Collibra Platform Reviews

Our primary use case of this product is for metadata information for our technology assets. We also use it for all the governance dictionaries, and for minutes as well.

The solution is very useful for IT people but it's also helpful for those not literate or knowledgeable in IT. The sales department, for example, can track where the information is coming from, where the transformation is happening and where they can find a report for any specific asset. It's very important for them to have it handy, and I believe that for the people who need to know that information, it's very good.

The diagram showing the limits is absolutely magnificent. It shows an end-to-end business term or any asset going from end-to-end. From a visual perspective on the diagram, it's simply beautiful.

The workflows and the language they use needs to be improved. Programming the needs for every user on the workflows is a key improvement that is required. In addition, they haven't updated their training solution in a while. We need to implement a lot of things ourselves and they want us to move to the cloud but there are a lot of glitches in the system. There are three environments - stage, development and production. Often things work well in the first two stages and then when you get to production, they don't work. It happens a lot and their response is slow. 

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

I would say that stability is around 85%-90%. It's very stable compared to other solutions on the market. 

Scalability is very good, excellent. 

Collibra provides one-on-one technical support, which gives access to a very knowledgeable person and their customer service is amazing. The only problem is that sometimes they don't know the answer so they have to check it out and get back to us. Sometimes you reach a dead end and that's the main problem of their system. We also now get in-house support.

We didn't switch from another solution, but we were using other solutions to control metadata. We used Infomatica for our transformation things. It wasn't like a governance tool. We also used Spark IS, an information solution, to harvest the data we needed.

The initial setup took a week because our systems are tricky due to security considerations. Deployment throughout the company took about six months, but that's an internal issue because of training implementation and that adds to the time. It's our main governance system so we had to move carefully. We already have 2,100 people using it. Operations uses it a lot and sales uses it for everything. 

For now, only 60% of our company is using it, so there's no ROI yet. 

Collibra started at a very reasonable price and then they increased the cost significantly by about 150% and almost lost us as a customer. It was something that the people from procurement and from finance ask whether the solution is really necessary.

At the time we also evaluated Unify, which became Boomi after it was purchased by Dell. That's an amazing tool as is Informatica. The issue there was that the price was too high. We went with Collibra because of the price and what it gives the end user.

Sometimes the technical support is messy but the system is great. It's a very good tool and I would suggest speaking directly with the technicians who develop the tool, rather than customer service. It's a great tool for a medium size company. if you're in a larger company, I would recommend implementing team by team. It's a tool that the end user needs to understand so if you implement it all at the one time, people will have difficulties and you won't have the support. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

The primary use case is generally about IT people trying to manage their metadata to control what data their organization has and where it's going, as well as to manage data quality and integration. Ideally, that needs to be tied to their business outcome, but that's still quite a rare use of the product. I'm the president of our company and we are partners with Collibra.  

Collibra are very good at helping organizations get a handle on controlling data and the knowledge around where the data is, its type, etc. If you don't know something, you can't protect it, so they help with that.

Their user interface is much more business friendly than anybody else's. Also, their workflows, the rules and policies on workflows, are really strong. They're very good at that. I would also say that the roles and responsibilities, their way to manage people within that process is efficient. Their GDPR module is also pretty good. 

I think the connectivity with different applications could be improved so that they ingest metadata through different applications, through integration with applications. The integration with different metadata sources is not where it needs to be. The company strategy is also, honestly, infantile compared to a lot of companies. If they were to extend the GDPR, if they were to kind of anonymize that and make it more general so it could cover CCPA and a number of the other legislations around the world, that would probably be a good thing.

I've been using this solution for about six years. 

The stability is good but it's only as good as the processes within your company. 

The solution is scalable, it can handle large volumes of metadata.

The technical support is limited. It's high quality, but not high volume, meaning that they have some really good people, but not a ton of them. Nowadays, a lot of people are getting into tech, but they're not really experienced in the particular solutions they're dealing with. It's also potentially hard to find people for that area that are really good, because it requires different types of experience. They have to know the application, but they also have to understand how applications work, how data warehousing work, things like that. Nothing against young people, but when they've only been in the industry for a few years and don't necessarily have that experience, they may not be able to help as much as you might need.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

I'd say that you need to understand what your business goals are around privacy and data, before implementing Collibra. The solution is not like an RSA Archer. They're not a security and risk application, they enable security and risks through management of metadata. They're a piece of the process, but they aren't the primary piece of that process. If somebody's looking at a security and risk application, I wouldn't necessarily say that this is the solution. They should look at data governance as part of the process of managing risk, but they shouldn't look at Collibra as primarily that type of application. If you're looking for a privacy and risk application you might want to look elsewhere, not because of quality issues but based on the full feature capabilities they'd be up against. I don't think Collibra can compete on those fronts. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10.