LeanIX Reviews

The product has matured a lot over time. They've moved up into the enterprise architecture realm very well. They're still able to provide substantial value on application portfolio management (APM), and in doing that, I am able to drive cost savings to justify the purpose of the tool. From that standpoint, it's a very good tool, and then we're able to get a lot of the enterprise architecture facts from that.

The most valuable feature would be application portfolio management, which is where they came from, but over time, they have got artificial intelligence. They built up a very good repository. If I identify a system by name, from historical information, oftentimes, they can tell me that this is deployed with this number of CPUs and they can give me a really good profile of the application for me to put it into a change management database with very little effort.

They're moving forward pretty well. I'm seeing a little bit more focus on the business architecture side than they are currently focused on, but the pendulum for that is shifting back to more of a traditional enterprise architecture view, so they're probably positioned pretty well for that. Over the next eighteen months, you're going to see people starting to move back towards more of the traditional enterprise architecture view versus the MDA-type business view of the world. 

In terms of focusing a little bit more on the business side, there's a short-term window. By the time they focus on it, the window would have closed, so their current trajectory is very good. Some of them are trying to position with the heavy, what I refer to as, MDA-flavor on how business architecture is being addressed, and I see the pendulum has already swung out to that area, and it's starting to come back. So, if you're building for that now, it's not going to be that significant when you get to market with it. 

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.

I've been using it off and on for about five years.

I have not had to deal with their tech support. Most of the people who have been working with me on it have been very comfortable with it. Anytime we've had questions, they've been very helpful. It was years ago when we had to reach out to them, but they were very supportive, and normally, it was the person in the sales cycle who was supporting us. So, it was very high-touch when we reached out to them.

The actual initial time to value is about three days. I can get it installed if I have someone who knows what they're doing with it. They can import my data because normally, we have the data laying around somewhere, and I can get through and identify overlaps in my portfolio within probably three business days so that it gives me a good value. 

Their go-to-market is rather interesting where you can do a pilot. In the pilot itself, you can pretty well identify enough cost savings to justify the full purchase. From that, it puts them in a very good position to then be able to save you additional components and make your enterprise architecture more robust.

I have not done any recent ones. Most of my data was from around three years ago, and I was getting a full return on investment in under six months. Normally, I'm looking for at least around eight months. That's normally what I'm expecting, but anything better than that is really surprising. With some of the more expensive tools, we're looking at a two-year ROI. They can move up their price just a little bit based on that.

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.

I would rate LeanIX a solid nine out of ten. I've recommended it for usage to probably seven customers, and four of them purchased it.

Our company is a partner with the solution and we use it to provide our clients with enterprise architecture management.

Partnering with LeanIX has given an edge to our Enterprise Architecture Consultants.

The out-of-the-box Enterprise Architecture artifacts are accurate and intelligent.  

The solution has a very useful assessment tool that automatically populates from input data to produce a detailed analysis of customer's environments. 

Sandbox access is provided across all architects. 

The solution needs to incorporate an AI/ML data intelligence tool that gets smarter with industry wise enterprise engagements and provides suggestive data input when optimum data sources not available for a new engagement. 

The solution has good security but should be wary of publishing services over internet for open consumption, because that will increase the attack surface. 

I have been using the solution for nine months. 

The solution is stable. 

Technical support is very good with no issues because they have an engagement model across sales, marketing, and support. 

The setup was handled by the solution's technicians so I cannot speak to its complexity.

The implementation was also handled by the solution's technicians and everything runs fine.

The solution's pricing is based on a licensing model that is competitive and in line with other products. 

I rate pricing a ten out of ten because there is good value. 

Most enterprise architecture solutions include standard features with little difference between products. 

All of the leading EA Tools depends on CMDB and ServiceNow for source data. 

We recommend the solution to customers because we are partners and prefer to use it. 

But it all depends on the assessment scope and what is the best fit. Some customers are not ready to move to a new enterprise solution or want to stick with what they already have in place. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We are system integrators for LeanIX. LeanIX works in the petroleum industry towards the production of petroleum products, supply and demand, supply chains. The company was looking for an end-to-end view of its environment and business capabilities across the organization. LeanIX is indicative of that process. I'm a company partner. 

This product has the ability to interface with downstream systems of data, whether primary or secondary. It's one of the better in the market place. It's an extremely useful system to enable visualization of your end-to-end flow and to look at future proofing. It's got great graphics and is new, modern, and completely cloud-based. It's efficient to put into production quickly. 

LeanIX does a poor job of being able to allocate detailed costings to components within the network, rather using an average base, and it won't let you extend its data structure to include detailed pricing information. That is not sufficient in today's world and climate. The biggest issue we have is that the support staff are in Europe and we're in Southeast Asia so it's difficult getting support. 

They need to be able to provide extensions to their metadata structure so you can create functions but you can't add metadata structure, so you actually have to get creative and start using additional add ons or add on libraries. It takes away from maximizing the use of LeanIX. 

We've been using LeanIX for about three years. 

The solution is highly scalable. Scalability is only limited by the license type so it's about the number of active users as opposed to the functional component. 

There are difficulties with support because our company is based in Southeast Asia and the support is based in Europe. 

This is an SaaS product so it's on my network and the maintenance is automatic because of that. 

I recommend this solution but it's important to engage the business first and acknowledge that they're the owners of the data. Engaging the business significantly improves the return on investment. I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We use the tool's Enterprise Asset Management and Application Portfolio Management. 

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. 

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.

LeanIX is stable. 

The solution is scalable. However, the tiered pricing structure makes it expensive as you scale up. Despite the cost, the clean interface and UI make it accessible even to those who are not very familiar with enterprise architecture.

The technical support is decent, with gold, silver, and platinum levels. Some of my clients have platinum support, which is very good. They offer in-person advice and join us over conference calls, like Teams, which is helpful.

My client has the highest level of support, platinum level, so they pay the maximum amount. The support is really quick.

I rated it eight out of ten because sometimes our queries lack answers. They say they'll return to us, and we must follow up separately.

Positive

The tool's deployment is easy. It is easier than other tools and takes about three to four months to implement, depending on the number of applications and fact sheets. A complete deployment can take up to six months.

LeanIX is very clean and intuitive. The website offers good training solutions, so you can start using it even if you're not an enterprise architect by profession. It's one of the easiest tools to learn and use. I rate the product a ten out of ten. 

LeanIX is an enterprise architecture management tool. In general, enterprise architecture is a comprehensive practice and this tool can be used for many aspects of the practice. 

Primarily, the tool manages  Business Capabilities, Application, Technology and  Data catalogues and linkages between them. The base package also includes the following catalogues that can be linked as well:

User Groups - as the name suggests, user groups definition with different attributes

Projects/Initiatives - very helpful for roadmapping exercises

Interfaces - useful for various integrations modelling

Technical Stack/Domains - for technologies/software/tools categorization

Providers - providers of the items in the IT Components list 

In addition, there are add-on tools for the lifecycles of third-party tools  - useful for technology/software currency management on the corporate level.

Before LeanIX was implemented in our company, there might have been a scenario where we had a security project and needed to know all our APIs, corporate-wide, because we wanted to set corporate standards. If we wanted to know all our API's from all our product lines, it would have taken a couple of days to connect to the departmental or line-of-business lead architects and ask them, "Okay guys, can you list me all the APIs that you're exposing?" Now, it's a matter of spending a couple of minutes and we have our list. We just do a search.

It's used extensively for analysis of mergers and acquisitions. In that scenario, the users include infrastructure people, infrastructure directors, enterprise architects, and plenty of other architects as well. They work at combining the overall footprint and view of technologies and the way we're doing things at Teranet, and how they match with the other company. That is one of the major use cases for this kind of system, and we have seen significant time savings when it comes to mergers and acquisitions.

LeanIX is a tool for larger companies that need to manage a larger application portfolio, in addition to inventory. Our company has a number of lines of business. When we're working on a strategy at the corporate level, we need the kind of comprehensive analysis and global view that it provides. That's what it's really good at quick artifacts for global analysis. 

Usually, companies maintain lists of applications and technologies in different tools; sometimes just in Excel files. It takes the same amount of time to put the information into LeanIX, but the output is much more comprehensive through the reports it provides. You don't even need to build them because they come with the product.

Once you have an inventory of your platforms and third-party tools, you can show them through the LeanIX Self-Service Portal. You can use it to filter based on whatever you'd like. We use it for building our approved-software list, just from the entries that were already there, without spending even one more second on it.

Among the most valuable features are the easy-to-use interface and the ability to get quick results. Setting up an enterprise architecture practice, in general, is a lengthy process, and it's a learning process in many ways. A tool that is very open with a lot of capabilities can sometimes look intimidating. This tool doesn't look intimidating. EA practice is not only for technical people and that makes the usability of an EA tool like this very important.

We do talk a lot and engage with many business users and they need a little bit different approach than technical people. From that point of view, many tools that I have seen are great for technical people and for giving business information as well, but they're not as friendly and easy as LeanIX.

From an adoption perspective, it's much easier than Sparx Systems or Orbis. Those tools are more open but, at the same time, they are more sophisticated and more intimidating for non-technical people. LeanIX is built with a non-technical audience in mind as well. 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. The results may be a bit more predefined, but you can configure it as well.

It also has very good tagging abilities and a good search so you can segment your inventory based on your own preferences, not only according to something predefined by the vendor.

LeanIX is different from most of the other enterprise architecture tools. On the one hand, it's not as open as other tools, but from another perspective, it gives you a number of predefined ways to organize your inventory and your linkages. 

It has a number of configurable reports or artifacts that are created based on the information that you input. The tools for creating automatic artifacts are pretty good, including diagrams and reports. At the end of the day, when it comes to inventory, you need to be able to report on it, provide an artifact, and show how many of each item you have.

And if you need to build something that is customized, it provides a very comprehensive API so you can build your own reports and tools, and configure the system as you wish. It opens up views from every angle. It does take a little bit of technical knowledge, specifically Node.js, to build it, but it's not too complicated. It provides a GraphQL API, which means it's not too difficult to build your own reports.

The visualization of your information is a very good aspect of the solution as well, the way you can share the information with others. It has multiple ways of doing so.

There are also integrations, as add-ons, with ServiceNow. It has the ability to go through all your environments and find everything you have installed. That can help you automate the gathering of the inventory list of your technologies. ServiceNow can use the definitions of the products you have defined in LeanIX. One important caveat here is that the CMDB and the ServiceNow part need to be managed well to make it happen.

There is another very useful add-on that connects your technology list with Technopedia. When you link to an item in Technopedia, it will bring all the information about the vendor's platform. And if there are changes, it will change yours as well, such as life cycles or when the product is going to be sunset. Valuable information can be taken from Technopedia in a very easy way.

There are other add-ons that we don't use. One of them is with Signavio, which is a BPM tool. If you have it, I think that add-on would be very valuable. 

LeanIX has another offering that we are just looking at, to do the same type of discovery for cloud platforms. That means that with the correct configuration, you can monitor what kinds of cloud services you are using and have that information as building-blocks for your enterprise architecture.

It provides diagramming, but it is not the best diagramming tool that I've ever used. It's there. It can use all the linkages you already have, which is very handy. But it's not the best tool.

Even though that feature is not the best, for diagramming purposes it integrates with Lucidchart. That brings together the power of Lucidchart and all the information in LeanIX. From a visual perspective, it's great. We use that to make the diagramming better.

I don't think LeanIX will try to create a great diagramming tool. It's a basic tool that could definitely be improved, but it looks like they took a little bit of a different approach, by integrating with a leading diagramming tool.

Another area for improvement is that when you're starting to look into more advanced information, using the solution's APIs and its customizations, documentation for that specific aspect is not very good. There is not too much support built into the offering for that aspect, for a developer. As a simple example, I wanted to create a custom report. Using the documentation that was provided, I was not able to do that, and I have been a developer for more than 25 years, in addition to being an enterprise architect.

After I talked to a representative, they did bring some technical people into the discussion. They could even make that a service where I could say to them, "I would like to have your support for one day to set up the environment, to give me a couple of examples, and go over this." They acknowledge that they're looking into this, but they don't have it. It would be a great service, even a paid service. I would be willing to pay for it. It's not a matter of the complexity of the development part, it was more the complexity of the setup.

So they lack good information in that area, but it looks like they're working on it. And they are very open. I work with two success managers from LeanIX, and both of them are very responsive to our requirements.

I have been using LeanIX for about half a year, but very extensively.

It was a new implementation when I was hired as enterprise architect at Teranet. One of the first tasks I had was to implement the enterprise architecture framework, and this was a part of that. We are implementing a lot with LeanIX, from an enterprise architecture perspective.

The selection of the tool was done before my time at the company, but I'm very versed in the tool now. I feel that we are really pushing the limits of it, very much.

Stability and uptime are good. 

Keep in mind that this kind of solution doesn't affect the runtime of any of your products. It's an information system only, with information about metadata, and about your organization, and not about things you do. 

It's a browser-based solution, so sometimes it's a little bit slow, but that slowness goes away pretty quickly as well. They share the monitoring of the uptime of their systems as well, so you are aware if something is happening. In the last half a year, there were no alerts at all, but they will alert you on outages.

It's a pretty scalable solution, even though there is a slight pre-built reports' performance degrade when the number of factsheets involved comes close to 1000 

The technical support is very good.

Sometimes, when you're trying to make configuration changes or do customization that you think is included in your package, those things are not included. But from a technical support perspective, what they provided me with were plenty of workarounds. Even when I was asking a simple question, they could have just said, "It's not included in your package, sorry." But one time, the guy did some custom development and said, "Try this. You will be able to do it." They give great support for it.

Our company does use Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, but that's more for application architecture. We didn't have much of an enterprise architecture practice. I was hired to set it up. And that was the primary reason LeanIX was adapted. It was a strategic initiative from the CIO and other C levels. The tool was purchased to promote the EA process in general.

The initial setup was very straightforward. When you know the practice of enterprise architecture and you know what you're building, it's very easy. There is no complication when setting it up. 

It would probably be very complicated if you don't know EA. You do need to know what your objectives are. But when you know it, it's very one-to-one. All aspects of the implementation of this tool are mapped one-to-one. For someone who knows the subject, it's easy to refer to it because it's built-in a very predictive way.

It's a cloud solution so there is not that much you need to do. Setting it up was easy. To get an agreement about the setup was something else. We have almost 60 architects who had to come to an agreement. But the setup itself was very easy.

It has an export function from Excel spreadsheets, which is the usual place for maintaining lists, and that helps a lot with bulk updates. That's one of the great tools that it has.

It also has some configurations available so you can at least change names and labels. You do need an add-on for that, but it's a pretty cost-effective add-on. It's not that expensive and you can adapt labels to whatever meanings you have in your organization, and how you prefer to label things. That was part of what made it a very quick setup and promoted better understanding and adoption.

When I started to implement integrations with our internal systems, I didn't find it very difficult. The ServiceNow was one of the most involved integrations, but we did it in one day with the help of their technical support. It started to work right away.

Because of the nature of our practice, we implemented it first for our IT departments. Now, there are a myriad of people working with it, including all kinds of architects, lead architects, senior architects; there are some directors of development, directors, managers, lead developers, and QA analysts as well. 

We haven't rolled it out that much yet for non-IT personnel, but that is the plan for the end of this year. They are already going through the training for it. We are expecting to have plenty of sales and marketing people on it. 

It is used a lot for our CIO, and for presentations to our board of directors, for more strategic initiatives and plans.

We haven't yet calculated a return on investment because it's only been half a year. We plan to look at it on a three-year basis. You can't anticipate ROI right away, but we have seen the benefits I have mentioned.

I do anticipate that there will be a considerable ROI.

There are two pricing models. One is based on the number of what they call Fact Sheets, which are a representation of the things in your company, such as applications, technologies, and business capabilities. They are like a profile for each entity that you want to bring in and pricing is based on the number of those entities that you bring in. That's what we purchased. 

They introduced another pricing model based only on the number of applications that you bring in.

In the first model, they give you fewer capabilities in the package, but you can use it for a larger number of entities. In the other offering, they give you more capabilities, maybe even way more capabilities, but you need to form your information in a way that you are conscious of how many applications you put in. 

The second way of doing things is very new. It was introduced a couple of months ago. When I looked at it for our use, it was not going to give us too much benefit. First of all, we were set up, and all our agreements were made based on a different licensing model. If we were to go back and remodel things, it would be a big effort so we decided not to go with it. We decided to stay with the pricing model that they had originally, based on the number of building blocks, not just applications.

It all depends on how you put together the inventory. You need to be cognizant of what kinds of information you will need and what kinds searches you foresee. It's a tool. There should be an enterprise architect who understands what outcome he is looking for. You can then build that outcome using Lean IX.

It's a tool that has a specific way of working. You need to understand the tool very well and determine if it works for your use case, for whatever you're trying to achieve. So first of all, you need to know what you want to achieve.

You will need to spend time to get an agreement, internally, on how you model your business architecture and your application and infrastructure architecture, to build better expectations of outcomes of the system. There will definitely be internal work to get to a collaborative agreement. Once you do have that agreement and you understand how LeanIX works — and it is not a very complicated system — then it's easy to see how it will work for you, or at least how much it can bend.

When you look into it, your first impression might be, "Oh, it's a little bit more of a closed system." Understand that this aspect does help you with adoption, and then look at the customization techniques and whether you can support them. Do you have the skillset, someone who will be able to work with it if you want to expand the system? That will be someone who works in Node.js and someone who knows GraphQL.

If you're just at the beginning, in addition to those questions, I would go a little bit more in-depth into what exactly is included in the package, because sometimes that's not very intuitive. Ask questions about what is included and how much it will benefit you. For example, the ServiceNow add-on is a little bit more expensive and you need to understand if you are ready for it. Otherwise, you will be paying for nothing.

Its overall ease-of-use plays a big role in adoption. As usual, you need to sell this tool, and the practice of EA in general, to the people who will contribute to it, and that's where LeanIX is really valuable. It helps you to drive the practice. They have put good effort into making it very easy to automate things and that is a valuable part of establishing an EA practice and for the adoption of it. It's not only the only part of that process. It cannot build the whole EA practice. You can't do that with one tool.

It offers neat visualization and referencing functionality while enabling the creation of landscape maps and showing the relationship between different applications. It allows logical mapping and basic architecture design, making it similar to other tools used for creating schemas. The tool is easy to adopt and has a low barrier to entry in terms of usability. Overall, it is a user-friendly and comprehensive solution for optimizing IT landscapes.

I highly appreciate its usability and capabilities for enterprise asset management.

It would be beneficial to have additional features and capabilities to enhance mapping between applications, especially across domains where the relationships may not be direct. Adding a basic intelligence layer that could suggest connections and dependencies based on labels metadata assigned to applications in the future would save time.

I have been using the solution for a year.

We didn't face any issues regarding the performance stability.

Being mostly used as a repository, documentation and design solution, we didn't have scalability issues with the solution.

I had experience with similar tools in the past and I consider LeanIX to be one of the best alternatives on the market.

Prior to choosing LeanIX, I would suggest verifying the ability to adopt it and its features to utilize its full potential. It does require significant expertise and technical proficiency, as it is a tool primarily used by a limited number of experts in the architecture field. I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use the solution for:

• Application Portfolio Management
• Portfolio Rationalization
• Democratizing the EA decisions rolled up to CIO/CxO Dashboards
• Model the current state architecture and prepare for the target state architecture
• Business architecture-related activities like business capability model, and landscape views for change management/transformation/tech refresh. 

It helps to map the EA components with project/program management data, costs, and where to invest next (risks and opportunities) based on the TIME framework (tolerate, invest, migrate, eliminate).

It increases the synergy of architects, project managers, business analysts, and infra. The solution provides a single window view of business, application, data, and technology views of the IT ecosystem. Now the stakeholders collaborate more effectively like a workbench like the system LeanIX, so the data and insights that the CIO office wants are projected in real-time; it's become more dynamic instead of static Visio diagrams/PowerPoint presentations. The decisions are taken more democratically and as a shared responsibility, with transparency of how the data is collated and presented as a wholistic picture to senior management.

The most valuable aspects of the solution include its factsheets, easy data capturing, coarse-grained security access control, surveys for automatic data collection and embedding into the platform data (mapping to meta models), technology life cycle management (with industry data) out-of-the-box dashboards like business capability modeling, matrix reports, etc.

It offers out-of-the-box data sync with ServiceNow (ITSM platform), and REST API for integration.

There's a cloud integration for listing the services/applications an organization uses in AWS, to provide a single window listing in the EA Platform for SSO, license cost, etc.

There can be more factsheets covering technology capability, application capability, application services, etc. 

The whole integration architecture view of interfaces/data exchange could be improved. It would be better if the diagrams generated could be exported as Visio files. 

We need a way to create programmable/customizable dashboards/reports. 

The whole underlying meta-model should have been exposed for easy integrations; it's not good at documentation for easy integration (like AWS Lambda/Python/C#) in the use case of writing a batch application for data sync. 

The export of dashboards is not good or useful for printing or projecting.

We've used the solution for the last three years, starting with Enterprise Architecture Management, then Transformation, Value Stream, etc.

There are frequent releases of the application. In many cases, the vendor helps with underlying existing data porting as well. Availability is not an issue.

It is scalable system since it is a fully cloud-based SaaS solution.

Often the tickets are responded to within a day. We have dedicated success managers as well that help make this solution really able to deliver value to the organization.

Positive

It is built using bleeding-edge technologies hence the application is more intuitive.

It is a fully SaaS-based solution and is very straightforward to get this delivered as a portal and start using it. The exception is taking into consideration the sustainability needed for keeping data alive with data sync of other ITOP systems.

We implemented the solution as a team (no vendor involved) and kept the success managers of LeanIX highly engaged to get online quickly and effectively.

We were able to optimize/rationalize 30% of the applications.

LeanIX licensing is calculated per application count; hence the cost will need to be assessed upfront while keeping in mind that the M&A or business strategy changes/roadmaps must be anticipated for the next few years.

I have used both Essential Projects and Avolution Abacus. Both are suitable for different types of organisations; LeanIX being a SaaS-based solution, helps and is quick to market with a bit more intelligence in-built than a typical reporting solution.

Users should see dashboards before buying and see it aligns with the CIO organization style of leadership expectations. It is very important to sustainability that users are keeping the system up to date by automating/integrating with other apps in the ecosystem/ITOPs. 

I am an enterprise architecture consultant. 

LeanIX gathers all of the customer's applications into a single repository, enabling them to analyze and rationalize their applications, saving money.

I like LeanIX's ease of use in general.

The modeling could be improved.

I have used LeanIX for five years.

I rate LeanIX 10 out of 10 for stability. 

I rate LeanIX 10 out of 10 for scalability.

I rate LeanIX technical support 10 out of 10. 

Positive

Deploying LeanIX is straightforward. Depending on the organization's size, it tasks two or three people to deploy. 

I've seen an ROI with LeanIX.

The cost is average.

I rate LeanIX 10 out of 10. If you plan to implement LeanIX, you should get someone who understands their industry and business, not just the tool.