Collibra Platform Reviews

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.

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.

Collibra Governance is mainly used as a one-stop solution for data discovery.

Using Collibra Governance means that we know the end to the life cycle of data across the team, which provides our data science and analytics team with sample data they can use to make decisions on what to do next.

Collibra Governance's most valuable features are data lineage and stewardships.

There are a lot of gaps in Collibra's support and documentation. In the next release, I would like Collibra Governance to include better integration with data ecosystem tools.

I've been using Collibra Governance for approximately a year.

Collibra Governance is stable with limited data sizes, but with bigger data sizes, you need to invest a lot in the job servers, which becomes a very costly operation.

Collibra Governance isn't that scalable.

It's very difficult to get support from Collibra.

Neutral

Previously, we used Apache Atlas and switched because it had very limited features.

The initial setup was very difficult - if you're looking at a high-availability or a production scale setup, you need to be technically sound. I would rate the ease of the setup process as two out of five. Deployment took around six months.

We used an in-house team.

Collibra Governance helps our organization, but getting a GMV or dollar value out of it is tough. I would rate its ROI as two or three out of five.

Collibra Governance is expensive - I would rate its pricing as one out of five. There are also additional costs for everything except the basic setup.

We evaluated Alation and OvalEdge.

Before implementing Collibra Governance, go through the tool very thoroughly because doing a POC or MVP is fine, but when you're looking at a production-scale deployment, it's very complicated. So explore other tools before jumping in with Collibra. I would rate Collibra Governance as six out of ten.

We used Collibra Lineage mainly for end-to-end lineage. Additionally, we wanted to use it for business velocity data cataloging and data quality.

The most valuable features of Collibra Lineage are the multiple options for automation. Additionally, if you have a scenario where automation does not work, you have the option to manually create the lineage. The solution does not force you to always go through an automated way where you have broken lineage and you are stuck without a lineage.

Collibra Lineage could improve connectively. If they can offer more out-of-the-box connectors, which come as in a package compared to you having to go and buy a lot in the marketplace for certain specific connectors.

I have been using Collibra Lineage for approximately two years.

We have no major issues with the stability of Collibra Lineage.

The scalability of Collibra Lineage has been good. We have not seen any problems.

We have four clients that are using Collibra Lineage and a total of 25 users.

The technical support is good. There was not a lead time in terms of their response. They were quite responsive.

The initial setup of Collibra Lineage is straightforward. It is not complex.

We had a partnership with Collibra to do the implementation and we participated in the configuration.

There are different licenses available for Collibra Lineage based on what kind of access you want. If you want, for example, a read-only license they have different ones to pick from.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Collibra Lineage an eight out of ten.

The most important feature in Collibra Governance is the ability to gather data or a collection of data into one repository. If a client creates a repository at his place, then it will get updated to the cloud automatically.

It's easy to operate and understand.

Also, you can have different views for business people and for technical people, and there are some helpful customizations in it as well.

Collibra is not very user-friendly in terms of lineage generation. The lineage generation process is quite tough, and it takes lots of time to understand it.

Business staff are also struggling to generate lineages and to understand them. So, it is not very user-friendly.

They need to improve support. They have so many features, but nobody is much of an expert in the market at present. If they have easy, friendly support, it will help improve the product and help understand their own product.

I worked on a project related to this solution for six months.

It is quite a stable solution.

It is quite scalable. I think in the past, they had an in-house, on-premises version, but now they have come up with a cloud version, so it's quite scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. Collibra helped with that process, but we found it to be straightforward and not complicated.

For functional users, one or two persons are adequate for deployment and maintenance. For preparation, four to five persons should be enough for the overall job. Two people will be needed for hands on work, and two consultants who can guide the people and resolve queries will be needed as well. You will also need a project manager who can monitor everything and assign tasks etc. A total of  five or six people is more than enough.

Collibra helped with the deployment, and we shadowed them during the setup and upgrading processes.

I would rate Collibra Governance at seven  on a scale from one to ten.

There is a master glossary which includes all of our business fields. The fields are related to particular lines of business such as account numbers. We then build business rules around these fields and complete data integrity checks. 

We plan to increase our usage of this solution over time. We will have to use other functionality within this application as it is currently limited. We currently have 12 team members using this solution. 

This solution is user friendly and offers multiple functionalities. It operates like a kind of a repository that allows you to find anything about a particular data set or field.

This solution could be improved with the the addition of process diagrams to help the many users of the platform understand all the fields.

We have used this solution for six months. 

This is a stable solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was made easier due to the access we had to the Collibra team. The deployment took three months and involved three to four people.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use Collibra for IT data governance, specifically for GDPR compliance. Our company is in the banking and financial institution sector and we are customers of Collibra. 

In general, this is a valuable solution for us. Collibra provides a good view of where my data is, the type of data we have across the landscape, how it's getting utilized, the quality in terms of correct calibration, and whether the integrity is uniform across the landscape. Everything is in sync and Collibra is a central repository that provides a good snapshot of understanding along with holding the integrity, confidentiality, and security of our data. 

Data discovery would be the major area that requires improvement across the landscape and I'd also like to see data redundancies. Those are the two areas where improvements could be made. A lot of countries have laws that don't allow most of the data to flow into the cloud. That issue needs to be addressed when it comes to personal data protection laws. Collibra needs to take into consideration the local laws and the concerns of those countries.

 I've been using this solution for well over two years. 

The main technical support is from Collibra which has local partners. It's not a critical application that requires 24/7 support so they're available five days a week during work hours. 

In terms of the tool, the initial set up is not a problem, but there can be many legacy factors in any organization that can affect deployment.  Implementation needs to be understood so that the tool can be aligned to the IT setup of the organization. In that sense, implementation is always a challenge. 

We deployed in-house in consultation with Collibra, and implementation took about eight months. We have about 80 users throughout our organization including CTOs, CIO,s and the board which have become more sensitive to data protection over the years. 

There are other companies with solutions in this field; IBM, Informatica and they provide a lot of competition. I believe Collibra has a good standard and is an early bird in this area, I believe they'll keep that lead as they move forward in line with this constantly evolving field. 

It's important to have a clear understanding of your IT landscape and its features and whether they really match up with the roadmap of governance in terms of compliance. Those issues need to be assessed before choosing a solution. 

This is a cost-effective product and to my mind has all the ingredients to satisfy compliance requirements as well as ease of implementation. I recommend this solution and rate it eight out of 10. 

We've used it for cataloging or defining our business data entities and their associated attributes or data elements. Where appropriate, we are defining their sources and their modes of derivation. Rising above that, we are also using Collibra for the definition of our business metrics that are calculated from those data elements and the derivation definitions associated with them.

We have folks in the field doing our clinical research operations, and they have the opportunity to refer to Collibra when they are examining a particular report. When they have a question about how something in that report is derived, they can pull a metric that is defined fully in Collibra. They have the opportunity to drill back into Collibra to see that.

It is a big library. It has a long list of data assets and their descriptions and lineage. It's fairly two-dimensional. For my use, it just has lists of things. There might be others in my organization who are tying the data elements, metrics, and other things together, but I don't rely on that, and I don't leverage that. For me, it is a fairly flat library for information.

What I use it for is fairly rudimentary, and I don't have any complaints about it. I haven't tried to stretch the boundaries at all, but it would be nice if there were capabilities built within the system to somehow help enforce the quality and consistency across related elements that are built in the catalog. It could have intelligent capabilities built in to help maintain the quality of the data and information, such as natural language processing, machine learning, and so on. 

I've been exposed to it for about seven years, but I have been using it more heavily over the past couple of years.

I've not seen or heard of any problems with its stability.

I haven't seen any impediments there. So, I have no concerns about scalability. It could be because I haven't been this involved in pushing the boundaries, but I've seen it accommodate new layers without hearing of any issues.

It is open to everybody in our organization. We have more than a thousand users. So, there are more than a thousand people out there who have lately used Collibra, but most of them have used it in the reference mode or read-only mode. In terms of their roles, we've got everybody from data engineers, data analysts, and systems developers to business analysts and business end-users. 

I've never called them, and I don't hear anybody complaining about it.

As far as I know, this was our first venture about seven years ago into data cataloging and data governance.

I wasn't involved in the setup, but I can see that the maintenance of information within the system is quite straightforward.

My guess would be that we took care of most of the things in-house.

I'm only involved in the use of it. My advice would be to make sure that the content is of quality because it tends to mushroom into lots and lots of information that can easily get out of sync. It should only be entered into by an organization that has the discipline behind it to maintain the information at a high level of quality. Otherwise, you end up with a lot of information that seems useful, but in effect, it could be more harmful than it's worth if things get out of sync. It takes an organization to maintain this kind of solution. The content is dependent on the quality of the maintenance of the content.

I see a small chunk of it, and I would rate it 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.