LeanIX did something important for enterprise architecture. It took a discipline that was drowning in TOGAF frameworks, PowerPoint diagrams, and multi-year implementation timelines — and made it accessible as a modern SaaS product. That was a genuine contribution, and it moved the entire market forward.
But the EA market has evolved. And so have the questions organizations need to answer.
The catalog era
LeanIX, and most enterprise architecture tools, are built around the application catalog: a structured inventory of your IT landscape. You create application entries, fill in metadata fields, tag lifecycle states, assign owners, and draw relationship lines. This is valuable work. Knowing what you have is the foundation of architectural governance.
The challenge is what comes after. Every organization that invests in an EA catalog eventually faces the same problem: keeping it current becomes a heroic effort. A small group of dedicated architects maintains the data, nudges application owners to update their entries, and chases down changes after every deployment. The rest of the organization gradually stops trusting the catalog because the data is always slightly behind reality.
This is not a failure of any particular tool. It is a structural limitation of the catalog-first approach. When your architecture model is primarily maintained through manual data entry, staleness is inevitable. And when the data is stale, people stop using it — which makes it staler. It is a self-reinforcing cycle that plays out at nearly every enterprise we have talked to.
From inventory to intelligence
The fundamental shift we built Dependra around is this: an architecture platform should not just tell you what you have. It should tell you what happens when things change.
That means the dependency graph is not a documentation artifact — it is a computation engine. When a component fails, you should be able to traverse the graph in milliseconds and see every affected system, business process, capability, and customer segment. When you plan to decommission a service, you should see the full impact before you make the decision.
This requires a different data model than a catalog. Dependencies need to be first-class, typed, weighted, and directional. The graph needs to extend beyond applications — down into components and infrastructure, up into business processes, capabilities, and audiences. And it needs to stay current, which means accepting data from APIs, monitoring systems, and CI/CD pipelines, not just manual entry.
What Dependra models that catalogs cannot
The full chain
Most EA tools model at the application level. Dependra models the complete chain:
Infrastructure → Components → Applications → Business Processes → Capabilities → Audiences
Each layer matters. Saying “the Payment Application is affected” is less useful than saying “the Payment API and the Transaction Database are on the critical path, the Payment Analytics Worker is affected but non-critical, and the Checkout Process is broken at the payment step, degrading Online Checkout for 12,000 retail customers at EUR 6,600/hour revenue exposure.”
That level of precision requires component-level modelling, not just application-level. It requires business process integration, not just capability tagging. And it requires audience segmentation with revenue attribution, not just a user count.
Business process modelling
Architecture tools traditionally treat business processes as someone else’s problem — that is what process modelling tools are for. But if you want to understand the full impact of a technical failure, you need to know which business workflows depend on which components.
Dependra models business processes as versioned workflows with steps, actors, approval gates, and capability linkage. When blast radius analysis traverses through a component, it identifies which process steps break, which actors are blocked, and which downstream capabilities are degraded.
Live health intelligence
Your monitoring tools already know when something is unhealthy. Dependra accepts health status via API and auto-computes blast radius for every unhealthy component. Instead of manually correlating alerts with architecture diagrams during an incident, you get an instant, quantified business impact — affected processes, capabilities, audiences, and revenue at risk.
SLA countdown timers show when contractual thresholds are approaching. Monthly uptime summaries track reliability trends.
Technology radar
Track every technology in your landscape with automatic end-of-life data from the public endoflife.date project. Set governance recommendations — Adopt, Trial, Assess, Hold, Retire — per technology. Know which components are running unsupported versions before your security audit finds them.
Portfolio analysis
The Gartner TIME model (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate) — but computed from live signals instead of survey responses. Technical fit scores derived from component health, tech debt indicators, vendor end-of-life status, and structural risk findings. Slice by capability or audience to see which parts of your portfolio support your most valuable business functions.
Structural risk analysis
Automatically detect single points of failure sitting on high-value dependency paths, hot paths carrying disproportionate business value, brittle chains of synchronous dependencies, tech debt on critical paths, sunset technologies with active dependents, and unprotected public-facing components.
A different approach to pricing
Traditional EA tools do not publish pricing. You go through a sales process, get a custom quote, negotiate an annual contract, and discover the total cost weeks into the evaluation. For many organizations — especially those who are not yet sure if EA tooling is worth the investment — this friction is a barrier.
Dependra publishes its pricing openly — three tiers, a self-serve trial, and no “contact sales” wall just to see a number. The current numbers and exactly what each tier unlocks live on the pricing page, pulled straight from our live plans endpoint.
The shape is outcome-based: the entry tier gives you the core impact-intelligence model — full landscape modelling, blast radius, capability economics, topology, manifest import and export. The next tier up unlocks the evidence-and-analysis layer — audit log, risk analysis, business processes, revenue-exposure modelling, and API/MCP access with the health-signal pipeline. Enterprise adds the org-scale integration layer: per-tenant SSO, outbound webhooks, and higher depth/rate caps. Blast radius itself is on every plan — we don’t feature-gate the core intelligence.
API-first and AI-ready
Every entity in Dependra — applications, components, dependencies, capabilities, audiences, business processes — can be created, updated, and queried via a REST API with idempotent upsert. Scoped API keys with configurable expiration. Import your entire landscape from a manifest file.
Dependra also ships with an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which means AI coding agents can query your architecture model, compute blast radius, and update health status directly. Your AI tools get the same architectural context your human architects have.
The most genuinely satisfying use of AI is when you tell your AI agent to take inventory of a legacy system in a git repository and update Dependra, sit back and watch rich documentation and details be populated into your architectural diagrams with little to no effort.
Who is Dependra for?
If your organization is well-served by your current EA tool and the data stays current, there is no reason to switch. Good tools deserve loyalty.
But if you recognize any of these patterns:
- Your architecture catalog is maintained by a handful of heroes while most of the organization has stopped trusting it
- You cannot answer “what breaks if this goes down?” without a 30-minute investigation
- Your impact analysis stops at the application level and does not connect to business outcomes
- You want dependency data at the component level, not just the application level
- You need business process modelling integrated with your architecture, not in a separate tool
- You want live health intelligence connected to your architecture model, not just dashboards
- You want published pricing you can evaluate without a sales cycle
…then Dependra is worth exploring.
Getting started
Sign up at dependra.io/signup for a 14-day trial. Model your first landscape, compute your first blast radius, and see the difference between an inventory and an intelligence platform.
Dependra is an enterprise architecture and impact intelligence platform. We help organizations model IT landscapes from infrastructure to customer impact, map every dependency, and compute blast radius — who cares and how much it costs when systems go down.