Collibra Governance Reviews

Collibra Governance can be deployed on-premise and in the cloud. The solutions can be used for lineage data quality, business glossary, and data cataloging.

The most valuable features of Collibra Governance are that it is user-friendly and easy to use.

The price of Collibra Governance could improve.

I have been using Collibra Governance for more than two years.

We have approximately 30 business users. 

The technical support was good from Collibra Governance.

The intial setup for Collibra Governance is mostly straightforward except for the workflows. The workflows are not that straightforward. There is a learning curve.

The full implementation took approximately four months.

We have approximately four people for the deployment and maintenance of Collibra Governance.

There are different levels of licenses. For example, some users can only do read-only licenses, and others have the stewardship license where they can give access to users.

The license for Collibra Governance is expensive.

I would recommend this solution to others. However, I am trying out a new data governance tool very soon. Collibra has bought a new data quality solution, but it is not integrated yet. We are all waiting for the integration of the data quality solution. OwlDQ is the name of the solution they have bought.

All right, sir.

I rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

We use the solution mostly for a client. There are a port catalog and dashboard cataloging features that they use. That said, the principal use case, even though there are a number of use cases, is using it as a business glossary for terms throughout the institution.

We're saving a ton of time. There are complex terms like year to date, et cetera, and defining what university means or what college means, and the validations between certain aspects of the organization allow us to have a single source of truth for agreements on that information pulling from whatever status system. It's basically eliminating any data systems that might have been used previously and eliminating any last-minute scramble or days of back and forth questioning from stakeholders to other analysts, trying to figure out what the single source of truth is. This product creates a central repository for terms in their metadata and provides a platform for further changes and approvals for that.

It's incredibly easy to use. As far as the user-friendly aspect is concerned, it's good. The search function within Collibra for desktop is pretty cool with many hotkeys, and especially for having to build a business glossary, if somebody's confused about a term, they can use the hotkey to pull it up on Collibra for desktop, wherever they are.

With the application installed, you don't necessarily have to go to Collibra to utilize it. 

I do like the workflow customization feature as we're able to customize workflows that give ownership to the stewardship organization rather than have to rely on out-of-the-box workflows. You make it an IT function. The IT department can set it up and then put it in the hand of the stewardship organization through customization and a feedback loop, with the stewards able to make it do what they need.

The tried and true features and functions are solid. These features develop in a very good direction as new releases come through.

The stability is good.

The scalability is there if a company would like to expand. 

There are still some new features being released and unveiled such as the certification workflows or questionnaires for dashboard certification, and stuff like that, that will improve a lot as releases go on. There are just minor things here and there that can change. 

Every time you change or publish a new questionnaire for certification, you have to basically go into the code and update the new version of the questionnaire. Just little things here and there like that will, as features improve, be improved as well. 

Much like other tools, some things can be a little bit immature sometimes.

I'm a little bit limited in some of the features that we have available. It can be a little bit clunky or require extra Windows that aren't necessarily needed. It can get a little bit over-complicated here. It would be nice to have some of the workflow functionalities a bit more usable. There could be more advanced customizations and more added features.

I've used the solution for about six months at this point. 

In general, the stability has been good. there have been no hiccups or issues of any kind. It seems to be reliable. 

The solution seems to be very scalable, from what I have witnessed so far. if a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

It's my understanding that we have around 200 users on the solution right now. We have several admin users and 200 business users. I'm not sure of the exact size. It may even be more than that at this point. 

It's a solution we're actively using. I'd say we are using it a moderate amount. 

I haven't personally been in touch with technical support. I know my team has, however, I have not heard any feedback. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I wasn't a part of the initial setup process. I can't speak to how simple or complex the process was in terms of implementation.

As I was not a part of the implementation process, I'm not sure if an integrator or consultant was used to assist in the setup process. 

We're partners. 

We're using the most recent version of the solution at this time. What I've been doing is product management on developing features and workflows for the customers or for the stakeholders.

The insight I would have for others considering the solution would be that it's a blank canvas. What makes it effective is understanding the use cases very well with the customer and designing the product to appropriately fill that need. The better you can understand the use case, the better that you can design it in a user-friendly fashion and get feedback from the stakeholders and get by in and organizational and ownership of the data that are you using, the more success you're going to have.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I'm satisfied with what we've done so far. And I'm looking forward to working with the solution in the future.

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.

I am using it essentially for the GDPR implementation over here in Europe. This is my second project on Collibra. Before that, I have worked on the CCPA part for a US-based project.

I have worked on an on-prem solution and a solution on the cloud. I was the one who had created all the components on AWS because our client was not ready to move onto Collibra's cloud solution, but I believe they will be moving to SaaS soon.

We are on version 5.7.5. Version 5.7 is the latest, but because we're not on SaaS, it's quite tedious to upgrade each and every environment. We have four environments or five if you include what the developers work on, so it is a bit tedious to upgrade. 

In Europe, it is quite good for documenting your DPIAs, and you have to do that if you have to be compliant with GDPR. That's one of the main use cases that I see over here.

The catalog feature is definitely valuable because it makes ingesting the metadata of any application quite simple. You don't have to do things manually. You can just schedule an import, and it will just refresh the metadata of whatever application you want. That's what I like. I usually work on the technical side, and other than that, I usually create integrations. I integrate Collibra with different environments or applications.

I'm a developer, so I cannot vouch for the business, but for me, it is quite developer-friendly with the Java API interface and the REST API interface that they have provided.

It is good for creating dashboards based on the needs of each and every role. It can be user-specific or group-specific. We usually create dashboards and give them to our business users, and they are quite happy with that.

It should have more integrations with things like CyberArk because its main purpose is GDPR implementation. We have to have more scope for things that implement more privacy. CyberArk makes sure your credentials are vaulted and your things are secure when you're creating your integrations or connecting to an application. I do believe that they are working on this feature.

I've been working with Collibra for almost two years.

It usually is stable. It doesn't really require maintenance, and it doesn't go down. The only maintenance that is required is the upgrade, which is not that frequent. However, after our latest upgrades, when we ran some of the workflows, the form doesn't respond. Even if you open developer options on your browser and if you try clicking next or back, it doesn't work, but if you close it and then you open the form again, it works. I don't know why that's happening with this version, but because we are planning to move to SaaS, I'm not really bothered about it so much for now.

It is pretty new for this client, and we are in the initial phase. All the applications are not even on board yet. We are slowly trying to move towards the ideal scenario where we have things from your catalog to even integrations with Denodo and Feebo. These are the standard things for virtualization and everything.

We definitely know the capabilities of the tools. I have been working on it technically for almost a couple of years now, and we also have business users and consultants who have implemented a proper governance structure for the entire organization including everything from your roles and responsibilities to the line of businesses and how they should be. We have people who are experts at that, so it's slowly evolving. Our users are data stewards, business stewards, subject matter experts, IT owners, data owners, and stakeholders.

Most of the time, as soon as I raise a ticket, they revert back, and I get the correct thing. However, sometimes, for things like the workflow issue that I just mentioned, they aren't that good, but usually, they're good.

I have worked on SAS DataFlux, Ab Initio Express, and Ab Initio Metadata. All of them are data governance tools. Some of them are data quality engines. Collibra is not one. 

Collibra Governance is totally different from Dataflux. DataFlux usually is just for your data quality. That's the data quality engine that will run your data quality rules and store the data in a place, just like Trillium or exPress IT. After that, you have to integrate it with something like Ab Initio or Collibra to govern the data quality results that are coming from it.

I have also used the Collibra Privacy & Risk. It is the GDPR Accelerator. In fact, we cannot call it an accelerator after 5.7.

If you have someone who knows what they're doing, then it is pretty straightforward, but you have to get the business on board as well, and then you have to show them how to use the tool. That's usually a challenge for any new data governance tool that you get into place. 

If you're on-prem, then the setup is pretty straightforward, but if you're deploying on the cloud, it becomes a bit tricky because usually what happens in banks is that each line of business has its own AWS account. You use your servers to scan their metadata, but then you have to establish some connectivity between different accounts and all those things. That part is usually a bit complex, but if you're on-prem or if you're on SaaS, then it's going to be pretty straightforward.

I have actually created a Jenkins pipeline that works with the latest installable file that Collibra gives. It just does everything by itself. It is pretty straightforward for me now, but reaching that point took a while and a decent amount of effort. We have a DNS resolver using Route 53, which will then go to a load balancer, and the load balancer essentially is then connected to your receive tool that has the tool hosted on that. We take care of security groups and make sure that no unauthorized access takes place. We have implemented Azure AD authentication. Our client uses Azure AD for all their authorization, so we implemented that using the SAML functionality that's available in Collibra.

If there is any change in the asset models, then we have a team that does that. As of now, if we need someone who will deploy the actual tool or upgrade it, then I'm the one who currently takes care of that.

Most of our clients have seen ROI from using Collibra. Some of them are still getting up to speed. Usually, financial institutions have legacy systems where people will just use Excel for their DPIAs. It is somewhat of a drastic change for a lot of them, so it sometimes takes time to see the ROI.

I am not so much aware of price details. Initially, there was an add-on NuSoft license to use the DVC connector that NuSoft gives to create integrations, but Collibra is now phasing out of it slowly. Collibra is cutting ties with them is what we have been led to believe, and we have started developing on Spring Boot, which is open source.

I would recommend this solution to others, and I would ask them to directly go for SaaS instead of going for on-prem because you get a lot more features. I believe the license is the same or similar, but I'm not really aware of the price points.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using Collibra is that being compliant is important, and we are helping our clients do that. You must have read about H&M and Citibank. They got charged a lot.

I would rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten. Because I'm not involved with SaaS, I am keeping two points away for that. After using SaaS for a year, I can say more, but for now, it is eight.

I worked with this solution a few months ago and the main use case of Collibra was as the central metadata tool for the enterprise. The plan was to have all of our data dictionaries, our business glossary, to expose data lineage through Collibra and show all of the relationships and connections between our various tables and databases and the actual semantic business layer, in Collibra. It was a way to unify our technical metadata with our business metadata and with our actual applications.

Recently, a lot of work has been done around sensitive data elements. Collibra is really a good tool for centralizing a list of elements that could either be first or second order PII and connecting the top policies around those specific PII elements to the systems they're found in, and how they are implemented. If they're used as different names in different systems, that's valuable because it's helping the company meet its goals in terms of new legal regulations for the EU as well as for California. Those two are our GDPR and CCPA which are the two most recent policies from that domain. It's also very good for data quality issue management. Collibra is essentially the main tool for that. It's a valuable tool in many different companies.

The interface itself is very useful. I think what I find most useful about the tool, if I'm looking at it from the perspective of a data user, would be the search capability. The fact that I can search for any data elements that are in the table and there will be a pretty comprehensive list that are either identical or very similar to one another in the tables where they are found. I think in terms of sourcing, it's really valuable. I also think that the ability to connect your business metadata with your technical metadata, is something that's very valuable from the perspective of the business. People on the business side need to understand where data is coming from, how it's connected. Doing that through one centralized repository, or document, is useful.

The issue may be the way it's been implemented in my company but, for Collibra to be really useful, what's missing is an easy way to connect to different data sources and different types of data sources and actually ingest and profile some of that data. That's the trouble we've always had in getting wider adoption of the tool. Unless there's a mandate from the enterprise data office or the like, regular users are not going to use the tool for really robust business use cases without having some actual data in there. I know there is some out of the box capability for this, but I think it needs to be easier for Collibra to actually ingest and run some basic profiling on the data itself. That's currently missing from the tool. 

I think that today this is a stable solution which wasn't the case in the past. For a couple of years, there were certain outstanding issues and bugs that took a really long time to fully address. Those have been taken care of at this point.

It's a very scalable tool. There is a ton of metadata in there. If they were to roll this out to other lines of business and start getting more adoption, I don't think they would have a problem with scalability. I think the problem is really with getting that adoption in the first place.

The company is very hands-on providing support and solutions but I think the problem is that they might be stretched a little thin. It's a fairly small company, I believe, and there have been cases where we had to wait months to get support to fully patch something that was wrong in the tool. It's even more of an issue if you are connecting Collibra with another third party tool because you have to get everybody on the call. You have to make sure that they're corresponding, following up in a timely manner. It's just not easy.

I have previously used the Sandbox versions of Alation, and Informatica. I remember Alation being overall very similar to Collibra. I think Collibra's UI may be a little better. I think it's very user-friendly. I would say definitely superior to Informatica. I haven't really heard many good things about the Informatica business glossary metadata solution although it has been a while since I have seen or used that and it may have changed. I definitely think Collibra is the gold standard in terms of combining user experience with the actual capabilities. Again, at the end of the day, it's really a matter of implementation as to how good it actually is and how positively it will be adopted.

There have been some issues with the implementation and the adoption rate has not been high. It's not being used extremely extensively. It's being used for those use cases already mentioned, meaning at the enterprise level for identifying PII and complying with regulations. It is being used for data quality issue management in finance but as far as I'm aware it's not being used for data quality issue management for other lines of business.

I don't exactly remember the pricing but my impressions from everybody that I've talked to is that it's an expensive tool. It's more expensive than its competitors. It may well be worth it in terms of how it's being used. I think it's a superior tool, but it's also a premium tool. 

Before purchasing a license or licenses for Collibra, you need to have a data strategy or data governance and a management strategy defined beforehand. You need to have at least some semblance of an idea of how you want the various spaces and communities in Collibra to be organized. Obviously, certain things will change as you get familiar with the tool, but you can't just wing it. You need to have a strategy that also takes into account other tools and other solutions that you want Collibra to be connected to because there could be an issue where maybe you have a data lineage tool that is getting upgraded in three months from now, and your current version of Collibra will be better suited to connect with that tool once it's been upgraded. You're never going to be able to know 100% beforehand when those types of events will happen, but you need to have some kind of strategy in mind. This is where you really need the investment in data governance and management before you define the tool that you're going to use. That has to come before any implementation of Collibra. 

It's a big tool, so it can potentially be difficult to implement if you don't have the right investment in place before deployment. It's also user-friendly with a lot of great out-of-the-box capabilities. There is some room for improvement in certain areas, but overall it's a good solution. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

We use the solution to organize data. The IT team has access to the data and knows where it is stored, but when it comes to legal compliances and various regulations, the business itself does not have control over where the data is stored and how it is stored. Typically, the business wants to have control over where the data is stored, the various data classifications, and data sensitivity. That is the main reason why we use Collibra Governance.

I appreciate the range of features it has. Based on the reviews of some of the other tools we use, we find that the other tools lack in certain areas. If I had to choose a comprehensive tool across all the fields of data governance, I would opt for Collibra Governance.

The most valuable feature is the Technical Lineage. The fact that you can trace the auditability of a particular field or attribute across various systems is very useful.

There are a few things that need improvement. From a usability perspective, customers usually find some areas of the solution a bit complex. It takes a long time for the customers to get used to the UI and the interface. Another thing that the customers complain about when they opt for Collibra is the pricing. There are fees for additional features which mess with the customers' overall budgets.

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

It is a very stable solution. I would give it a nine out of ten. It works very well compared to other solutions on the market.

The scalability of the solution is good. I give it an eight out of ten.

The response time of technical support is typically high.

Neutral

Nowadays, most customers are looking into Microsoft Stack, so we use Microsoft Purview as well, although Calibra Governance is our preferred choice since it's much more stable than Purview.

Up until now, Collibra Governance has been the market leader and is always the first one to add new features. Purview tries to bring out a lot of features as fast as possible, but those features are not very stable and have a lot of bugs. Purview has the upper hand when it comes to the usability of the app system. It is easier for customers to understand the feature list while using Purview. For example, after using both solutions for a few weeks, they usually have a better grasp of Purview than Callibra Governance.

Since it is a SaaS platform in a way, the solution is deployed on Collibra cloud. The deployment is pretty straightforward since Collibra deploys it on its own. It takes about a week to get the core of the system up and running. After, we configure it to fit the specific needs.

On a scale from one to ten, the simplicity of the setup would be an eight.

Collibra Governance's pricing is based on its features. You get what you pay for. There are other solutions that are cost-effective but lower quality. With Collibra, you get a fair-value product if you pay a bit more.

I would not recommend using the Big Bang approach with Collibra Governance. You should understand the bigger picture of what you want to do. Start off with a few systems and four small modules. Get feedback from the business and then continuously evolve it. It is better to have the implementation spread out over a one-year period than have it crammed down within three to six months while trying to implement everything at once.

I would say that Collibra Governance is suitable for small to medium businesses. 

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.