We performed a comparison between Alation Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview 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."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."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"One of the best features is the classification rules, especially the scan rule sets. They are really useful, especially when we need to understand the current data the company has to ensure that all the problematic data can be put under someone's responsibility."
"It's certainly easy to work with all Microsoft data sources like SQL Server, Synapse, and data lakes, but it also has great functionality working with Oracle. And of particular interest to us is the ability to pull data from Excel, CVS files, and other types of flat files."
"Has a good interface and is reasonably priced."
"It is critical that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. That is the number one reason that people are adopting hybrid and best-of-the-breed approaches. Especially in banking, it is critical because people want to protect, govern, and secure their data. This is one of the first conversations that happens with security and the architecture group on the client side."
"The cataloging tool is definitely the most valuable... It tells you about all the data you have in your tables, which helps people understand our data. We now know what data we have."
"The data classification part of the solution is excellent, especially as it gives us an insight into our sensitive data within Microsoft 365."
"Instead of having to manually write down which tables and columns exist and then describe them, you can do that process in one go, by simply connecting to a source. That's a huge time-saver and a great benefit of Purview."
"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."
"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."
"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 API needs some improvement when connecting to non-Microsoft API sources. This is a limiting factor."
"Although you can explore the data, that creates a great interest in data lineage or the data flow. How does it go from a source to a platform to a Power BI report, for example? It is possible, to some extent, to see that with Purview, but the lineage feature requires some manual work on the development side or more work from Microsoft to improve on it."
"Blueprints and landing zones like we have in Azure would be great to see in Purview. The solution could offer a baseline or blueprint of recommended settings for compliance regulations such as GDPR and ISO, which could be applied with a simple switch in the options."
"One area for improvement is the detection of data types. This is really important. It has some of that functionality, but I consider it very limited. Maybe they can add some custom programming or machine learning could be particularly useful for the detection of the nature of the data."
"Another area for improvement is in managing the business glossary terms. If they could provide the same type of method that we use to configure the scan rule sets, that would be helpful. Currently, there is no option like this, so we have to do it manually. Automatic detection would be great."
"Purview's data connector platform for non-Microsoft data sources is good, but there is some functionality that hasn't been developed yet. There are some servers that it can't connect to yet, because they're still in a trial process."
"There are some limitations with regard to the lineage of data from different parts of the system."
Alation Data Catalog is ranked 5th in Data Governance with 3 reviews while Microsoft Purview is ranked 2nd in Data Governance with 7 reviews. Alation Data Catalog is rated 8.4, while Microsoft Purview is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Alation Data Catalog writes "The catalog now provides an opportunity for people to come together, to share, and to find". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Microsoft Purview writes "Saves significant time over manual data documentation and data catalog creation, but data lineage needs improvement". Alation Data Catalog is most compared with Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, erwin Data Intelligence by Quest, Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog and Ataccama ONE Platform, whereas Microsoft Purview is most compared with Collibra Lineage, Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, Varonis Data Governance Suite and Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager. See our Alation Data Catalog vs. Microsoft Purview report.
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