The Essential Project

Building a community supported by free, open source tools
The Essential Project is not only about the tools. It provides a useful, active forum for sharing ideas and experiences of applying Enterprise Architecture practices to real world business problems - working together to shape the development of relevant tools.

Apply Enterprise Architecture in the real world
The Essential Project is a set of open source, enterprise architecture support tools developed to be used with a variety of EA approaches and frameworks. 'Essential' because these tools are focused on providing capabilities that are essentialto maximising the value of enterprise architecture; helping organisations manage and analyse the knowledge needed to make decisions that impact or are impacted by the enterprise architecture.

Essential Meta-Model

The Essential Architecture Meta Model, is a detailed, extensible, yet easy-to-use meta model for describing an enterprise from top to bottom. Essential Architecture Meta Model is published as open source and is available for use in any modelling toolset. Read More

Essential Architecture Manager

Essential Architecture Manager is the reference implementation of the Essential Architecture Meta Model and includes advanced tools for both capturing and applying complex analysis to your architecture. This open-source toolkit is entirely free to download and use under the GNU GPL v3 license. Read More

Demo Videos

See how Essential Architecture Manager v1.x can help you manage your enterprise architecture in the Essential demonstration videos.

New demonstration videos for version 3.0 will follow shortly, in the meantime there are a series of screenshots of example views available to provide further detail.

Essential 4.0 - Speaks Your Language

Essential Architecture Manager version 4 brings together a powerful set of new capabilities and features that have been tested in the field over a number of months. Version 4.0 is available to download now from the Downloads page and an upgrade pack for existing version 3.0 installations will be available shortly.

A new multi-language framework for both the modeller and viewer, new data import capabilities and a wide range of new extensions to the Essential Meta Model means that Essential can rapidly import your data from your existing sources, capture and manage more details of your enterprise architecture and dynamically produce views of your data, in your language.

The ability to provide insights and support for a wide range of stakeholders - in particular for those from the business and outside of IT and architecture - in formats and terms that make sense to them immediately. Real world application of Essential Architecture Manager combined with shared experience of the Essential Community has directed the development of this new version, focussed on an enhanced and powerful platform for managing your Enterprise Architecture.

Download it

Download the free, open-source Enterprise Architecture Manager toolkit and get started today.

Analyse it

Thanks to the detail of the meta model that is used to capture the aspects of your architecture that you need, complex analysis is provided out of the box. However, it is easy to create your own analysis reports.

What's New

Essential 4 Sample Repository

A new sample repository for Essential 4 is available to download

Essential 4 Upgrade Pack

The Essential Update Pack (EUP) to upgrade existing version 3 repositories to version 4 is now available to download via the Downloads page.

Essential Viewer 4.0.1

An updated version of Essential Viewer 4 is now available to resolve the issues reported with the error view.

Model it

Get started quickly with tutorials that focus on the tasks that you need for your requirements. You don't need to model the entire enterprise or complete all the tutorials to get modelling and get the benefits.

Share it

Share your experience of applying the Essential Project to real-world problems. See where others are gaining real benefit from the practical application of enterprise architecture and share new components and reports.