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Alation Data Catalog vs DataMasque comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alation Data Catalog
Ranking in Data Governance
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (3rd)
DataMasque
Ranking in Data Governance
28th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
3.7
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Data Masking (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 4.0%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of DataMasque is 0.3%. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Alation Data Catalog4.0%
DataMasque0.3%
Other95.7%
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2776527 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data and Analytics Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Increases data discoverability and boosts self-service analytics through enriched metadata and intuitive search
The best features that Alation Data Catalog offers are its search capabilities and the fact that it works with many different data platforms; it is essentially platform agnostic. The other piece that I really think is important is how easy it is to use as well as to manage. What makes the search capabilities of Alation Data Catalog stand out for me is the fact that every item within the catalog is indexed and searchable, as well as the filtering features that allow you to narrow down to just the types of assets that you need. Wildcard searches are also very helpful. It is a very intuitive tool, as long as you are using the filters. Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert. This has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration. It has allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog. We have been measuring the curation of content within the catalog that has gone up over time, and we have also seen the number of users in the catalog increase, as well as the amount of activity within the catalog increase. We were seeing about an average of about 20% increase month over month for the last few months.
Nierojan Pushparajan - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Software Engineering at TelliHealth
Masking sensitive test data has improved compliance and now enables safe, realistic debugging
The best features DataMasque offers that stand out to me are the flexibility to create rule sets and mask UUIDs, which have been really beneficial. Additionally, their customer service and technical support have been very helpful in getting this set up. The flexibility in creating rule sets has helped my team specifically because we have lots of dependencies on different databases and different database types. We have an RDS instance and an OpenSearch instance. Having those rule sets really allowed us to connect data between the two because the same data can be across multiple datasets. Creating these rules enabled us to not think too much about which ones need to be unique or which ones need to be the same across different tables. Whenever we run into issues or questions, we are able to talk to the DataMasque team, and they give us a reasonable technical response within a good timeframe that allows us to solve our issues pretty quickly. We have not had huge delays or blockers because of the communication between us and DataMasque. I appreciate the consistency to continue to improve the application, and there are new features coming out this year that will be tools we use. DataMasque is doing a great job of adding new features, and we will definitely be using them in the future. DataMasque has positively impacted our organization by already showing visible benefits in security and reduced risks for compliance, even though we are still in the process of setting up production and using it to the full extent. It will allow our developers to troubleshoot issues easily without the risk of viewing PHI or anything similar. We are seeing the benefits already of that, but we still need to complete the full integration and incorporate it into our workflows to see the full benefits, which we are currently in the process of. So far, it has been really good. By just masking production data, we can go into this masked database set to understand edge cases and issues as they come up from support without the developers having to look at any production data. They can go into this masked dataset and see the problem firsthand, something we would not have caught with our dev dataset because it is such a smaller amount of data, whereas production has a vast amount of data that we can look through.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization as collaboration has definitely improved at my company, allowing us to reach out and know who owns data, which has been especially helpful with turnover and in building out the analytics side of our bank."
"The most valuable feature is cloud integration."
"Given the relatively low level of maturity, Alation's most relevant feature at the moment is a user interface that's easy to navigate, which helps us find and understand the data. So while Alation has a lot more functionality, our pain point right now is being able to easily find, understand, and trust the information to use it."
"Alation Data Catalog was very useful for sharing SQL queries easily in a platform."
"We had some of our data science engineers, who had built out some cloud-based data and data products for users. They were spending a lot of their time, up to 30 to 35% of their time, answering questions about the data and helping people understand how to use it. Once they were able to document that information within Alation, they were only focusing on around 5% of the high-value questions that really couldn't be solved through the catalog itself. It freed them up to be more productive, it made their end-users more productive, and it made the adoption rate of their data products rise more quickly because people were able to get to using them."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by improving the data marketplace section, the data utilization section, and the quality of the data."
"The most valuable features of Alation Data Catalog are the simplicity in onboarding data sources, the security in securing the data sources, and the way the various users of Alation Data Catalog communicate with each other through a messenger."
"DataMasque has positively impacted our organization by absolutely allowing us to more rigorously test our products within a safe environment without leaking personally identifiable information."
"We can now have a staging environment very much like a production environment, which improves our testing and product quality."
"DataMasque has positively impacted our organization by already showing visible benefits in security and reduced risks for compliance, even though we are still in the process of setting up production and using it to the full extent."
"Being able to generate the masking rules directly from the tool based on what it finds during the data discovery helps ensure that all sensitive fields are identified and masked."
 

Cons

"Alation Data Catalog needs to develop a lot in terms of data governance and would be improved with a built-in interactive data quality solution."
"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"Some of the downsides about the lineage is that some of the code is quite difficult to read as the formatting is a bit ugly sometimes."
"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."
"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"I know that this has been on their roadmap and they're working on it, but as a whole, there's an untapped reservoir of capabilities within their article features that could be used and built upon."
"UUID generation could be improved."
"I think it would be great if the user experience was upgraded because it can be quite technical at times."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."
"A three-year agreement is better than a one-year rolling 12-month agreement from a price point of view. I'd recommend looking at a three-year deal because you can't stand up a catalog and produce value in 12 months."
"The solution is a little expensive."
"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
45%
Computer Software Company
12%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alation Data Catalog?
The platform's most valuable features are workflow automation, automated business metadata tagging, technical metadata tagging, and data integration with data quality tools or platforms.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alation Data Catalog?
I haven't had any experience with pricing, setup costs, or licensing, as I have been strictly an end user and haven't had any administrative or management responsibilities.
What needs improvement with Alation Data Catalog?
Some of the downsides about the lineage is that some of the code is quite difficult to read as the formatting is a bit ugly sometimes. Alation Data Catalog can be improved with the lineage formatti...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for DataMasque?
The DM team was very happy to work with us when we were determining the pricing and licensing model we wanted to use.
What needs improvement with DataMasque?
I think it would be great if the user experience was upgraded because it can be quite technical at times. The user interface could benefit from an upgrade as it can be quite technical at times. I d...
What is your primary use case for DataMasque?
I use the solution to mask production data and restore it into a QA environment.
 

Also Known As

Alation
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Alation Data Catalog vs. DataMasque and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,114 professionals have used our research since 2012.