Collibra Governance Reviews

We mostly use Collibra Governance for governance-related tasks like building business glossaries and creating policies.

Collibra Governance comes with a lot of features, and we have used it in one of our projects for metadata management and data lineage. I have used the solution to create governance rules and a centralized repository for business glossaries.

The solution's metadata management is pretty novice and could be improved.

I have been using Collibra Governance for around one year.

I rate Collibra Governance a nine out of ten for stability.

Collibra Governance is more suitable for medium-level and enterprise businesses.

I rate Collibra Governance a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support was good, but there was a delay in their response time, possibly because of the time zones.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is simple.

The solution's deployment will not take more than a week and can be done in five working days.

The solution's pricing is moderate and not very expensive.

Informatica is coming up with some level of data governance. erwin Data Modeler is quickly emerging as a competitor for Collibra in the coming days.

Collibra Governance is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

In my company, we use Collibra Governance for data catalog.

Pricing policy of the product is an area with certain shortcomings that needs improvement. I would like to see better pricing in future releases of the product. Collibra Governance needs to develop some new technology, like Atlan, that has been incorporating AI in the automation area of its products.

I have been using Collibra Governance for five years. I have ensured that one of my company's customers uses the solution's latest version. My company has a partnership with Collibra.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Around 30 people in my organization use the solution.

The solution's technical support is helpful and responsive. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have probably worked with most of the products in the market related to data governance and data catalog, including products like Informatica Axon. I still do work with Informatica Axon at times.

The product's deployment phase was straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an AWS Cloud, which is a private cloud.

The deployment process is carried out by Collibra Governance's technical team.

There is definitely a return on investment from using the product, especially if you associate it with a data catalog tool. The return on investments is in terms of optimizing the process of development, data quality improvement, and having a single repository source of information for the metadata of the entire organization.

I don't know the licensing costs of the product since it is a SaaS solution.

I rate the pricing a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap.

The maintenance is something that is carried out automatically by Collibra Governance.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

Collibra is generally used as a data governance tool, maintaining all metadata repositories. For each and every data that has been cataloged in Collibra, there'll be an owner assigned to it, whether it's a subject matter expert, a data streamer, data owner, etc. All the data is catalogued into Collibra. It has a single source of truth for data. I'm a senior Collibra consultant and we are customers of the company. 

We have data that people want to access and that's where Collibra fits in. They provide the SSO authentication so that anyone in the organization using the login can find what they want. 

Collibra is evolving their connectivity towards all programs across the IT landscape. The solution has good workflows and they now offer nine dimensions of data quality and provide a lot of features. The solution is based on AIML, Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning so that even if you don't know SQL, you can operate Collibra Data Quality. Collibra Workflows, Collibra Data Quality, are two good aspects that I would highlight from Collibra. Governance provides a user access mechanism, where you have all the data assets cataloged in Collibra. Not everyone can access all the data which is where the governance process comes in. They are constantly coming up with new features, and provide a monthly release.

The Collibra interface is not very user-friendly because it has a lot of features that business users find difficult to navigate. Anyone using the device needs some knowledge about how to use the tool and it takes a while to access and get used to the interface. I'd like to see them build a simple interface with only four dropdowns in order to get access to the request. If you're using it for the first time, it's difficult.

There are widgets in the dashboard and if they could make it more like a webpage instead of a Word document, that would be helpful. They have alternatives, but it takes a lot of work and even Collibra developers don't necessarily know how it works. Some changes are needed. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The stability is good, I've never felt any performance issues. 

It is highly scalable, we have around 4,500 users.

When you buy a Collibra license, they offer some training. If we have any issues, we can have a coaching call with them. In addition, they have a support portal. If you raise a ticket with them, they'll respond. 

Collibra provides support to anyone deploying the cloud version and implementation generally only takes a couple of hours. They are also responsible for maintenance.

There is a standard license for Collibra Governance and an additional cost for Collibra Lineage and for Collibra Data Quality. Author licenses have a set maximum limit; if you want extra there's an additional cost. That's their marketing strategy. 

I recommend going to the Collibra University web portal where you can register and log in. They provide a lot of basic information and the functionalities they provide. For anyone wanting to get into governance you can easily get certified as a Collibra consultant. Collibra has its own product roadmap. They have an ideation platform, where you can suggest ideas and if they get a sufficient number of responses in a particular area, they will add it to their roadmap and work on it. Collibra provides a lot to their customers as well as continually improving the product.

Anyone wanting data analytics uses Collibra. I rate this solution seven out of 10. 

Our major use case for Collibra Governance involves maintaining lineage, as well as linking business terms and technical terms together. Then, our use revolves around linking policies with actual data, such that we can create data sharing policies within the tool, storing data and quality results.

I am currently working on about 10-12 projects with Collibra Governance using the latest cloud version. It is available on both cloud and on-premises, but currently all our solutions are moving to the cloud.

Workflows is the most valuable feature of Collibra because we will typically use an interface for it and we can customize it as per our needs.

It is also a very user-friendly tool which is easy to navigate and understand right from the start.

Many other tools like Collibra Governance give you the option to actually see the data in the tool, which is not an option in Collibra. If you compare it with Alation, which has the compose data option, you can see the data right there.

Perhaps this is a feature they could include in the future, although I'm not sure if it is in their roadmap or not, because it is just a governance tool for storing metadata, and not for connecting actual data. If they could include some type of data viewing functionality, however, I would appreciate it.

I've been using Collibra Governance for around six years.

It has been a stable tool since I started using it, which was around 2015. We have used their cloud version since about 2019 or so, making that two years of stable cloud use, while the on-premises version has also been stable. I believe it has been in the market from about 2008 and they have made many enhancements over time with regard to stability.

Since our version of Collibra is on the cloud and we essentially only use it as a metadata tool, the best way it can be extended is to increase the cloud database. This is all done by the Collibra team, however.

At the moment, I am working on between 10 and 12 projects with it, so in this sense I can call it scalable.

The tech support is good because they have a dedicated team who will be mobilized to help support you on the aspect that you are struggling with. Usually, you will get a response from a team member who has knowledge of the sort of routine you are asking about, and you will be talking with someone who has good knowledge of the tool. Of course, it may happen that the support team member is new to the job, but they will at least help guide you in the right direction.

There is also a support portal where you can browse and search for articles that explain what you need to know. If you can't find the information you're looking for, then you can just raise a ticket with their support. It is very easy.

Positive

It's a very user-friendly tool and easy to navigate right from the beginning.

We didn't actually need to install anything with the cloud version because the Collibra team maintains the installation and everything related to it. They simply give us a direct URL to access it and the admin team then manages all the other considerations. Usually, the customers buy one, two, or three instances at a time, including instances for QA and development, but the deployment process really depends on the size of the company.

Deployment in general is very easy because they have a built-in migration feature with which we can easily migrate data from one system to another in a direct manner. We can also simply make a complete backup of the environment and then just upload it to another system using the backup option.

Collibra provides you with a license based on the subscription model that you purchase.

I highly recommend this tool to users who want to see the lineage of their data, including technical lineage and business lineage. It is very easy to create lineage views with it, and it supports many technical lineages out of the box.

I would rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

We are focused primarily on the Data Governance Catalog (DGC) for our data dictionary use. We are not using it for information governance in terms of regulatory compliance, etc. We are focused on business glossary, data catalog, data dictionary, and some workflow processes to help with metadata management and other things.

We are fully updated, and we are using its latest version.

One of the workflows that we're just finishing and rolling out is a certification process. Collibra DGC has an attribute in there called "certified," and it is basically a yes/no choice. We wanted a lot more information about the certification of data sets, so I wrote this workflow, which is probably 30 or 40 steps long. We have a series of criteria that we have to meet in order for a data set to be considered certified. I was able to create attributes for all those and create a workflow that goes hand in hand with data set development so that when somebody competes their work, he or she can pop into Collibra and say, "I have finished this." It logs it and it becomes part of a trust score. It is really nice, and it is making our certification process more robust and the documentation easier to collect and maintain.

I like Collibra's flexibility. I like to be able to modify things for our own use. For example, we've chosen to use Collibra also as a knowledge management tool, even though it is not designed to be a knowledge management tool. That's the beauty of it. It can serve as a knowledge management tool by creating some custom assets specifically for knowledge management. I have a knowledge base domain and a knowledge base article asset type- along with a few other things. I really like the flexibility to be able to extend it in those non-traditional ways.

On the flexibility side, I've created some really nice and very useful custom workflows that have really helped with work processes and productivity. They've really helped us do things easier, faster, and better.

The UI is good if you happen to be an administrator and are familiar with the technical side of the administration. If you're a business user, the UI is not good. It is hard to learn. It is hard for those who are administering it to teach to end-users and it can take hours of training to do it. Because it is difficult and non-intuitive, business users resist using it. It is a battle to get them on board and to keep them engaged because of the UI. On the other hand, Collibra just hired a person specifically to revamp the UI. So, they're dealing with it, but it isn't there yet.

They're working on the lineage harvesting for technical lineages. I don't know this for a fact, but my feeling is that this is new to them. So, they're still developing it and it feels awkward.

I have been using this solution for eight months.

Its stability is very good. Out of 10, I'd probably give it a nine. We've had a couple of little glitches where something happened, but they were minor and we were able to create tickets and get issues resolved within a week and usually within just a day or so.

So far, we haven't had any major problems. We're ingesting metadata from AWS Redshift. We've also got connectors built for S3 but we haven't used them yet. We're importing from Oracle and working on lineage harvesting from DBT, Data Services, and few other places. So far, everything has been really good. We're importing metadata from Tableau, and there are no problems there, either.

In terms of the roles of its users, we've got product managers and solution managers. (A solution manager is the IT coordinator who works with the product manager.) We've also got analysts, engineers, reviewers, editors, data stewards, and data coordinators or custodians. We also have technical stewards, admins, and a group of people we call "normal" who are business users that have read-only access.

In terms of Collibra's usage, I would love to have it used 10 times more than it is, but because of the difficult UI, I am getting resistance from the users. It is hard for them to navigate and learn the interface. Once you know it, it is easy to get around and find what you need. It is just about learning the interface and dealing with some poor choices of how to use the screen real estate. So, right now, the user engagement is lower than I would like it to be. 

Their technical support is very good. On a scale of one to 10, I would give them a seven. We've probably had four or five tickets open and were able to get them resolved quickly. 

It feels like they may be sensitive--possibly they've had some bad reviews regarding their customer service--so it seems like they may be going overboard there. For example, they have scheduled a meeting every month for our team to meet with what they call a customer success manager.  I feel like this is too often.  They're responsive about stuff, but it feels like they're trying too hard.

Prior to this and strictly for our data dictionary, I used Dataedo. They are very good at what they do, but have a much more focused solution.

For knowledge management, I used Confluence and really liked it, but we came up against the issue of access levels for for non-registered users; we didn't want to pay license fees for a large number of "read-only" users. Basically, it is either full (paid) access or free access to "the world" and like everyone else, we have information that we don't want to expose to the world.

Setup was really straightforward. Collibra was very good with holding meetings and being responsive to requests. I was pleased with the setup and configuration process. They were really good at the initial stages of learning and understanding what we were doing.

Those of us who are working on this project also have "day jobs" so we were not focused solely on this. The focused time on it among members of the team was probably less than a hundred hours extended over a period of several weeks.

In terms of maintenance, we have a small, three-person team of people who are actually working on the technical maintenance side. All told, the actual time that we spend in administration at this point is very low--perhaps 20 hours a month spread between three people.

We did it in-house with direct interactions with the Collibra team. Our experience with their team was very good. They have an onboarding process and a roadmap they like to follow. We were just one department with a small team working on the actual setup and use case. Several of their steps didn't apply to our use case so we skipped these and even took some of the other steps out of order simply because it made sense for us. The onboarding team at Collibra was 100% supportive of making those changes and doing things the way we needed instead of the way they ordinarily would have done.

It is substantial, and we pay yearly. 

The thing that made our onboarding really simple was that we understood beforehand our use case and our needs. We understood what our roles were and who needed to be involved. We also understood our communities and our setup structure. We had all of that from the beginning. They mentioned several times that we were extremely well-prepared. So we learned that the more users know about the needs of the department or the company, and the more advance prep work they can do, the easier the onboarding process is.

When we started, the Collibra team sent us two huge Excel files that were basically questionnaires that they wanted us to go through to prepare for onboarding. We already had all of that done. It was finished but wasn't in the same format.  We wrote back and asked, "Do you really want us to fill out these Excel sheets? We've already gathered this information." They said, "Oh, great. We will skip the first two steps of onboarding because you've already got it." That really accelerated the process.

I'd give Collibra a nine out of 10. I am really happy with it though there are few things that I wish were different, especially in the UI.

Our use cases include connecting a lot of legacy data systems to our logical components. For example, if somebody has a question that they post to us and say, "Tell me everywhere in our organization where we have a policy stored?" the primary use case is to logically define what a policy is, and then we use Collibra to tie that logical construct to a technical implementation. We may have six or eight, however many, different admin systems. We bring in the schemas of the way that those systems look, and then how a policy exists in this database and this table and this column, for example, in that legacy system. 

The second use case that we implement is the ability to track the provenance or the lineage as to how something changes over time. For example, if we bring data in from a legacy system and we use some tool set (e.g. Azure Data Factory) to extract the data into a Hadoop data lake, and then perform some transformations on it, we want to be able to track it; "It came from the source system here, and this field got changed to this name, and we applied this transformation on this field and it eventually shows up on this report here."

We use it to track where a policy exists and also how it got there: it exists on this report and here's how it got on that report, here are all the steps that it took getting through to that particular report from the actual source system itself. Because quite often what we're finding is that our business users will get a report and they'll say, "I think your report's wrong. How did you get that value on that report?" That provenance or lineage is what helps answer those questions.

We have data stewards who are the resources that if somebody proposes a new logical asset based on what they think the customer means, these data stewards are the ones that would get together and look at what's being proposed and make sure it works across all of our business units for a generic implementation, or create business unit specific terms if required. They're the ones that say a particular system or term or logical construct is ready for consumption by end users.

Another group we have is the end users. We try to have people use Collibra by asking, "Don't tell me what system you want to get access to, tell me what you're looking for in business terms/constructs." In our example, it would be the question, "Tell me about all the policies in our system." They would go to Collibra and "shop" for that data and pick a policy and put it into the shopping cart basket that Collibra provides as part of their interface. Then they would submit that request for approval/access to the underlying data.

We also have data stewards who approve the use of new/updated business terminology and end users who are looking for their data to make business decisions. We also have some power users who are the resources who are setting the direction for the application of where we want to go with it, (e.g. new workflows or new functionality within Collibra).

For us, the Collibra application is an on-premise installation (although we use IaaS VMs to host it on cloud); it is not their SaaS implementation.

One of the biggest questions that we had was we didn't know what to with the our tons of legacy systems. The company I work for is a fairly old company, it's over 120 years old within the insurance industry. There are lots of systems that have been around for upwards of say 40 or 50 years, so we're trying to consolidate and bring those down to target, to go from say 15 systems down to three. But not knowing what's in those other systems makes it difficult to do that rationalization. It's enabled us to first understand what we have and then to figure out how we get down to the target state architecture with a reduced number of target systems.

Out of box ingestions of technical metadata as well as ease of use for setting up new business metadata for users to represent their business terms

Collibra is very good at talking to modern database systems such as a normal RDBMS (e.g.DB2, SQL server or Oracle). Where it isn't great is with older technologies that you'll typically find in finance or insurance industries (e.g. VSAM or ISAM, or those types of older technologies). It just doesn't connect with them very easily. They do provide an ability to use a separate product called MuleSoft, which they used to license (as a bundle) up until last year until Salesforce bought MuleSoft, and that division is happening in 2021. With this 'bolt-on', you could go and get that data, but you had to write that code and maintain it yourself. It wasn't an out-of-box (OOB) feature, which is what we really liked from the Collibra offering. Our only way to access these older technologies was to create a MuleSoft flow, maintain, and deploy it. This leaves us with technical debt which will need to continually be maintained. In fact, we built all our custom Mulesoft flows using Mule 3.x and will soon be pushed to upgrade to Mule 4.x. This will not be a simple upgrade and will likely result in additional cost to bring in consulting resources more familiar with the technology. Since we do have a lot of older legacy systems, things that aren't greenfield, if you will, it adds a lot more overhead than what we were originally led to believe when we originally purchased the product.

We're not that deep into the Collibra product yet because it's only been a couple of years. We do like their ability to automate the workflows, such that, for example, if somebody comes in to say, "I want to request access to this data," you can build your own workflows to automate the approval process. There are some that are out-of-box, I think they could go a little bit further with some of their out-of-box workflows instead of having to create a workflow manually, get somebody to code it, and implement it. I think they could offer a bit more in that respect.

The second item that I think they could do better at is to have other products, or have things where they have a set of taxonomy per industry that says, "Here's what a policy is. Here's what a customer is," that kind of thing. They don't implement that out-of-box in Collibra, you have to do that yourself, whereas other products bring that to the table. Informatica, I believe, has their own insurance industry or industry specific taxonomy that would come with the product.

It makes adding the new logical constructs to Collibra a more manual workup to take care of. The classification becomes more manual because you don't get that out-of-box to say, "Hey, I recognize that that's a policy, because I know that about that and the taxonomy." You have to manually make that connection.

I have been using Collibra Governance for about two and a half years.

Collibra Governance's stability is quite good. It doesn't take a lot of maintenance to deal with it, it just runs. It doesn't cause a ton of issues and it doesn't require a lot of upgrades (we usually upgrade once/year). In the couple of years we've done, I think, two upgrades on it. The one thing that we're disappointed with is that 5.7.7 is their last on-premise implementation that you can do. You have to go to a SaaS offering by Collibra, after it's just been released end of November.

Being the industry that we're in, we're very risk averse, so our use of SaaS offerings isn't that large, and our company isn't prepared to put a lot into the cloud, especially when it comes to personally identifiable information (PII). We're very nervous about that. With that limitation, we would have preferred that Collibra would have extended the timeline of their on-premise offerings beyond this.

I don't have a lot to say about scalability because we haven't had the system pushed that hard. I think we started out with an initial 25 users, and we might have a couple of hundred now. We haven't had any complaints from end users in terms of not returning information in a timely fashion or the system isn't working as good as I would expect. We haven't had enough experience to comment on that. Our current installation is approximately 175 users with about 15-25 concurrent usage. We went with the vendor recommended VM sizings although we did put all services for Collibra on one VM (except JobServer and Connect as recommended). For larger implementations, Collibra will recommend that you split out services (e.g. DGC, Search, Repository) onto separate VMs to allow performance tuning but our implementation hasn't come to that yet. 

In my experience technical support is pretty good. They're fairly responsive. If I enter a case, I'll usually hear back either later that day, so maybe a five or an eight hour turnaround, or definitely within two business days. I find if it's beyond a basic question, it takes a little bit to get it pushed to another level, to their second level support. Sometimes it takes a while for them to say, "I don't know the answer, now I'll ask second level to assist me with that." Getting past the first level, like most vendors, is a bit difficult because they want the call answered there, but it is not unreasonable in any respect

We previously used the IBM Information Governance Catalog, IGC. We had used that as part of the whole suite (e.g. Information Analyzer, InfoSphere, etc.). We went out and did vendor assessments and had demos from the vendors come in to set a strategic direction. We determined what our strategic platform was going to be in terms of a data catalog. IGC just quite frankly wasn't anywhere in the realm of what Collibra could offer in comparison. It felt like comparing Windows 3.1 to a Windows 95 interface. Collibra is known as the 'Cadillac' offering from a user perspective. There are some things that it is not as technically good for, such as Alation is quite good at crowdsourcing or crowd approval approach. But in our opinion, Collibra offered the most features from one product overall. It's a bit on the pricier end, but when we looked at the Gartner Quadrants and Forrester Waves, it was always consistently either one or two up there with, say, Informatica or other tool sets like that.

That's actually what my role is, as the technical lead. I'm the one who did the installation, and is responsible for patching and that kind of stuff. I'm not an end-user of it as much, I don't go into it every day to do workflows or create the data, but if there's a technical request or something, that's where I would get engaged.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. I found the Collibra pre-sales and their support pretty helpful. They got back to you in a timely manner to be able to do the setup. It wasn't a difficult implementation by any stretch. It was about what I expected in terms of the timeline that they had provided for us and what we needed to do.

In terms of the actual installation process, it was maybe a couple of days start to finish once the hardware and everything was there. Then you continue to do your configuration as time goes on to connect to different systems and whatnot.

Most of that was put forth on advice from the vendors. We said here's the usage count that we plan to have, here's how many systems we're targeting originally. We looked to Collibra to give us the recommendation as to VM sizing and implementing. We didn't really create our own, we used theirs and customized it slightly for our environments, but it was mostly a vendor-provided plan of implementation.

We used in-house resources to build/deploy the IaaS environment and complete the installation of Collibra. We have used 3rd party firms to develop custom Mulesoft flows for connecting legacy systems and custom workflows

We've had good ROI, because when we look at the amount of time invested, it's not necessarily dollars out the door; it's more about manual work avoidance. Instead of having somebody have to manually enter all of these different systems and characteristics, we can do integrations between our source systems and Collibra to get that automatically and refresh it. As people make changes to source systems as time goes on, we can automatically bring those into Collibra. It has allowed us to do one of the projects that we had on the books for this year, which was to understand what our critical systems were. Not only for disaster recovery, but where is our most important data about our customers? Where does that reside and how can we take that data and join it to understand more about our customers and their needs?

In our scenario, we have different business units with the same customer, but we can't make that realization that it's the same customer in different business units because of the way the systems grew separately over the years. Collibra is the one that's allowing us to tie that together. It opens up additional revenue streams with the ability to say, "Hey, I noticed you bought a product for this business unit from us. Did you know we also sell this product for this other business unit?" It allows us that cross-selling opportunity or upselling if you will (aka Revenue generation). That's a bit difficult to articulate or quantify in hard dollars, because there are so many steps going from a lead all the way to a sale. But we certainly believe that the information that Collibra has been able to provide us has helped or augmented our revenue generation streams. In a way it is a sales enablement tool.

In terms of pricing, it's not bad. You pay more money for the author licenses, which is where you do most of your entry and whatnot. Whereas consumers are basically viewing information and using the tool to say, "Hey, I want to look at this data." I think what we would like to get to eventually might be an enterprise license, rather than having to say, "I'm going to pay for 50 authors or 100 authors." At some point in the future, I could see us wanting an enterprise license.

They may offer that now, but it wasn't at a price that was palatable for our company at this point. Plus, we needed a few years to get uptake in it to justify going to that high level. It's just more money licensing wise, but not unrealistic, in my opinion. The money is well spent for the product and the services we're getting.

We just found that IGC was way behind the times. IBM had not really put any money into their product, it didn't connect with any of the systems that we wanted to do. It simply just didn't fill our needs.

We did look at the Informatica product and we did look at Alation.

I think what we found with Alation is that it was good. The user interface was impeccable, but it was not what we would consider the whole package. It was very good at the catalog portion, but in terms of interconnectivity with different systems, it did not have workflow, which was a key characteristic that we were looking for. Alation was a fairly new company. It was only maybe three or four years old at the time when we looked. There was concern about the staying power for that particular vendor. Not that their product wasn't good, it just wasn't as full a product as we would have had with Collibra but built on something for workflow, which we weren't interested in. We were looking for one product to do that.

The Informatica offering was quite good as well, but in our investigations and interviews with other companies in our industry, Informatica is quite a complex product to get up and running and to maintain. It's not cheap either, but when we looked at what it would take to care and feed our maintenance on the Informatica side of the house, in comparison to what we could do with Collibra, we chose Collibra.

Everything seems to be going the route of software as a service these days. It does take away somewhat your ability to customize like you want. Some products allow you to do that better with their SaaS offering than others. I would say that the data catalog space changes quite rapidly. When we did our investigation a couple of years ago, Alation hadn't been in business that long, they've continued to grow and maybe their offering has become better. Just because we chose something two or three years ago, doesn't mean that we shouldn't re-evaluate that in another couple of years to say, "Is this still the strategic product for us?"

There tends to be a lot of vertical integration going on. We once thought, "Well, let's just buy IBM because everything works with IBM." That doesn't seem to work any more. There seems to be a lot of best of the breed. But when you do that, there can be a lot of interoperability there that just doesn't work out. That people who like the IBM's of the world say, "We'll just buy our product because everything integrates." It truly doesn't in our experience.

You have to do your homework and definitely interview other customers to understand their experience for what is good and bad, because of course, sales isn't going to tell you that. But do your homework and make sure that you're talking to people who have not only installed the system, but have been able to use it for a few years, to see what's good about it, what's bad, and what they might have done differently. We talked to a number of different customers in the insurance field, in Canada, the U.S. and in Europe, and learned different things that we would have never considered on our criteria had we not talked to them.

On a scale of one to ten, I would peg it at a seven and a half, eight. I would put it higher, only except it doesn't connect as well to our legacy systems without additional programming and a separate tool, which they used to license as the whole product, but when MuleSoft got bought out by Salesforce, that business relationship was severed. Now we have to buy that MuleSoft product separately from Collibra. Now we have a data governance product that used to include MuleSoft (but does not now,) and now we have to deal with a second vendor to get that. It was nice when it was all one product. If they're going to say, "Use MuleSoft to get at your legacy systems," fine, sell me that product. But they won't do that anymore because Salesforce owns it.

I've been working with multiple companies, but with two of the companies we have been using Collibra mostly for data governance. With these companies, our use case is all about metadata governance, lineage, and data-related policy management. We're doing policy management directly inside Collibra and we're also using it for issue management on the analytics side.

If someone has a data concern, they just call me in and then put that concern into Collibra as a front-end UI for the data stewards and data scientists, and we start processing them.

We have benefited greatly from Collibra's data governance reporting. If we want to know more about a specific data element, we can use Collibra to get a picture of the whole history of it.

For example, who is the business owner for it? Where is the data coming from (especially when you have different sources which come through) and who was all touching it? And if I wanted to add a rule, like a business rule or a data quality rule for that particular data element, how or where do I keep it? It's like one central place, but for all these items.

I like the lineage feature the most because I don't think there's any other tool that actually depicts the data flow from multiple sources and the connectivities between every data element inside those sources.

I don't think there's any other solution where you can view multiple systems and multiple sources and data places and you can just write it down. It's a lot of work to initially organize but there's no other tools to do lineage like Collibra does it.

The connectors are not very sophisticated. They can do, for example, Informatica and Tableau, but the connectors themselves could be improved.

I recently got a subscription for another 600K for Collibra for one more year, so the author licenses are not used much. And they keep changing the UI platform; that can also be improved.

From an administration perspective, I like the white-glove onboarding part of Collibra. That was actually nice and I really liked that. For administration in general, I like that you can use Collibra however you want. It's more raw and easily adaptable.

So you can cook it or you can steam it or you can make changes to it in a lot of different ways, but it would also be nice if there were an already available analytics tools like Tableau at hand. Though it is easily adaptable and you'll have a completed end product which you can really leverage.

I've been using Collibra Governance for five or six years.

In terms of scalability, it's more like adopting; it's more like a shark. You have to keep feeding it and then it will grow. It depends on how many systems you're using. I worked for a union bank earlier when we set up Collibra and we were able to push in 3000, 30,000, 30,000 data elements. It's great when all the data is available because the team had been doing data analysis for more than a year prior to getting onto Collibra.

At my current company, the data analysis started at the same time along with the data governance and I think I hardly have 300 data elements. So it works on however much you feed it.

And if you have a huge data dictionary and business glossary already available, well and good. Instead of putting it in an Excel sheet, you can put it on Collibra and then you can actually walk through it. But if not, then you have to start feeding it, and it might take at least two years until you get proper food for the tool.

The technical support is okay, definitely not bad. I think they have a 24 hour SLA, but again, it's a data governance tool, so if it breaks and it's not available for a day or so, it's not going to create any business loss. It's more of an understanding kind of tool, and if the SLA is a bit delayed it won't be much of a problem.

The only comment I have is that some of the technical support teams in privacy, security, infrastructure, etc., could be more available during US timezones. That would have made our onboarding process easier.

We went through setup with the white-glove onboarding program. I actually gave feedback to Collibra as well, because the process is a little unusual, but I appreciate it.

The one thing I found a bit difficult when properly onboarding with Collibra and setting it up is that some of the Collibra teams we're working with, like in the security, privacy, and infrastructure teams, are in the European timezone and not the US timezone. Because of this, it becomes a little uncomfortable. It would be great if they could change things around so that there's also somebody available in the US.

It's not just one single technical support team when you are setting up Collibra; you have a lot of different puzzle pieces to work with. That's what the white-glove onboarding is all about. So it actually takes five to six weeks to completely set up, from starting with the solution to getting the software installed and all the nodes set up.

Whether it's on-premises or online, in both cases the whole setup takes five to six weeks and in this time frame I also need to have the company-related IT support people available. And it's just hard for me because most of Collibra's support teams are on Europe time. It could even take up to eight weeks.

Regarding implementation, we need to have the role-setting, we need to have the workspace in the UI in the front end, we need to build the communities, the groups, etc. So it's more like a whole structure that you have to build, and it's a lot of work.

It's more raw, so you can change it however you want. But the thing is, there's not much of a guideline and it depends on your company and organization as well. So you have to ask, how do you want to do the structure? Then you first have to find the communities, and you'll have to set up the groups and the UI, and what comes back, and it's just more about adopting the software to your needs.

Our data officer was very interested in doing it. So she's fully on. And we had an administrator, a developer and the business. We had around three or four business owners to set up the first part before we adopted the rest of the businesses. Of course I was there, too, and there was one more project manager. All in all, we implemented Collibra with only about eight people. As for ongoing maintenance, we only require one administrator.

We have not seen ROI yet. Again, it's more like a dictionary. You buy a dictionary at home, so whenever you want it, you use it. What is the value of getting the dictionary? I don't know. It depends on your talent. If your team does not have good talent, then the dictionaries are more useful. It gets easier to navigate. And if you don't have the dictionary, it's going to be hard.

I think they have a trust issue.  I did not like the way they recently went through the process. They were like, "Finish this SOW first, only then will we sign the other SOW." Or, "Finish this code." I didn't like that much.

And they're also very hard. They don't negotiate much: The first price is the first price. We tried our vendor management team contracts that our negotiation people use, but they did not negotiate at all, nothing at all. The very first price they quoted, they almost always stuck to the same price, within 95-98%. Always the same price; hardly anything went down. So that's one thing. They shouldn't do that.

Generally, when all the vendors quote, first they quote and then we start negotiating it. They might then reduce the quote or just provide a different way of getting around. Collibra were very rigid cost-wise, so they should improve that or maybe come up with some plan on how to negotiate.

I think we considered Informatica and one or two others that I can't remember off the top of my head. Informatica was the actual challenger to Collibra before we finalized the cost and everything.

It was cheaper, and it was another good one from an analytics perspective. But we know that, industry-wise, Collibra is number one from a data governance perspective. That's one of the reasons why we went with Collibra, even though the rest of the tools' setup cost and maintenance were cheaper.

It's a very niche product. It's nice to use and easy to promote. You don't have to have all the user licenses - you can also get the author licenses. If you have 10 author licenses, you can get up to 50,000 consumer licenses. It's nice to know you have a mobile component in that regard.

If you're doing a lot of training as well, you need to do proper training with your data team, and with your business team, try to use it as a business tool instead of a technical tool. Employ it as much as you feed it, because then it's that much more useful.

And then having the business rules, the data governance and data quality rules, everything in one place, is nice to have. If you try to utilize it, the data lineage is number one, because there's awesome capability in it. So just try to use it and you'll start loving it.

I would rate Collibra a seven out of ten.

My company, a financial institution, decided to implement data governance for data analytics, et cetera. We designed an entire metadata management system using Collibra. Initially, we designed the metadata management, and then we enabled the receivership at the organization-level and also roles and responsibilities. After that, we created the lineage between the technical and business assets, and we automated the process of insertions and updates.

The enterprise data analytics and data science team are able to use the solution for analytics, utilizing the filtered finalized metadata from Collibra, which helps them acquire accurate details. 

There's also a lot of time-saving and they're able to use appropriate data sets. We have a bunch of data sets, however, we've been able to bring and filter, and finalize the proper data sets for our users. These data sets can be used on the data mining side, where, due to the accurate datasets acquired, appropriate data is available and better results are achieved. They're much more likely now to be able to provide good input to the company based on sound data. 

The data security lineage is the solution's most valuable aspect for our organization.

The product offers very good artificial intelligence capabilities.

The automation process is very strong.

The whole company can utilize the product. Once we ingest the metadata from the technical side and we enable the security, if any user wants to know anything from business asset information to which component it is been assigned where, et cetera, they can do so. They don't need to be technical or get a technician to pull the data for them. 

There is a lineage, which helps us to track down and drill down on details. It helps with data analytics and data science. 

Earlier we used to have a third party tool like MuleSoft for connectors. On the architecture side, they are introducing new features that allow us to phase out the third-party connector.

Collibra itself is building and providing some out of the box workflows. These features allow you to automate the process and strictly align the compliance of the company.

There are many new aspects of the solution, however, I haven't yet gone through the documentation to see if they really help solve for issues or not.

Many features have recently changed their appearance and I need to re-learn how they work.

Sometimes, if a client needs a specific customization, we cannot do it directly. The client needs to reach out to Collibra and request the customization.

The technical support is very poor.

I've been using the solution on a few projects now.

We don't have any concerns regarding stability. It doesn't crash or freeze. It doesn't have bugs or glitches. It's reliable and easy to use.

The solution scales well for the most part.

Collibra, as a SaaS model, defines every functionality. What happens is that when you are trying to deploy the solution to the customer, some customers may have a lack of knowledge or, because of compliance issues, they might not like the SaaS approach. That said, if a new customer wants to deploy governance but they do not have any knowledge about governance and they've chosen the Collibra, the solution will 95% meet their expectations. Customers that are well-versed in governance will also be mostly pleased in its capabilities.

The issue is that if you are a client and you want me to customize the product in a particular way, while the solution may not allow my team to make the customization, if the client directly reaches out to Collibra, no doubt they can make it happen for the client directly.

Technical support could use some improvements.

One of the concerns I have is the Collibra response time. For example, if you have an issue and you log the call with Collibra for support, the response from Collibra will take a long time. 

For every service request of support from Collibra, the response time is slow. For each of requests, as well they say the client needs to take coaching. They recommend the user to go for coaching. They need to change that support process. The answer can't always just be "learn more". 

Even with debugging issues, they respond properly. There are just a lot of problems with the way they handle calls from us. 

I have previously used different solutions. I've used, for example, Infomatica Axon. Out of all the products I've used, however, I really like Collibra.

There is another product called Alation, which is a very sophisticated product in the market of governance. Alation has more advanced features than Collibra. While it may be expensive, it might be worth the cost to get something more sophisticated. It's possible that Collibra might be updating to those more sophisticated features in the future. Cost-wise, compared to the Alation, Collibra is a cheaper product and much more economical. Also, on the web interface side, Collibra is more hands-on and it's easy for any customer to add and update. 

The initial setup is very straightforward. The Collibra product itself is pretty easy to implement and they have it designed in a way that can make the process pretty smooth. They've defined all of the processes so that they are easy step-by-step scenarios.

That said, the implementation of governance from a customer perspective is not so easy. That's not the product's fault. When we try to implement governance, a couple of stakeholders might agree, and others might not agree. There are internal differences. It depends on the customer.

With any new project, when you are launching it, you will face these roadblocks from the customer's side from time to time. From Collibra side, the product is very smooth and easy.

The deployment also depends on the customer, and therefore it can take anywhere from months to years to fully implement the process.

Typically, you need a minimum of three people to handle the deployment process. If a company's size is bigger, or their requirements are more intensive, you may need more.

Post-deployment, as well, you will need someone to handle some occasional maintenance on the product. How many individuals you may need will depend on the parameters. Governance is an ongoing process. It's not a set it and forget it scenario. Tweaks need to consistently be made.

As a consultant, I never really get into pricing and licensing. However, comparatively speaking, I'd say that it's not as expensive as other options. It's probably about average within the industry. It's not so expensive that companies can't afford it. 

I work on governance modules. I'm not related to Collibra. I'm an external consultant and a governance consultant. We adopt any technology which is related to governance. We prepare ourselves and we'll learn it and we'll get hands-on experience so that we have a good understanding of it for our clients.

My experience with Collibra has been amazing. I've been working on Collibra within a couple of fields and my journey through Collibra was very fabulous all the way across.

I'm using the SaaS version of the solution. It ensures we're always up to date on the latest features, etc.

I'd recommend the solution to others. I'd rate it at a seven out of ten. I'd rate it higher, however, the technical support is really quite bad.