Looking for a WinDesign (CECIMA) alternative?
What is the best alternative to legacy modeling tools? Discover why Boldo is the choice for companies seeking modernity and collaboration.
Modernize your Enterprise Architecture approach
WinDesign (CECIMA)
WinDesign (CECIMA) is recognized as a legacy benchmark for modeling in France, praised for its methodological rigor and adherence to standards (Merise, BPMN). However, this power comes with an aging interface and technical complexity that limits adoption. Its workflow, often perceived as rigid and workstation-centric, unintentionally creates barriers to collaboration with business teams.
Boldo reinvents the experience by offering a modern, SaaS-native platform. By replacing technical austerity with a 'Consumer Grade' interface, Boldo democratizes access to the enterprise repository. Architecture is no longer just for documenting the status quo, but becomes a dynamic communication lever, enabling seamless alignment between IT experts and strategic decision-makers.
Move from siloed modeling to collective intelligence
While WinDesign allows for a central repository, its traditional architecture tends to isolate the architect at their workstation. Sharing mechanisms, often based on static exports or restricted access, slow down information flow and make spontaneous contribution from stakeholders difficult.
Boldo breaks these silos with a platform built for real-time collaboration. Like modern productivity tools, multiple users can co-create, comment, and iterate on models simultaneously. This approach fosters shared governance and transforms architecture into a living enterprise project.
Reduce complexity to engage business teams
While WinDesign's functional density satisfies methodology experts, it is a major barrier for occasional users. Complex navigation and highly technical vocabulary create cognitive overload, preventing business teams from owning the models and validating processes without extensive prior training.
Conversely, Boldo focuses on immediate onboarding. The clean interface hides underlying complexity to present only relevant information. By making navigation intuitive, Boldo allows any collaborator to understand the impact of a decision, ensuring mass adoption across the organization.
Turn your diagrams into strategic narratives
WinDesign’s approach excels at producing standardized diagrams essential for technical documentation. However, these deliverables are often difficult to interpret for a non-technical audience, lacking the narrative context needed to support executive decision-making.
Boldo integrates advanced Storytelling features. The platform allows you to script architecture views to tell a clear story: the current state, the target, and the transformation roadmap. This ability to contextualize technical data makes it a powerful tool for convincing leadership and uniting teams around a shared vision.
Compare Boldo with 10+ other Enterprise Architecture modelling and mapping solutions.
Designed for collaboration across all stakeholders
Architecture should not live in silos. With Boldo, business teams, IT and leadership work on the same views, in a shared and living workspace. Everyone explores, comments and aligns in real time. Architecture becomes a collective alignment tool, directly understood and adopted across the organization.
Built on European data sovereignty
Boldo is a French platform, with data hosted in Europe on Scaleway, a trusted sovereign cloud infrastructure. Your architecture repository stays fully under your control, in an environment designed to meet regulatory requirements. No ambiguity, no hidden dependencies: clear hosting, clear rules, full transparency.
A flexible metamodel that adapts to your reality
Every organization has its own constraints and maturity. Boldo relies on a flexible and evolving metamodel that adapts to your context instead of forcing a rigid framework. Start simple, enrich progressively, and let your architecture evolve at your own pace.
Visual storytelling at the core of the experience
In Boldo, diagramming is not an afterthought, it's the heart of the product. Views are intuitive, visually refined and immediately readable. Clear hierarchies, smooth navigation and embedded diagrams make architecture easy to grasp and easy to share, from executive committees to hands-on workshops.
Fair and transparent pricing
Boldo offers Pro and Team plans in self-service, with public and predictable per-user pricing. No opaque licenses, no hidden bundles, no constant renegotiation. From day one, you know what you pay, what you get, and how it scales.
We are here to drive adoption and value
Customer Success is central to our approach. We work closely with teams to build an architecture governance that is useful, alive and truly adopted. Responsive support, continuous exchanges and a long-term vision ensure architecture becomes a concrete decision-making asset, not a theoretical exercise.
WinDesign (CECIMA) vs Boldo
| WinDesign (CECIMA) | Boldo | |
|---|---|---|
Pricing | ||
| Pricing model | Based on assets | User and modelled asset packs |
| Price positioning | $$$ | $$$ |
| Free trial | ||
| Self-service offering | ||
| Enterprise offering | ||
User experience | ||
| Modern interface | ||
| Consistency across views | ||
| Time to implement | ~ 3 to 9 months | ~ 1 to 6 weeks |
| Learning curve for architects | Very Steep | Very fast |
| Learning curve for business / C-level users | Steep | Very fast |
Collaboration | ||
| Access rights management | Simple | Very fine grained (fields and relationships) |
| Real-time multi-user modelling | ||
| Comments linked to objects and views | ||
| Mentions and notifications | ||
| Object-level history and versioning | ||
Modelling | ||
| Custom object type creation | ||
| Object hierarchies | ||
| Custom properties per object type | ||
| Custom relationships | ||
| Process modelling | ||
| ArchiMate metamodel support | ||
| Framework-agnostic modelling | ||
Storytelling and visualisation | ||
| Dynamic views (auto-synchronised) | ||
| Nested maps and diagrams | ||
| Data visualisation | ||
| Auto-generated diagrams | ||
| Diagram in ""conception"" mode | ||
| Bi-directional data ↔ visuals synchronisation | ||
| Storytelling mode and scripted views | ||
| Multi-dimensional impact analysis | ||
Data and automation | ||
| Public API | ||
| Batch imports (CSV) | ||
| Native connectors | ||
| Data validation rules | (Q4 2026) | |
| Automatic triggers on changes | (Q4 2026) | |
| SaaS hosting | ||
| Sovereign hosting | ||
| On-premise hosting | ||
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