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LeanIX vs SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer 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

LeanIX
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP Enterprise Architecture...
Ranking in Enterprise Architecture Management
24th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Enterprise Architecture Management category, the mindshare of LeanIX is 15.9%, up from 12.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Enterprise Architecture Designer is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Enterprise Architecture Management
 

Featured Reviews

Umit Sengul - PeerSpot reviewer
A platform that facilitates efficient IT architecture management and integration, improving organizational coordination and decision-making
LeanIX is primarily used to create and manage architectural models, link capabilities, activities, and products and generate comprehensive reports. It serves as a central platform for overseeing the IT landscape within EON, a large organization, streamlining operations and enhancing governance…
Artur Chyziewicz - PeerSpot reviewer
Great training available with traceability a key feature
I use this solution to model enterprise software architecture. We are customers of SAP and an educational organization in Poland.  Traceability is a fantastic feature.  They should upgrade the algorithm. The solution currently has an old algorithm and there are now free tools on the market that…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features are the clean user interface and the fact sheet feature in Application Portfolio Management. The tool integrates well with ServiceNow, which is the usual CMDB platform."
"It offers neat visualization and referencing functionality while enabling the creation of landscape maps and showing the relationship between different applications."
"The most valuable features include the reporting capabilities and the LeanIX Academy's educational resources."
"For the reporting capabilities, LeanIX provides dashboards for different levels, including CXO dashboards. There are plenty of dashboards for reporting."
"The usability is very high. It almost looks like a Facebook for Enterprise architecture, it's pretty nice. It's HTML5 based. The repository is very easy. It has 10 different ways of sorting the objects you have in your architecture repository. Maintaining new data or to add data to your repository is very easy."
"Among the most valuable features are the easy-to-use interface and the ability to get quick results... Many tools that I have seen are great for technical people and for giving technical and business information as well, but they're not as friendly and easy as LeanIX... It works well for both technical and business users. It provides a good combination, enabling you to quickly put valuable information in for both technical and non-technical people and derive results."
"Interfaces well with downstream systems of data."
"The solution provides a single window view of business, application, data, and technology views of the IT ecosystem."
"Traceability is a fantastic feature."
 

Cons

"Improvements in user interface simplicity could be made, particularly with the reporting and filtering capabilities."
"LeanIX experiences a lot of server timeouts. Nearly every transaction needs to be done twice due to these issues."
"They should improve the out of the box connectors that they provide. They should see if clients are really ready to adapt them."
"What would make LeanIX better is more variety in terms of reporting, and more flexibility with its data importing feature."
"I find LeanIX's pricing expensive for the functionality it offers. However, with the acquisition by SAP, the pricing might become more affordable due to scale and tiered application pricing. Currently, it offers different tiers for the first 400 applications: 400 to 600 and 600 to 1,000, making it expensive from a pricing standpoint."
"The whole integration architecture view of interfaces/data exchange could be improved."
"They're probably positioned pretty well. I hope that they would not focus that much on the business architecture, and they would focus more on the overall cloud strategy and how we can leverage multi-cloud and transition back and forth from other cloud providers. With a lot of current vendors, you get locked in with one cloud, and then you try to migrate to someone else, and it becomes very problematic. What they need to do is to look at the overall data strategy, and they probably need to amplify their data strategy, especially around multi-cloud."
"Does a poor job of being able to allocate detailed costings to components within the network."
"The algorithm is outdated and should be upgraded."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is very good. We definitely get good value for the money."
"LeanIX uses application-based account licensing, where the cost is multiplied by the number of applications in the software implementation."
"The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is competitive and in line with other products."
"The tool needs to include more flexible licensing options. We do not use the tool all the time. So pricing should be considered only when we use the tool."
"It cost me $91,000 a year for 300 applications. For any enterprise, 300 applications are minimal, as many have well over 1,000 applications."
"As the tool is cloud-based, its cost is more affordable."
"I would rate the pricing a one out of ten, where one is cheap, and ten is expensive."
"There is a sweet spot of where they need to be on pricing right now. They could go up a little bit in pricing, but it has to do with the cost savings, and it has to do with the practitioners using it. I use it where I get cost savings and I can justify it, but they probably have the ability to flex a 10% up channel on their sales on that. So, they could increase their settle price, not their offering price, when they sell. They can probably hold that up a little bit higher than it is because there are cost savings that we can drive from it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
6%
Educational Organization
15%
University
13%
Comms Service Provider
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Any experience with Strategic Project Portfolio Management Solutions?
Hi @Cheryl Joseph ​Looking at the crossover between Project and Portfolio management with EA, then Planview could be a good choice. If looking at Portfolio Management from an EA perspective then Le...
What do you like most about LeanIX?
The ability to import data and generate reports from it. That's where its power lies.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for LeanIX?
LeanIX is associated with high costs. It cost me $91,000 a year for 300 applications. For any enterprise, 300 applications are minimal, as many have well over 1,000 applications. The first pricing ...
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Also Known As

No data available
SAP EA Designer
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

adidas, Bosch, Chico's, Haworth, Helvetia, KuKa, Osram, Telekom, TUI, Santander, Swarovski, Vaillant, 7Eleven, and Zalando.
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Find out what your peers are saying about SAP LeanIX, Sparx Systems, erwin by Quest and others in Enterprise Architecture Management. Updated: February 2025.
838,737 professionals have used our research since 2012.