Meet an alternative to BlueDolphin
How does BlueDolphin compare to Boldo when it comes to adoption across IT, business, and leadership teams What role do visual clarity and UX play in driving transformation initiatives?
Why do some organizations choose Boldo over BlueDolphin ?
BlueDolphin application view
BlueDolphin, collaboration through structured information
Published by the Dutch vendor ValueBlue, BlueDolphin has established itself as a collaborative SaaS platform designed to facilitate information sharing between architects and business contributors. The platform emphasises structured data collection, notably through questionnaires and record-based views, with the objective of making Enterprise Architecture more accessible and better distributed across the organisation. This approach is effective for consolidating and standardising information at scale, while remaining primarily focused on data structuring and analysis, rather than visual storytelling aimed at strategic alignment.
Boldo, visual collaboration with European sovereignty by design
Boldo shares this collaborative ambition while taking a distinctly different path, combining a design-first approach with native European data sovereignty. The platform is built to transform architectural data into immediately actionable visual artefacts, fostering alignment between IT, business teams, and executive leadership. By unifying collaboration, readability, and sovereignty, Boldo positions architecture as a shared decision-making asset, not just a repository of information.
Framework-agnostic by design
BlueDolphin offers structured and coherent data models, but customisation can become more complex as soon as organisations need to introduce specific dimensions, such as sovereignty criteria, ESG indicators, or advanced HR linkages.
Boldo is built on a fully flexible, no-code metamodel, with no technical constraints. Objects, attributes, and relationships can be created and adjusted freely, allowing organisations to start with a focused use case and progressively extend the platform enterprise-wide. This flexibility supports organic adoption, without locking teams into the vendor’s predefined vision.
From data entry to decision-driven storytelling
BlueDolphin relies heavily on form-based data entry and survey mechanisms to collect information. This approach is effective for structuring data, but visual restitution for executive committees or kick-offs often requires additional manual synthesis and formatting efforts.
Boldo is designed to make data a native communication and decision-making tool. Visualisations are automatically generated, enabling teams to move instantly from a raw inventory to a roadmap, an impact graph, or a clear transformation view. Architecture is no longer just stored, it is narrated, enabling faster strategic alignment and collective decision-making.
Trust, governance, and European sovereignty
Enterprise Architecture data often includes highly sensitive information, such as application landscapes, critical dependencies, and exposure points. In regulated or strategic contexts, organisations increasingly require clear guarantees regarding data governance and legal protection.
Boldo guarantees 100 percent European data sovereignty by design. The platform is hosted on Scaleway, a European cloud provider, ensuring that strategic architecture data is fully governed by European data protection and privacy regulations. This approach provides strong protection against extra-territorial legislation, such as the US Cloud Act, and offers organisations a clear, enforceable governance framework for their most critical architectural assets.
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 European 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.
Compare features, pricing, and key benefits in detail to choose the solution that best fits your organization.
| BlueDolphin | Boldo | |
|---|---|---|
Pricing | ||
| Pricing model | Module-based pricing and user seats | User packs and modelled assets |
| Price positioning | $$$$ | $$$ |
| Free trial | ||
| Self-service offer | ||
| Enterprise offer | ||
User experience | ||
| Modern interface | ||
| Consistency across views | ||
| Implementation time | ~ 2 to 4 months | ~ 1 to 6 weeks |
| Learning curve for architects | Fast | Very fast |
| Learning curve for business / C-level users | Moderate | Very fast |
Collaboration | ||
| Permissions management | Fine grained (role-based) | 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 types creation | ||
| Object hierarchies | ||
| Custom properties per type | ||
| Custom relationships | ||
| Process modelling | ||
| ArchiMate metamodel support | ||
| Framework-agnostic modelling | ||
Storytelling and visualisation | ||
| Dynamic views (auto-synchronised) | ||
| Nested cartographies | ||
| Data visualisation | ||
| Auto-generated diagrams | ||
| Bidirectional data ↔ visuals synchronisation | ||
| Storytelling mode and scenarised views | ||
| Multi-dimensional impact analysis | ||
Data and automation | ||
| Public API | ||
| Batch imports (CSV) | ||
| Native connectors | ||
| Data validation rules | (Q4 2026) | |
| Automated triggers on changes | (Q4 2026) | |
| SaaS hosting | ||
| Sovereign hosting | (AWS / Azure) | |
| On-premise hosting | ||
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