savings or return on investment, I can say that with SAP PowerDesigner, our company saves a lot of time."
"The most useful feature has been the detailed possibility to model almost anything regarding physical databases."
"The most valuable features of the solution are it's built very well, easy to use, and simple to describe freely what is needed in logical and physical data models."
"I like the property sheet capability and the user-defined attributes that you can set up."
"Very good repository features."
 

Cons

"It would be helpful if ARIS BPA could have a simple database to get the extract of various attributes."
"The solution's processes are huge and it is not easy to get an overview of how things work. It needs to improve the interface. I would like to see the product include a better overview of processes and improve search."
"The pricing of the solution can be improved and the initial setup should be made easy."
"The ​integration between ARIS, webMethods, and project versions needs improvement.​"
"The solution is difficult and not very exciting to learn."
"I could use more icons and other graphical elements.​"
"With ARIS BPM, the script creation is quite cumbersome. With version ten, we needed our developers to do scripting."
"The tool must provide more documents."
"It would be helpful if there were glossary, catalog and governance tools. It would help make it a true end-to-end product."
"One disadvantage of SAP PowerDesigner is that you cannot reverse engineer the ALTER statements, so that's an enhancement or area for improvement I'm looking forward to seeing from the SAP team in the future. That should directly reflect on the physical data models my company builds."
"In the future, I would like to see data manipulation capability where you can actually write SQL queries and manipulate data from directly within the tool."
"Connectivity can be improved because it's not very good."
"There are many areas of this solution that needs to be changed."
"SAP PowerDesigner could improve by making the repository easier to understand. It is difficult to understand how the repository works because when I used logical models as part of the team, we wanted to use them together and update the older versions of the data model version but it was confusing. The repository needs to be explained."
"The solution itself does not need to be improved. However, they could add support for different languages."
"Checking-in models to the repository, especially when working remotely, is a slow process than can sometimes have problems with models being corrupted."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"ARIS has different licensing mechanisms for different modules, but they are perpetual licenses. So you pay once."
"The product is expensive."
"​It is on the higher side."
"We have a concurrent license system."
"Pricing for ARIS BPA is average, not cheap or expensive. It's cost-effective and worth the money we pay."
"This is absolutely not the cheapest solution in the market, but for large companies, the price is fine."
"From my point of view, no, it is not cheap, but it is not too expensive because you get this big organization behind it, technical support, and all those things. It's not so expensive to use. It's a Rolls Royce in this field, I know that. Even for small organizations, they can get so much effect from using this tool, in a very fast way, so the money will be back in the customer's pocket very fast."
"ARIS is quite expensive."
"The pricing varies based on functionality and users."
"When you purchase the license for SAP PowerDesigner, you have to buy one year of support. The tool is worth the money."
"PowerDesigner is not the cheapest solution on the market, so make sure that you are using it to its full potential."
"The ROI has been 43%."
"The price of the solution is low."
"The price of the solution is too expensive. When we asked for certain licenses in different countries it was unattainable."
"SAP PowerDesigner is cheaper than eriwin."
"I would like SAP to prove free licenses to professionals that are using the solution. The free version is limited."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
25%
Government
11%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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?
I find it difficult to access the database as I want with direct querying. I must write scripts, which requires specific knowledge. Software AG could improve this by making the database more open. ...
What do you like most about SAP PowerDesigner?
It allows us to have proper documentation in terms of the databases.
What needs improvement with SAP PowerDesigner?
Based on my experience with SAP PowerDesigner, I'd like to see improvements in the DMM feature. Even if I have an ETL tool, I'd like the DMM options to directly connect to ETL tool repositories lik...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

ARIS, ARIS BPM
Sybase PowerDesigner
 

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.
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Camunda, Microsoft, SAP and others in Business Process Design. Updated: April 2025.
850,671 professionals have used our research since 2012.