IBM Blueworks Live vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest comparison

erwin by Quest and IBM are both solutions in the Business Process Design category. erwin by Quest is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.1, while IBM is ranked #12 with an average rating of 7.6. erwin by Quest holds a 2.2% mindshare in BPD, compared to IBM’s 3.6% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of erwin by Quest users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 90% of IBM users who would recommend it.

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Read 39 erwin Data Modeler by Quest reviews

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1,038 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

IBM Blueworks Live

Read 20 IBM Blueworks Live reviews

2,383 Views
1,542 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

IBM Blueworks Live

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

IBM Blueworks Live and erwin Data Modeler by Quest compete in business process modeling and data modeling, respectively. Blueworks Live leads in collaborative modeling, while erwin excels in data model precision.

Features: IBM Blueworks Live offers real-time process modeling, collaboration tools, and seamless integration with IBM BPM, facilitating workshops and fast model creation. It centralizes documentation, enhancing ease of use. Erwin Data Modeler provides strong visual representations for database management, reverse engineering, and version control, ensuring effective data structure organization and synchronization.

Room for Improvement: Blueworks Live can improve its reporting, enhance simulation features, and better integrate with tools like Visio. Its limitations in BPMN 2.0 compliance and lack of on-premises support require attention. Erwin Data Modeler needs support for big data platforms, better reporting, support for non-traditional databases, and more intuitive reverse-engineering processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM Blueworks Live's cloud-based nature simplifies deployment and receives positive feedback for customer service. Erwin Data Modeler, largely on-premises, adds deployment complexity but suits larger infrastructures. Erwin's customer service is praised, though improvements in support processes are suggested.

Pricing and ROI: IBM Blueworks Live offers flexible, cost-effective licensing, ideal for SMEs seeking process digitalization. Some suggest expanding to full BPMS solutions as needs grow. Erwin Data Modeler's higher price reflects its comprehensive data modeling tools, with concurrent licensing making it economical for specialized teams. Its robust features justify the investment for advanced data management needs.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Blueworks Live vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Blueworks Live vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest

April 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

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Ranking in Business Process Design

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Enterprise Architecture Management (3rd)

IBM Blueworks Live

Ranking in Business Process Design

12th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Business Process Design category, the mindshare of erwin Data Modeler by Quest is 2.2%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Blueworks Live is 3.6%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Business Process Design

Featured Reviews

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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AjarMathur

Global Innovation Director at Ernst & Young

An easily scalable and affordable solution that enables users to document and digitize processes with ease

IBM Blueworks is BPMN 2.0 compliant, but it does not adapt to the overarching BPMN 2.0 concepts. There is only one kind of BPMN 2.0 diagram. It is a process diagram. It doesn't have the concept of separate tools, which other products offer. If I had to do a hardcore BPMN 2.0 modeling, the product would have its own reservations. There were features we could not explore from a BPMN 2.0 perspective. Most of the time, people who are shifting from Microsoft Office tools to a digitized way of working still want the reporting capabilities to be strong. Some tools, like ARIS or Signavio, offer customized solutions from the reporting perspective. If I have documented my whole finance process and want to fetch out a complete SOP report in a very customized manner, IBM Blueworks cannot provide it. We have to rely on some other services. So that's one area in which we always struggled, how to really customize the reporting aspects. I understand that we need to keep the tool a little more asset-light. It's very difficult to keep adding many options, but at least a few BPMN 2.0 options were needed. We have been suggesting to IBM that we should have some way of customizing the reporting. At least we should get a custom way of reporting it into different formats like Excel or putting up a logo for one of the clients so that their SAP can be printed that way.

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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 solution is excellent in providing a visual representation of a database and can generate DDL for implementing changes. We use DDL for logical purposes to review with business people, ensuring they have the required fields for processing. We also use it as a data dictionary for the physical data model to understand all the purposes of the terms. This helps us map the logical and physical terms with the business definition to understand our data."

"The visual data models for helping to overcome data source complexity and enabling understanding and collaboration around maintenance and usage are excellent. A picture speaks 1,000 words. Seeing a picture that shows you how the data relates to each other helps you better understand what the data is and how to use it. Pairing that information with a dictionary, which has the definitions of the tables and columns or the entities and attributes, ensures that the users understand what the data is so that they can use it best and most successfully."

"The most valuable features are being able to visualize the data in the diagrams and transform those diagrams into physical database deployments. These features help, specifically, to integrate the data. When the source data is accumulated and modeled, the target model is in erwin and it helps resolve the data integration patterns that are required to map the data to accommodate a model."

"The logical model gives developers, as well as the data modelers, an understanding of exactly how each object interacts with the others, whether a one-to-many, many-to-many, many-to-one, etc."

"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."

"We use the Forward and Reverse Engineering tools to help us speed things up and create things that would have to be done otherwise by hand. E.g., getting a database into a data model format or vice versa."

"Any tool will do diagramming but I think the ability to put the stuff up in a graphical fashion, then think about it, and keep things consistent is what's valuable about it. It's too easy when you're using other methods to not have naming consistent standards and column consistent definitions, et cetera."

"The principal feature that I liked is that the solution has a very graphic interface."

More erwin Data Modeler by Quest pros

"It is a stable solution since there has not been any downtime. Everything loads fast."

"For me, what I find to be the most valuable is its simplicity and the association with Microsoft Office."

"It has the ability to document in different formats. It is not tied to a specific model. You can look at it from different angles and see the intuitive nature of it. It always generates a valid diagram. You cannot create something that is not BPMN compliant."

"The reporting that we can generate from IBM Blueworks Live has been interesting. We found the KPIs, risks, process modeling, format, and colors, to be very good. We use the EY template and it is interesting to generate reporting in this format."

"The solution is stable. All the refreshes run very well."

"You can use if from your mobile device or you can be on the desktop. It doesn't matter. You are always connected. It is cloud-based, so you don't have to install anything."

"It enables decisions based upon processes that we do model, and ultimately move forward with."

"The licenses are transferrable between different users."

More IBM Blueworks Live pros

Cons

"As someone who has used it for a long time, I have seen stability vary from version to version."

"One of the things I've been talking to the erwin team about through the years is that every data model should have the ability to be multi-language... When I was working at Honda, it became very difficult to work with the Japanese teams using just one model. You can have two models, one in English and one in Japanese, but that means you have to keep the updates back and forth, and that always increases the risk of something not being updated."

"There is a lack of local support in the China region."

"The modeling product itself is far and above anything else that I've seen on the market. There are certain inconsistencies when it comes to keeping up with other platforms' databases in the reverse-engineering process. It should also support more database platforms."

"The solution's model mark could be better because it crashes sometimes."

"Some Source official systems give us DDLs to work with and they have contents not required to be part of the DDL before we reverse engineer in the erwin DM. Therefore, we manually make changes to those scripts and edit them, then reverse-engineer within the tool. So, it does take some time to edit these DDL scripts generated by the source operational systems. What I would suggest: It would be helpful if there were a place within the erwin tool to import the file and automatically eliminate all the unnecessary lines of code, and just have the clean code built-in to generate the table/data model."

"It does not have a cloud application."

"The only real complaint I have is the time it takes to do a database comparison on a large model. If they could speed that up, that would be the only thing I can think of that needs improvement."

More erwin Data Modeler by Quest cons

"I wish Blueworks Live had simulations built in, but it doesn't. It also lacks a feature of reporting; ad hoc, drag and drop reporting. A lot of senior people are always asking for reports, and there's no reporting feature within IBM Blueworks."

"It is BPMN-compliant but the tool needs to be more involved to get into a completely 2.0 oriented tool. It has a few things but it's not the complete BPMN model."

"The APIs are great, except the normal business user doesn't know how to create APIs. So it's hard because IBM comes to us as the business users and tell us to create reporting with APIs, except we don't know that, so we have to turn around and flip it to our IT people."

"The objects that the solution creates are not unique."

"IBM Blueworks is BPMN 2.0 compliant, but it does not adapt to the overarching BPMN 2.0 concepts."

"Some of the import functionality was a bit restrictive, in terms of loading data in from other data sources. Something as simple as Excel, loading data tables from Excel, wasn't great. And vice-versa. Some of the export and import functionality with something like Visio - which, I know it's a slightly different tool - but being able to work seamlessly with those other tool sets would've been quite useful. I know it was something that was in the pipeline to be looked at. So that would be useful."

"We would like the ability to add additional custom colors. We would like to color additional items to add notes to the blueprint."

"In the Blue Works Live software boxes and lines are automatically placed by the programme and can't be easily manipulated."

More IBM Blueworks Live cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This company had bought the license for three years, and it's not an individual license. While you can buy a license for each individual, that would be very expensive. There is something called concurrent licenses where you can purchase licenses in bulk and 15 to 20 people can access the license and model. Concurrent licenses are scalable to the number of users and are proportional to the cost."

"The tool is expensive."

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

"erwin has this option where you pay a one-time fee and you have the license for six years, which makes sense because I don't upgrade my database engine every other year. I have an application that depends on it. This is something weird about PowerDesigner. There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fee."

"erwin is expensive compared to other solutions. We are paying almost $6,000 per seat a month."

"The solution is expensive."

"Though the solution is not cheap, it's worth the money."

"The primary reasons that erwin was selected were that it was much more affordable for us [than Embarcadero] and it was easily maintainable."

More erwin Data Modeler by Quest pricing and cost advice

"The solution is very, very cost-effective."

"There are editor licenses that are around 50 euros per month, and contributor licenses that are around 30 euros per month."

"They have a free subscription model that gives a lot of power to the users."

"Based on the licenses purchased, from a footprint perspective, you can have as many people as you want. You have multiple different categories of licenses to keep the cost low."

"Making it less expensive would be good."

"Price wise, IBM Blueworks Live is in the middle range, and I would give it a five out of ten."

"We are seeing ROI from this solution. The solution has saved us time."

"The solution is not very expensive."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Computer Software Company

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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...

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What do you like most about IBM Blueworks Live?

The solution is easy to operate. Also, there is an automatic mode to make the business flow. You don't have to put any lines or arrows in a decision point in IBM Blueworks Live; it's very automatic.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM Blueworks Live?

The solution costs around 600-700 dollars/year, which is quite affordable.

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM Blueworks Live?

Sometimes, the tool is automatic, which can complicate it, but once you're accustomed to manipulating it, you can use it very effectively.

See all answers

Comparisons

SAP PowerDesigner vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Compared 31% of the time

IDERA ER/Studio vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Compared 18% of the time

Lucidchart vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Compared 15% of the time

Visio vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Compared 8% of the time

Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect vs erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Compared 7% of the time

More erwin Data Modeler by Quest Competitors

Visio vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 32% of the time

SAP Signavio Process Manager vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 18% of the time

Lucidchart vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 15% of the time

ARIS Cloud vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 11% of the time

Camunda vs IBM Blueworks Live

Compared 7% of the time

More IBM Blueworks Live Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Modeler by Quest

April 2025

Download erwin Data Modeler by Quest product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Blueworks Live

March 2025

Download IBM Blueworks Live product report

Also Known As

erwin DM

IBM Lombardi Blueprint

Overview

erwin pioneered data modeling, and erwin Data Modeler (erwin DM) remains trusted, award-winning software for data modeling and database design, automating complex and time-consuming tasks. Use it to discover and document any data from anywhere for consistency, clarity and artifact reuse across large-scale data integration, master data management, metadata management, Big Data, business intelligence and analytics initiatives – all while supporting data governance and intelligence efforts.

erwin by Quest

IBM Blueworks Live is a cloud-based business process modeling tool that helps you discover, map and document your processes. It is easy to use, allowing you to learn and perform business process modeling in minutes.

With Blueworks Live you can:

Simplify business process modeling
Quickly build business processes in a straightforward, cloud-based interface designed for both IT and business users.

Improve process efficiency and accuracy
A central process repository eliminates version control and consistency issues by providing users real-time access to process workflows.

Enhance cross-team collaboration
A shared team workspace engages all business process owners, encouraging cross-team participation and continuous process improvement.

IBM

Sample Customers

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

Cloudsoft Corp. Ltd., Bayer, S¾SS, Essex County Council

Buyer's Guide

IBM Blueworks Live vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest

April 2025

Free Report: IBM Blueworks Live vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Blueworks Live vs. erwin Data Modeler by Quest and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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