Alation Data Catalog and SAP Information Steward are prominent contenders in the data management sector. SAP Information Steward often emerges as the superior choice due to its comprehensive features focused on data governance and quality.
Features: Alation Data Catalog is known for its ease of use, collaborative data search, and integration capabilities across various data sources. It emphasizes user-driven data discovery and metadata management. SAP Information Steward is robust in data profiling, validation, and monitoring, ensuring strong data quality management. These unique capabilities make each product attractive in their own right, depending on user needs.
Room for Improvement: Alation could improve by enhancing its analytical features and expanding its data governance tools, which currently are less mature compared to SAP. Additionally, Alation could increase support for more complex data environments. On the other hand, SAP Information Steward would benefit from streamlining its deployment requirements and further improving user experience for non-SAP environments. Enhancing cross-platform integration could also strengthen SAP's offering.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Alation offers a simple cloud-based deployment and provides responsive support for swift implementations. SAP Information Steward requires more complex on-premise or hybrid deployments. Despite this, SAP's extensive support infrastructure is advantageous, particularly for large-scale enterprise deployments.
Pricing and ROI: Alation Data Catalog appeals with competitive pricing, especially for those looking for low upfront costs and quick user adoption for significant ROI. SAP Information Steward, although associated with higher initial costs, offers substantial long-term ROI through its advanced features, proving invaluable for companies prioritizing data governance and quality. The higher cost is justified by the return potential in large enterprise settings.
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.
Monitor, analyze, and improve data integrity with SAP Information Steward software. Combine data profiling and metadata management tools for continuous insight into the quality of enterprise information to optimize processes, and enhance operational, analytical, and data governance initiatives.
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