Direct answers about what Turbo EA is, what it can model, how it is licensed, how it is deployed, and how to move to it from another tool. Every answer here reflects the product as it ships today.
Turbo EA is a self-hosted Enterprise Architecture Management platform with embedded business process management. It builds a digital twin of your IT landscape by cataloguing applications, business capabilities, technologies, data objects and the relationships between them on a fully admin-configurable metamodel. The platform runs as Docker containers alongside a PostgreSQL database, entirely inside your own infrastructure.
Turbo EA is built for enterprise architects, IT leaders and transformation teams who need a working architecture repository rather than a slide deck. It suits mid-size organisations and growing IT departments that cannot justify a six-figure commercial licence, and it equally suits large enterprises that require complete data sovereignty. Because there is no per-seat licensing, read-only stakeholders can be invited without a procurement conversation.
Turbo EA is published on GitHub under the Functional Source License 1.1 with MIT Future License (FSL-1.1-MIT). You may self-host it for any internal purpose, commercial or not, with no fees and no seat limits, and you may read, modify and fork the source. Each release converts automatically to the MIT licence two years after publication, and releases up to and including v1.66.x are already MIT. The one restriction is that you may not resell Turbo EA or offer it to third parties as a competing product or hosted service.
Turbo EA is built by Vincent Verdet, an enterprise architect with more than 18 years of experience across global manufacturing, pharmaceutical and engineering organisations. He established the group-wide enterprise architecture function at Sulzer, a CHF 3.6 billion industrial engineering group, and he holds TOGAF Practitioner, SAP Enterprise Architect and SAP LeanIX certifications. The reasoning behind the product is set out in Why I built Turbo EA.
Yes. Turbo EA includes a Statement of Architecture Work editor with rich-text sections, version history, sign-off requests and DOCX export, architecture decision records with an audit trail, an EA risk register aligned to Phase G, and an admin-curated set of architecture principles that both documents reference. Business architecture and implementation governance therefore live in one repository. The metamodel is configurable, so it can equally be adapted to another framework or to one of your own.
Everything in Turbo EA is a Card, and cards are organised across four architecture layers: Strategy and Transformation, Business Architecture, Application and Data, and Technical Architecture. The default metamodel ships with 13 card types, including Objective, Initiative, Business Capability, Application, Interface, Data Object, IT Component, Tech Category and Provider, connected by 45 relation types. Administrators can add their own card types, subtypes, fields and relation types from the admin interface, because the metamodel is stored as data rather than code.
Turbo EA includes more than ten interactive report types. These are the portfolio bubble chart, the capability heatmap, the lifecycle roadmap, the dependency graph, the cost treemap, the matrix cross-reference, the data quality dashboard, the end-of-life risk report and the process map. Report configurations can be saved, shared with named users and exposed as OData feeds, and any report can be replayed as it appeared at a past date using the time-travel slider.
Yes. Turbo EA has a native BPMN 2.0 editor with draft, published and archived states, approval workflows and stakeholder sign-offs. Process elements link directly to EA cards such as applications and IT components, so you can see which systems support which process steps. Process maturity assessments covering efficiency, effectiveness, compliance and automation can be recorded against a process and tracked over time.
Yes. Turbo EA includes a portfolio Gantt with cost aggregation and health indicators, a hierarchical work breakdown structure with auto-computed completion, a Kanban task board, budget and cost tracking that syncs back to the initiative card, and a risk register with probability-impact scoring. Initiatives link to the capabilities and applications they change, so delivery work and architecture stay in the same repository rather than in two disconnected tools.
Turbo EA embeds AI in three places. Card description suggestions combine a web search step with an LLM extraction step and return a confidence score, editable text and source links. TurboLens performs vendor analysis and resolution, duplicate detection, modernisation assessment, guided target-architecture design and compliance scanning against frameworks including the EU AI Act, GDPR, NIS2, DORA, SOC 2 and ISO 27001. The built-in Model Context Protocol server lets AI clients both query the repository and write to it, under each user’s own role-based permissions. All of this works with self-hosted Ollama or with OpenAI, Google Gemini, Azure OpenAI, OpenRouter or Anthropic Claude.
Yes. The GitHub repository includes a one-click GitHub Codespaces launch that builds a fully loaded instance in your browser, with no local installation and no account beyond a free GitHub account. It comes pre-populated with a sample dataset of more than 150 cards across all architecture layers, along with business processes, strategic initiatives and their relations. The first build takes roughly five to ten minutes.
Turbo EA is deployed with Docker Compose. You fetch the compose file and the example environment file from the GitHub repository, set your database credentials and a JWT signing key, then run docker compose pull followed by docker compose up -d. The application becomes available on port 8920 by default, and the first account created automatically receives administrator rights.
The frontend is React 18 with TypeScript. The backend is FastAPI on Python 3.12. Data is stored in PostgreSQL, with the metamodel held as JSON so that card types, fields and relations can be changed without a code deployment. The bundled Docker stack uses non-root images for every service, and the codebase is continuously scanned with CodeQL while dependencies are monitored with Dependabot.
No. Turbo EA is self-hosted software that runs on your infrastructure and holds your architecture data in your own database. Neither the application nor any installed extension sends your usage data or your architecture data back to Turbo EA. The platform is air-gap capable and needs no outbound call to operate, which is set out in full in the privacy policy.
Turbo EA supports an unlimited number of users at no cost, because there is no per-seat licensing. Access is governed by admin-configurable roles with more than 50 granular permissions covering both application-level and card-level actions. Single sign-on is supported for Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta and any generic OIDC provider. Curated read-only views can also be published as public web portals that require no login at all.
Yes. Turbo EA ships a dedicated LeanIX importer with field mapping and a staged review, so you see exactly what will be created before anything is written. Importers for Ardoq, MEGA and Bizzdesign are on the roadmap and are not available yet. Any tool that exports to Excel or CSV can be loaded today through the bulk importer, which supports field mapping and a preview, so a migration can be rehearsed as many times as it takes.
Turbo EA ships a documented REST API, OData feeds that push saved views and reports into Excel or Power BI, and a bidirectional ServiceNow CMDB sync with field mapping, staged review and encrypted credentials. It matches IT components against endoflife.date for lifecycle tracking, embeds a self-hosted DrawIO editor with card-aware shapes, and connects to SMTP for notifications, surveys and sign-off requests. The Model Context Protocol server exposes the repository to AI clients such as Claude, Copilot and Cursor.
Capabilities outside the core are normally delivered as extensions. An extension is a signed bundle that installs from the admin interface and keeps working across core upgrades, so nothing has to be forked or patched. Extensions can add card types and reference data, new integrations, or entirely new pages, card tabs, admin panels and reports. Ready-made extensions are available in the Turbo EA Store, and bespoke extensions can be commissioned.
Yes. The author offers implementation and onboarding, bespoke extension development, sponsored core development, EA advisory and training workshops. Sponsored core development funds a specific improvement that genuinely belongs in the core, which then ships to every user as part of the product. Note that this is a consulting relationship rather than a vendor support contract: there is no service level agreement on the free core. Scope and contact details are on the consulting page.
Run the browser demo before you install anything, or see how Turbo EA compares with the commercial platforms.