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Avolution ABACUS vs Visio 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

Avolution ABACUS
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Enterprise Architecture Management (9th)
Visio
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
106
Ranking in other categories
Business Process Design (2nd), Mind Mapping Software (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

Avolution ABACUS and Visio aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Avolution ABACUS is designed for Enterprise Architecture Management and holds a mindshare of 3.8%, down 4.8% compared to last year.
Visio, on the other hand, focuses on Business Process Design, holds 12.4% mindshare, down 13.7% since last year.
Enterprise Architecture Management
Business Process Design
 

Featured Reviews

JoseCamacho - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports evaluating architecture through corporate objectives
I conducted an evaluation of enterprise architecture at the European Court in Luxembourg, reviewing and analyzing existing implementations to identify potential improvements and providing recommendations I conduct evaluations to identify potential improvements and make recommendations, forming a…
Tugrul TASCI - PeerSpot reviewer
We have seen return on investment in the form of time savings but should have more design tools
I am generally using Visio to create some diagrams Visio should implement more complex tools or graphics to facilitate processing and use flexible templates. It should allow users to easily drag and drop some previously created diagrams. The tools supplied or provided are very basic, and there…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ease of modeling and the ease of showing interconnectivity and relationships is the most valuable. It is fairly simple and out of the box. It is customizable in many ways. It is a pretty good tool."
"The technical support is very good. They are responsive and the answers they provide are detailed."
"If you face new challenges or issues then you can dynamically customize according to the business needs."
"There are plenty of features available such as the ability to test applications for issues and a user-friendly dashboard."
"Avolution ABACUS allows for flexible enterprise architecture analysis."
"The most valuable feature is that it has a customizable meta-model, which is key."
"The most valuable feature is the traceability, you can trace any object to the other."
"You can design using a diagram tool installed on your desktop, a key difference from other vendors."
"Visio is outstanding because it has features that are useful for project management."
"Visio is stable."
"A lot of built-in templates are really phenomenal. They cut down the time when you're trying to get something out. They reduce the complexity that technical folks like to put into things that have to be given to technical folks."
"It has a lot of great features."
"I find the control flow and settings features valuable."
"The most valuable feature is the set of diagramming tools."
"The task sequencing, the process level views, and the ability to communicate between lanes are valuable features in Visio."
"It works really well for flowcharting, it can label."
 

Cons

"The tool doesn't have any intelligence built in. We have to design the dashboards ourselves, which is a challenge because we have to depend on the vendor for customizations."
"The usability of the tool is an area with shortcomings that need improvement."
"While this is one of the most powerful tools on the market it does not integrate well with Microsoft Office or others."
"I use reference models, which are taxonomies, in my EA work. It is a reference model/taxonomy of things with capabilities, sub capabilities, and sub-sub capabilities, so you're working it down. I haven't yet found a simple way to implement that in Abacus. It could be that it is there, but I don't know how to do it."
"It is vastly scalable but you can't run it on a Mac or Linux so it has limitations."
"Having more control over page size is lacking in this product. Print utilization also needs to be improved."
"The company needs to update the UML version they are using for the product as it is quite old."
"In the future, there could be improvements in integration and enhancements."
"Integration with other software would be an area of improvement, so that it's not just used to document but also as a center plane for information sharing."
"The solution could improve by making it more modern."
"The one particular thing which I would like to see improved is in comparison to other products in the market, and is still lacking in Visio, is publishing on a web application. For example, there is a freeware application business process modeling tool, Bizagi."
"It is a visualization tool, so database visualization is pretty static in it. They haven't moved the ERDs very well. They haven't adopted any real visualization like what you have in Hackolade for JSON or other data patterns. It has none of that. If you go onto broader patterns, you can actually label and integrate with a data set, if you want, for Visio, but it's very clunky and very difficult for me to assign that to another user. I can't assign it to a junior or a documenter. They really haven't cleaned up and made their tools simpler to use when linking to data, which is primarily what you're trying to do."
"When you use a BPA solution you can open an end-to-end process in one window, go down, or go up between layers to different places. You should be able to see descriptions of the steps of the process."
"Inventory feature could be improved."
"It should natively enable importing diagrams or reference architectures from any of the vendors whose solutions are used by the customer or proposed by solution providers such as DXC"
"Sometimes, there is a little bit of a learning curve with it, especially while doing complex network diagrams and getting the lines to snap the way you want them and not overlap or be confusing. It would be great if there was a built-in tutorial. It is not that you can't YouTube, but it would be nice if they gave you some free training. I've been using it forever, but every now and then, I got to do something complicated with it and I wonder how do I do that again. Maybe they do have such information, and I don't know. I have not done research on it because a bunch of people work for me, and some of them are better at it than I am, so I just ask them to do this for me."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of Avolution ABACUS is reasonable, given the features they offer in comparison to other tools."
"The solution's pricing is not an issue."
"My company makes annual payments toward the licensing costs of the solution. Considering the product's capabilities, its prices are very reasonable."
"It is expensive."
"The pricing is quite good compared to the competition and it is part of the reason we chose the product."
"This solution is expensive for some people's budgets and they need to offer a Lite version at a cheaper price"
"I'm paying on a yearly basis. I don't know whether it's a highly expensive tool or not. I'm getting a single version of it, and I don't have the enterprise part on it because I don't need the server component, and I don't need a web browser component. My estimate would be that it's a very reasonably priced tool given that you don't need to have licenses with everyone in order to get the information and the decision support capabilities out of the tool. You use the enterprise edition on top of the studio, which is the heart of the tool. I am not aware of any additional costs."
"It is competitive. It is not chump change. I am just using the studio version. I am not using the full enterprise version, which would probably cost me three times more for single-use, but it gives a lot more capability and analysis. It is server-based as well, and it is reasonably priced compared to a lot of the other tools. There are other tools that have other sorts of capabilities, but in order to use them, you'd really have to have like 50 users for the price to become justifiable."
"I believe Visio to be priced pretty reasonably."
"If I want to buy Visio for myself, I think it will be around 80 to 120 USD, though it is important to consider that I am unsure of its actual costs."
"The product is inexpensive if you already have Microsoft products in your environment. The license encompasses all the required services."
"The price could be more flexible for infrequent users. If it's your main utility that you use daily, then it's a good price."
"It is a free solution for us. It is integrated with our pack. We are trying to use the solutions that we already have."
"It has a lower price point than the competition."
"You can purchase a corporate license for more users to use the solution. We have purchased a stand-alone license and which could be cheaper."
"We have about 10 to 15 people with Visio licenses in my company, but I wasn't involved in the direct negotiation of the prices since this was taken care of by my administrative office."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
19%
Government
14%
Computer Software Company
9%
Educational Organization
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Avolution ABACUS?
The tool's implementation is straightforward as everything is readily available. For instance, setting up a portal is seamless, allowing easy publishing and access to data. However, integrating wit...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Avolution ABACUS?
It's pricey compared to Essential, Deltek, or Essential Cloud. However, its diagramming capabilities and metamodel design make it worth it. But it's not for large user bases. It has modules for app...
What needs improvement with Avolution ABACUS?
While Avolution ABACUS is flexible, it can be complex to work with as it requires knowledge of specific configurations to customize the product. It would be beneficial to have seminars or other met...
How easy is it to migrate process flow charts (modeled using tools like Visio) into Bizagi?
I have been using Bizagi with a major project for a state government agency for about four years now. It is pretty straightforward to load in files that are BPMN 2.0 compliant. The option to load V...
What do you like most about Visio?
The diagrams Visio creates are quite impressive in the sense that we can cooperate with more colleagues in one task and see the flow of the process.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Visio?
One of the main problems with Visio is its licensing options and associated issues, which lead to discussions about the price with a Microsoft representative. If asked to rate the price, I would gi...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Visio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Barclays
Thomas College, Hamburg Port Authority, Portigon AG, Conseil G_n_ral du d_partement des Hautes-Alpes, AAA Auto a. s., Commonwealth Financial Network, ICA, Abu Dhabi National Energy Company
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