Arena by PTC is a cloud-based PLM and QMS platform. Arena helps product companies that rely on distributed teams and global supply chains to develop products, ensure regulatory compliance, and respond to customer demands.
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PTC Windchill
Score 8.5 out of 10
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PTC offers Windchill, the company's Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) platform that includes BOM (a digital bill of materials) for cost and product quality control via parts-centric source of truth, dynamic and updated product change and configuration management to ensure up-to-date product information, industry standards and requirements validation and control, and role-based data access among other features.
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Pricing
Arena PLM and QMS
PTC Windchill
Editions & Modules
Arena PLM Launch
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Arena PLM Enterprise
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Arena QMS
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Arena QMS Enterprise
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Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Arena PLM and QMS
PTC Windchill
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Required
No setup fee
Additional Details
Arena's cloud-based PLM and QMS solutions include role-based subscriptions to meet diverse team needs. Their fixed-fee QuickStart™ implementations supports rapid deployment.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Arena PLM and QMS
PTC Windchill
Considered Both Products
Arena PLM and QMS
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Arena PLM and QMS
Arena was more intuitive and had a better interface and user experience than PTC Windchill, though Windchill was great as it had good CAD integration and the CAD PLM was the document PLM, everything was in one place. Windchill also had good customization workflow that …
At my first job, we used PTC Windchill and I just remember it being a pain to manage and work with. I don't remember the support being great and the user interface was not user-friendly at all. It also seemed really outdated and there seemed to be too much duplicate information.
Arena is more convenient than PTC Windchill. Arena is easier to use with SOLIDWORKS than PTC Windchill. Arena is easier to use when working with assemblies and subassemblies than PTC Windchill. Arena is easier to use when creating engineering change requests, handling reviews …
Arena is only a PLM solution, so if you need PDM + PLM, look elsewhere. Or use a separate PDM to your PLM system. Large companies with complex products may find this an issue, but if you can streamline your PLM use Arena could be a good fit. Once you get past that decision, …
Arena has all the functionality the company needs (all the PLM systems reviewed had the same basic functionality) and was a better price. It also offers great support after implementation at no additional cost. It was also great to work directly with Arena, rather than …
Having worked previously with Windchill, I found Arena to be far more intuitive and easy to use, needing much less customization. Though the use of Windchill was at a much larger company, Arena was clear and flexible and able to meet our needs with only a fraction of the time …
The arena user interface is much better, although I think Windchill may be a little better at change management or at least visualizing it. Also, Windchill can create PDFs of our mechanical drawings on their release so it is critical for our ME team.
Arena PLM is well suited for part number, BOM and file management. Processing changes (ECNs, ACOs, DCO's, etc.) in Arena is very easy to do and provides great visibility on the status of submitted requests. The ability to communicate with Suppliers and grant them access to files in Arena is extremely helpful. Arena does not appear to be the best suited system for managing software
It provides in-depth product information such as Technical Data, CAD model, 2D drawing, ECR document, ECN document. Integration between windchill and creo is seamless. In addition to it, it provides necessary tools for data transfer, distribution, reviewing, and publishing of product data. Moreover, one can manage the complete product life cycle just on the web.
It provides easy, 'login-anywhere' internet cloud-based access to fundamental PLM functions.
It provides secure access control for employees & vendors (but you pay per person for access licenses).
Data is effectively 'always backed up' in the internet-cloud.
There is an option to attach thumbnail graphics representative of each item and create a Bill of Materials view that also displays the graphics to help provide item recognition for BOM readers.
Arena lacks the capability to edit documents within its interface and requires users to upload new versions of documents when changes are made. This makes it a bit more challenging to collect and implement reviewer feedback
Arena's requirement tracking world does not have the proper functionality we need and was not useful for us.
We have so much time and effort invested into Arena. The history of approvals, revisions, etc. are necessary for many of our customers. We also have entire device histories recorded. Having to re-create that on another platform would be a feat requiring years of effort. But mostly, Arena just works. It's transformed our business into a much more streamlined system, resulting in a massive cost and time savings.
The Arena interface is fairly intuitive, and has very complete functionality. Documents are easily accessed according to prescribed user permissions, and the navigation pane is clearly positioned and sensibly structured. Notifications are sometimes a minor distraction, and document organization and hierarchy display may be difficult to follow at first. After a brief learning curve, perceived usability quickly increases for the typical user.
Windchill is an extremely verbose and unintuitive system, with masses of unnecessary duplication of fields, convoluted workflows, unclear roles and terrible search capabilities. It is one of the worst software products I have ever seen to propose solving something that is actually factors quicker to do with manual writing and paper work
Seems like when I need to access our workspace for an emergency situation, this is when maintenance is scheduled, just the luck of the draw, I guess, and I just wait until the maintenance is complete, and then can proceed
Upon initial observation, Arena Solution appears to possess a rather intricate nature, yet this complexity was effectively navigated during the initial configuration phase with the invaluable assistance of an expert well-versed in Arena, a factor that greatly contributed to our comprehensive mastery and autonomous handling of Arena Solutions thereafter.
The On line training was easy to understand and was very efficient for most of our users. We used the training tools to make sure we use all of the features to their fullest and correctly! After a few weeks mos of our users were very proficient with ARENA PLM and were able to work on their own and use mos of the sections and PLM capablilities.
I've used SAP, Agile in the past, for PLM, and unless the server is in your office, you cannot configure anything, and should it crash, you as the client are stuck until the issues are resolved. In my 15 plus years using Arena, there has only been one instance where the server was down, and the support team quickly resolved the issue with no loss or data or breach of any kind. Both PLMs are very light on what you can configure for your own company, most of it is out of the box, and you are stuck with it, whereas Arena Solutions gives you much more freedom to really tailor it to your company's specifics and what works for you.
It can be compared directly to any CMS at the base level. SharePoint/Drupal are in this category and support document versioning, search, collections. Furthermore, certainly in SharePoint you can build flows and manage system logic through power automate, SharePoint lists and power apps. Furthermore, it is possible to assign a multitude of roles/groups to SharePoint. SharePoint can present documents in-frame, it can search and so on. Where Windchill proposes to improve upon the CMS is in providing the roles and flows, in this case, specific to a QMS. Unfortunately it does not include the grass roots level build of something like SimplerQMS which incorporates even the generation of the required documents in phase through templates and suggestions. Windchill proposes to address the niche problem of an eQMS, without really providing anything that is implied by the "e" for electronic, meaning faster and more efficient. No, everything in Windchill is manual, intensive and convoluted. I don't have a good word to say about it.
Arena is easy to customize and therefore easy to scale. Different user groups with access restrictions can be easily created and new training plans can be created to support different user bases. Suppliers can also easily be added or items can be shared with them
Arena PLM and QMS has allowed [...] to efficiently respond to Design Changes and process them effectively.
Arena PLM and QMS has completely automated our CAPA process, removing all paperwork and 99% of other electronic files.
Arena PLM and QMS has allowed our Contract Manufacturing Organizations (CMO) to upload current manufacturing data; this puts [...]'s finger on the pulse of a CMO thousands of miles away. No more surprises.
Saves time as all of our drawings and business instructions and procedures are housed in a central location with check-in/out capability and version control.
