Alation Data Catalog vs erwin Data Intelligence comparison

Alation and Quest Software are both solutions in the Data Governance category. Alation is ranked #7 with an average rating of 7.3, while Quest Software is ranked #28. Alation holds a 5.3% mindshare in DG, compared to Quest Software’s 1.8% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Alation users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

Alation Data Catalog

Read 12 Alation Data Catalog reviews

4,719 Views
4,106 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

erwin Data Intelligence

Read 18 erwin Data Intelligence reviews

2,788 Views
2,788 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Alation Data Catalog

erwin Data Intelligence

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 19, 2025

Alation Data Catalog and erwin Data Intelligence compete in the data management sector. Alation is favored for its cost-effectiveness and robust support, while erwin is distinguished by its comprehensive features.

Features: Alation Data Catalog is known for its powerful collaboration tools, intuitive search capabilities, and effective data governance. On the other hand, erwin Data Intelligence excels in providing detailed data lineage and impact analysis, robust metadata management, and extensive connectivity options for enriched data insights.

Room for Improvement: Alation could benefit from expanding its data governance features beyond its current user interface ease, improved integration with platforms like Snowflake, and a more mature automation capability. erwin could enhance its user interface simplicity, streamline its setup process to reduce complexity, and offer more intuitive tools for non-technical users to improve accessibility and usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Alation offers a cloud-based model that supports quick deployment and intuitive interfaces, complemented by responsive customer support. erwin provides flexible deployment options, including on-premise and cloud, though its installation can be more involved, balanced by thorough customer service with a technical focus.

Pricing and ROI: Alation is recognized for competitive subscription pricing, offering a solid return on investment with manageable entry costs and consistent updates. erwin presents a higher initial setup cost, attributed to its rich feature offering, appealing to enterprises seeking extensive functionality and long-term value.

To learn more, read our detailed Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Intelligence Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Intelligence

September 2025

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Helped 871,688 peers since 2012

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

7th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Metadata Management (2nd)

erwin Data Intelligence

Ranking in Data Governance

28th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Governance (17th)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 5.3%, down from 8.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Intelligence is 1.8%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Governance Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Alation Data Catalog	5.3%
erwin Data Intelligence	1.8%
Other	92.9%

Data Governance

Featured Reviews

Brahma Lam

Developer at CVS Health

Has metadata cataloging features but needs changes in domain model

The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature. The tool's domain model needs to be changed. Alation Data Catalog is stable. The solution is scalable. Alation Data Catalog's deployment is easy. I rate it a nine out of ten. Deployment takes only two to three hours to complete.…

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Roy Pollack

Advisor Application Architect at CPS Energy

The solution provides more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term.

We have loaded over 300,000 attributes and more than 1000 mappings. The performance is slow, depending on the lineage or search. This is supposed to be fixed in the later versions, but we haven't upgraded yet. The integration with various metadata sources, including erwin Data Modeler, isn't smooth in the current version. It took some experimentation to get things working. We hope this is improved in the newer version. The initial version we used felt awkward because Erwin implemented features from other companies into their offering.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Alation Data Catalog was very useful for sharing SQL queries easily in a platform."

"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."

"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."

"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."

"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."

"The solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."

"The most valuable feature is cloud integration."

"We can customize templates based on our use cases."

More Alation Data Catalog pros

"Data Intelligence creates a single source of truth for all of our metadata. This solution is better for data warehousing, but the metadata features speed up our development work. It's easy to create and manage mappings because we can export them to Informatica and pick up the work where we left off."

"Data Intelligence allows us to automate multiple tasks we had previously done manually, such as restructuring the metadata for our purposes, setting up ETL flows, and defining the data tables we create. It also enables us to standardize our approach and our technical processes."

"The biggest impact for us is that erwin generates DDL extremely quickly. We're able to pull in metadata, map it to a target, generate DDL to create the tables, and generate SSIS packages. Previously, especially going back 10 to 15 years ago, hundreds of hours had to be spent to manually perform these tasks. This solution completely automates it and gets it 90% done. We can then pass it off to a developer to create the items in SSIS."

"We use the codeset mapping quite a bit to match value pairs to use within the conversion as well. Those value pair mappings come in quite handy and are utilized quite extensively. They then feed into the automation of the source data extraction, like the source data mapping of the source data extraction, the code development, forward engineering using the ODI connector for the forward automation."

"erwin has tremendous capabilities to map right from the business technologies to the endpoint, such as physical entities and physical attributes, from a lineage standpoint."

"Data Intelligence has provided more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term. We have linked three critical layers of data, providing us with an end-to-end lineage at the column level."

"The data management is, obviously, key in understanding where the data is and what the data is. And the governance can be done at multiple levels. You have the governance of the code sets versus the governance of the business terms and the definitions of those business terms. You have the governance of the business data models and how those business data models are driving the physical implementation of the actual databases. And, of course, you have the governance of the mapping to make sure that source-to-target mapping is done and is being shared across the company."

"Mind map... is a really good feature because it is very helpful in seeing which column's tables are related. Also, you can flag them with "sensitive data" and other indicators. You can also customize your own features for the mind map. That was another very robust feature."

More erwin Data Intelligence pros

Cons

"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."

"Alation Data Catalog is not user-friendly for business users. Its user experience is comparable to a Wikipedia page, lacking good visualization."

"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."

"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."

"The interface is not user-friendly."

"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."

"The product's data governance features need improvement."

"Alation Data Catalog doesn't support end-to-end lineage. By that, I mean the ability to trace the movement of data from when it first comes into our organization to where it's consumed."

More Alation Data Catalog cons

"If we are talking about the business side of the product, maybe the Data Literacy could be made a bit simpler. You have to put your hands on it, so there is room for improvement."

"We still need another layer of data quality assessments on the source to see if it is sending us the wrong data or if there are some issues with the source data. For those things, we need a rule-based data quality assessment or scoring where we can assess tools or other technology stacks. We need to be able to leverage where the business comes in, defining some business rules and have the ability to execute those rules, then score the data quality of all those attributes. Data quality is definitely not what we are leveraging from this tool, as of today."

"There was a huge learning curve, and I'd been in software development for most of my career. The application itself, and how it runs menus and screens when you can modify and code, is complex. I have found that kind of cumbersome."

"Really huge datasets, where the logical names or the lexicons weren't groomed or maintained well, were the only area where it really had room for improvement. A huge data set would cause erwin to crash. If there were half a million or 1 million tables, erwin would hang."

"There is room for improvement with the data cataloging capability. Right now, there is a list of a lot of sources that they can catalog, or they can create metadata upon, but if they can add more then that would be a good plus for this tool."

"Another area where it can improve is by having BB-Graph-type databases where relationship discovery and relationship identification are much easier."

"There are a lot of little things like moving between read screens and edit screens. Those little human interface type of programming pieces will need to mature a bit to make it easier to get to where you want to go to put the stuff in."

"The data quality assessment requires third-party components and a separate license."

More erwin Data Intelligence cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."

"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."

"The price is too high."

"You buy a seat license for your portal. We have 100 seats for the portal, then you buy just the development licenses for the people who are going to put the data in."

"The whole suite, not just the DI but the modeling software, the harvester, Mapping Manager — everything we have — is about $100,000 a year for our renewals. That works out to each module being something like $8,000 to $10,000."

"Smart Data Connectors have some costs, and then there are user-based licenses. We spend roughly $150,000 per year on the solution. It is a yearly subscription license that basically includes the cost for Smart Data Connectors and user-based licenses. We have around 30 data stewards who maintain definitions, and then we have five IT users who basically maintain the overall solution. It is not a SaaS kind of operation, and there is an infrastructure cost to host this solution, which is our regular AWS hosting cost."

"The solution is aggressively priced."

"erwin's pricing was cheaper than its competitors."

"The price is reasonable and competitive. When you get into forward and reverse-engineering, the cost could go up. However, if you are a large organization, you would probably be able to access different packages. If, however, you don't need forward and reverse-engineering, then the price is relatively cheap."

"The licensing cost was very affordable at the time of purchase. It has since been taken over by erwin, then Quest. The tool has gotten a bit more costly, but they are adding more features very quickly."

More erwin Data Intelligence pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Government

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	7

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	14

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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alation Data Catalog?

The price difference between Alation Data Catalog and Collibra was not significant. Collibra is a little bit expensive than Alation, but I presented the benefits of having that platform, so that li...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Alation Data Catalog?

Alation Data Catalog is not user-friendly for business users. Its user experience is comparable to a Wikipedia page, lacking good visualization. In a fast-paced world, we need to grasp information ...

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Comparisons

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 40% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 13% of the time

Collibra Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 10% of the time

Atlan vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 5% of the time

data.world Enterprise vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 2% of the time

More Alation Data Catalog Competitors

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 31% of the time

Collibra Governance vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 23% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 8% of the time

Collibra Lineage vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 8% of the time

More erwin Data Intelligence Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alation Data Catalog

October 2025

Download Alation Data Catalog product report

Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Intelligence

October 2025

Download erwin Data Intelligence product report

Also Known As

Alation

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance

Overview

Alation pioneered the data catalog market and is now leading its evolution into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions including data search & discovery, data governance, lineage, stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation.

Thanks to its powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. With Alation, analysts are empowered to search, query and collaborate on their data to achieve faster, more accurate insights.

Trusted by 400+ enterprises worldwide like Salesforce, Nasdaq, LinkedIn, Finnair, and Cisco.

Alation

Erwin Data Intelligence drives automation, supports data catalog and literacy, and offers Smart Data Connectors for efficient metadata handling. Its customization flexibility and integration facilitate enhanced data governance, visualization, analysis, and compliance.

Erwin Data Intelligence offers automation scripts that accelerate development, integrated data cataloging, data profiling, and lineage analysis to streamline information management. Users appreciate its capability in metadata harvesting, code engineering, and infrastructure integration. The tool provides flexibility to enhance governance and data visualization. While it performs well, users have noted challenges with API robustness and interface complexity, and there are opportunities to improve workflow integration, AI features, and large dataset handling. Companies rely on it for metadata management, automation of metadata mappings, and data governance to support compliance and literacy.

What are the main features of Erwin Data Intelligence?

Automation Scripts: Speeds up development processes through powerful scripts.
Data Catalog: Supports comprehensive data mapping and profiles for better analysis.
Smart Data Connectors: Efficiently handles code engineering and metadata harvesting.
Customization Flexibility: Adapts to existing infrastructure for seamless integration.
Comprehensive Visualization: Empowers data visualization and standardization processes.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Increased Development Speed: Automation scripts notably enhance development efficiency.
Improved Data Governance: Streamlines processes, supporting compliance and business definitions.
Effective Integration: Seamlessly fits with ETL tools and existing workflows.
Enhanced Data Literacy: Supports data literacy initiatives with robust cataloging features.
Comprehensive Impact Analysis: Facilitates thorough analysis for informed decision-making.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail, organizations implement Erwin Data Intelligence for efficient metadata management and governance. It assists in automating lineage and mapping, supporting ETL procedures while enhancing compliance and data literacy efforts. Its flexibility and integration support create valuable data insights and governance improvements.

Quest Software

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC

Buyer's Guide

Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Intelligence

September 2025

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