Alation Data Catalog vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

The compared Alation and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Alation is ranked #6 in DG , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 5.9% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #2 in eD , with an average rating of 7.6, and holds a 26.4% mindshare. Additionally, 71% of Alation users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Alation Data Catalog

Read 12 Alation Data Catalog reviews

5,408 Views
2,441 Comparison Views

71% willing to recommend

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Read 8 Microsoft Purview eDiscovery reviews

1,703 Views
349 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Alation Data Catalog

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Alation Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Collibra and others in Data Governance.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Governance Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Data Governance

June 2025

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Helped 856,873 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

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Governance (6th), Metadata Management (2nd)

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

eDiscovery (2nd), Microsoft Security Suite (25th)

Mindshare comparison

Alation Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Alation Data Catalog is designed for Data Governance and holds a mindshare of 5.9%, down 10.2% compared to last year.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, on the other hand, focuses on eDiscovery, holds 26.4% mindshare, up 19.0% since last year.

Data Governance

eDiscovery

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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Frank Radeck

Director, IT Infrastructure & Cloud Technology at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented the solution now take just 30 minutes.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms. It is critical for Purview to be able to connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From a support perspective, I can do things while I'm eating lunch or something else. It's more dynamic and responsive. I think everybody appreciates it. We're not tied to one device. Purview's multi-cloud capabilities are also essential for the same reasons. Keeping everything under one umbrella further increases the time savings. Purview accounts for critical regulations from around the world. This is crucial because we hold ourselves accountable to standards and need to align with them. Working at a law firm, we have clients who dictate to us what standards they expect. The visibility is excellent. As we move more things into the cloud, more opportunities exist to put everything under one umbrella.

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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's best feature is the SQL query publication."

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

"The most valuable feature is cloud integration."

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

"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."

"Alation Data Catalog provides a nice interface for connecting to the database, querying the data, and working on it."

More Alation Data Catalog pros

"Our legal team benefits from using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery."

"Purview eDiscovery has made it significantly easier to handle rare litigation requests."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms."

"The machine learning wasn't half bad. I really like that part. I thought it was novel. It pretty much automated it, once you trained the model."

"The most valuable features are automatic content logging tagging. Performing these tasks manually would be impossible. Since most of our data is already in Microsoft, it's convenient to run it through this tool."

"The return on investment is saving the equivalent of one or two full-time IT department employees and a few hours per week for legal staff."

"The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and they didn't disclose it. Thanks to the product, it's easy for me to search and find out what communication a specific user has done, whether it's from SharePoint or any other platform. With Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, we can easily retrieve and restore this data."

"I think eDiscovery Premium has made dealing with data from Teams much more accessible than any other platform."

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery pros

Cons

"The interface is not user-friendly."

"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."

"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."

"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."

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

"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."

"Data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges"

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

More Alation Data Catalog cons

"I see two significant challenges with many of my clients. One is that there are some functionality gaps compared to specialized tools in the legal industry, like a legal hold tool or a document review tool. They have features that Purview eDiscovery lacks. Those gaps create a situation where I almost have to do things twice. I need to collect all my data in eDiscovery and ship it to another platform to complete the review."

"It has been one of the most solid tools I have worked with. However, Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives."

"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders. It would be beneficial to have more options available for E3 customers. Enhanced Teams functionalities and better capture of text message data, both SMS and MMS, would also be improvements."

"Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives."

"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery should be cheaper."

"The sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users. We still need all the backend stuff. We have to use Graph API to interface with everything and create custom interfaces on the front end to make it easier for the end users, which is costly. The reporting, sorting, and filtering capabilities that other products have aren't available natively in Purview."

"The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be beneficial. Copilot is expected to add such functionality in the future."

"Purview eDiscovery works, but it's not entirely perfect. There were times when search results would get hung up or error codes would be presented and we'd have to contact Microsoft to get that sorted out."

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery 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."

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

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

"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comes as part of Microsoft 365 licenses."

"In the positions that I've had through contracting over the years, I've heard talk of it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors."

"The costs associated with E5 licensing are currently expensive for us, so we use the E3 license, which comes with fewer features and functionalities."

"With the full bundle, pricing is not a significant concern. As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile."

"The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently. While the licensing for Purview is not as tricky as other Microsoft products, navigating licenses since the shift to E3 and E5 plans has been a task, as individual licenses must now be purchased separately."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

13%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Computer Software Company

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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.

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?

The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and th...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?

The setup process was very straightforward. We acquired pricing through our reseller in NASDAQ, eliminating the need to search for prices ourselves.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?

The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be benefici...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 45% 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 4% of the time

Alex Solutions vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 1% of the time

More Alation Data Catalog Competitors

Google Vault vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 44% of the time

Veritas Enterprise Vault.cloud vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 7% of the time

Relativity vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 7% of the time

Exterro vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 5% of the time

Varonis Platform vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alation Data Catalog

June 2025

Download Alation Data Catalog product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

May 2025

Download Microsoft Purview eDiscovery product report

Also Known As

Alation

No data available

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

Efficiently respond to legal matters or internal investigations with intelligent capabilities that reduce data to only what’s relevant. Discover data where it lives. Discover and collect data in place, within your Microsoft Purview boundary. Manage workflows efficiently. Streamline your eDiscovery process with an end-to-end workflow from one platform. Accelerate your process. Get insights quickly with built-in capabilities, reducing review time and costs.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

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

Information Not Available

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Collibra and others in Data Governance. Updated: June 2025.

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