We performed a comparison between Alation Data Catalog and erwin Data Intelligence by Quest based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Governance solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"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."
"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'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."
"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."
"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 solution saves time in data discovery and understanding our entire organization's data."
"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."
"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."
"It is a central place for everybody to start any ETL data pipeline builds. This tool is being heavily used, plus it's heavily integrated with all the ETL data pipeline design and build processes. Nobody can bypass these processes and do something without going through this tool."
"Overall, DI's data cataloging, data literacy, and automation have helped our decision-makers because when a source wants to change something, we immediately know what the impact is going to be downstream."
"There is a wide range of widgets that enables the user to find the proper information quickly. The presentation of information is something very valuable."
"Being able to capture different business metrics and organize them in different catalogs is most valuable. We can organize these metrics into sales-related metrics, customer-related metrics, supply chain-related metrics, etc."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"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."
"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."
"The product's data governance features need improvement."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"The technical support could be improved."
"The fact that I sometimes have to go in and out of different applications, even though it's all part of the whole erwin suite, perhaps means it could be architected a little bit better. I think they do have some ideas for improvements there."
"Everything about Data Intelligence is complex. Though we've used the tool for five years, we're still only using about 30 to 40 percent of its capabilities. It would be helpful if we could customize and simplify the user interface because there are so many redundant things."
"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."
"The solution's Arabic language processing is limited. The results are limited when you use the interface in Arabic."
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Alation Data Catalog is ranked 5th in Data Governance with 5 reviews while erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is ranked 3rd in Data Governance with 11 reviews. Alation Data Catalog is rated 7.8, while erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Alation Data Catalog writes "A stable data catalog solution that helps onboard data sources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of erwin Data Intelligence by Quest writes "Gives a visual representation of how the data flows from tables to the metrics and has a big impact in terms of the transparency and understanding of data". Alation Data Catalog is most compared with Microsoft Purview, Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog and BigID, whereas erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is most compared with Microsoft Purview, Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, Collibra Lineage and Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager. See our Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Intelligence by Quest report.
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