Meet a lightweight and affordable alternative to LeanIX
Is SAP LeanIX the right Enterprise Architecture platform for every organization? Do you need a highly mature EA practice and a structured transformation program to fully benefit from LeanIX? Is there a more lightweight alternative to visualize and steer IT landscapes without months of implementation and data preparation?
Discover why many mid-sized organizations and public sector teams consider Boldo as an alternative to SAP LeanIX.
LeanIX application landscape
LeanIX: The Standard for Modern Enterprise Architecture
Founded in 2012, LeanIX reshaped the traditional Enterprise Architecture market by moving away from legacy tools such as MEGA, Sparx or Software AG, often perceived as overly rigid and framework-heavy. By favouring an editor-driven meta-model rather than strict adherence to frameworks like ArchiMate or TOGAF, LeanIX appealed to IT and Enterprise Architecture leaders looking for consistency, standardisation and business alignment.
Now recognised as a market leader, its acquisition by SAP in 2023 (alongside Signavio for Process Mining) confirms its role as a core platform for large-scale transformation programmes.
Boldo: Agility and Shared Vision Beyond Inventory
Boldo takes a different path, prioritising intuitiveness and adaptability over rigid standardisation. The platform provides ready-to-use meta-model libraries to accelerate onboarding, while remaining fully evolvable to match an organisation’s own vocabulary, practices and maturity, rather than forcing teams to conform to a predefined structure.
Its user experience is designed around collaboration and shared understanding, enabling teams to collectively build, discuss and communicate architecture through visual storytelling, not just static documentation.
Boldo also adopts a transparent pricing model, with two clearly defined offerings (Self-serve and Enterprise) designed to scale naturally with organisational needs.
Finally, the platform is hosted on secure sovereign cloud infrastructures, ensuring full control over data, compliance requirements and long-term ownership.
Adapt your architecture to your maturity, not the other way around
SAP LeanIX is designed around a highly structured and standardized metamodel, well suited for organizations with mature EA practices and clearly defined governance. This strength ensures consistency at scale, but it can also make early-stage or evolving organizations feel constrained when their architecture is still taking shape.
Boldo takes a more flexible approach. Its evolutive metamodel adapts to your organization’s level of maturity. You can start simple, model only what matters today, and progressively enrich your architecture as needs grow, without being locked into a rigid framework from day one. The model follows your reality, not the opposite.
Shorten the learning curve for every stakeholder
LeanIX built its reputation by lowering the entry barrier to Enterprise Architecture. By replacing complex tooling with an intuitive editor-driven meta-model and simplified querying capabilities, the platform made architectural information accessible to non-expert profiles, enabling architecture inventory at scale.
Boldo’s next-generation user experience goes one step further, drawing inspiration from the UX and UI standards of leading collaborative tools of the 2020s such as Miro, Notion and Airtable. The objective is to accelerate the learning curve, turning architecture into a daily reflex and enabling teams to produce actionable deliverables in a single click.
We’re transparent on our pricing
SAP LeanIX relies on a pricing model indexed on the number of applications, with defined thresholds and tiers. In organisations with a large application landscape, this logic can lead teams to voluntarily limit the scope of what is modelled in order to control costs, while also introducing uncertainty as the definition of an “application” evolves over time.
Boldo adopts a clear and value-aligned pricing approach. The self service offering is based solely on the number of editor users, while the Enterprise offering combines packs of modelled assets and user packs, including premium support, SLA commitments, dedicated Customer Success and native connectors. This model ensures a stronger correlation between cost, covered complexity and adoption, with pricing typically 30 to 50 percent lower than LeanIX for an equivalent scope, and a progressive scale up without abrupt threshold effects.
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.
| LeanIX | Boldo | |
|---|---|---|
Pricing | ||
| Pricing model | Based on number of modelled applications | User and modelled asset packs |
| Price positioning | $$$$$ | $$$ |
| Free trial | ||
| Self-service offering | ||
| Enterprise offering | ||
User experience | ||
| Modern interface | ||
| Consistency across views | ||
| Time to implement | ~ 2 to 6 months | ~ 1 to 6 weeks |
| Learning curve for architects | Fast | Very fast |
| Learning curve for business / C-level users | Fast | Very fast |
Collaboration | ||
| Access rights management | Fine grained (asset level) | 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 | (Signavio or Draw.io) | |
| ArchiMate metamodel support | ||
| Framework-agnostic modelling | ||
Storytelling and visualisation | ||
| Dynamic views (auto-synchronised) | ||
| Nested maps and diagrams | ||
| Data visualisation | ||
| Auto-generated diagrams | ||
| 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 | ||
Other alternatives
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BlueDolphin is an Enterprise Architecture platform developed by ValueBlue. It helps organizations align strategy, business processes, information systems, and data within a shared repository, with strong capabilities for current and target state modeling, impact analysis, and stakeholder collaboration.
