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Alation Data Catalog vs Zaloni Data Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

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
5th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (3rd)
Zaloni Data Platform
Ranking in Data Governance
38th
Average Rating
6.6
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Data Preparation Tools (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 4.0%, down from 6.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Zaloni Data Platform is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Alation Data Catalog4.0%
Zaloni Data Platform0.6%
Other95.4%
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2776527 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data and Analytics Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Increases data discoverability and boosts self-service analytics through enriched metadata and intuitive search
The best features that Alation Data Catalog offers are its search capabilities and the fact that it works with many different data platforms; it is essentially platform agnostic. The other piece that I really think is important is how easy it is to use as well as to manage. What makes the search capabilities of Alation Data Catalog stand out for me is the fact that every item within the catalog is indexed and searchable, as well as the filtering features that allow you to narrow down to just the types of assets that you need. Wildcard searches are also very helpful. It is a very intuitive tool, as long as you are using the filters. Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert. This has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration. It has allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog. We have been measuring the curation of content within the catalog that has gone up over time, and we have also seen the number of users in the catalog increase, as well as the amount of activity within the catalog increase. We were seeing about an average of about 20% increase month over month for the last few months.
reviewer1476264 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Solid multi-ingestion tool but with poor exception handling
The major pain point with Zaloni is that their exception handling is not good. If any event happens (an event is when the job stops in the middle of the process), it doesn't tell you at which point it failed and it doesn't tell the operations team how they should take corrective actions unless you call Zaloni and then identify the issues. That is one issue. Another issue is that sometimes your jobs fail and if you run it a second time, it will go through. A third area it could be improved is the deployment process. When you want to deploy anything, it has a lot of manual processes. For example, you have to create your password in an encrypted format, and then you have to use a lot of manual deployment process. They should actually be building something else, like using Jenkins or automating their process. I have suggested to them that they have to improve their deployment process because they want everyone to run a manual deployment. It takes a lot of time, about half a day, for any single deployment. Then test it, then it might not work, and then reverting back is not easy because of the manual deployment process. I think in recent versions they added a lot of upgrades and additional features including a lot of integrations. Before it was just AWS, later they extended it to Azure. I'm not sure how they have extended it to GCP. It has some built-in features and a lot of improvements now because the UI and the features were not easy to navigate. Regarding showing the metrics, it's okay. I will say it's neither easy nor hard, there is whatever is required. Lastly, on the governance side, it's not very good. We faced some issues with the Ranger version. Ranger was an authentication tool on big data and Zaloni had some compatibility issues with the Ranger at that time. Later they said those are all going to be resolved, but at that time it had some issues. I'm not sure whether it was working with the Sentry or not.

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 has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert, which has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration, and allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert, saving them quite a bit of time and frustration and allowing them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog."
"Alation Data Catalog positively impacts my organization by improving data efficiency, data quality, and collaboration, allowing analysts to spend more time on analysis instead of searching and preparing, so they can just start their analysis."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by improving the data marketplace section, the data utilization section, and the quality of the data."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert, saving them quite a bit of time and frustration and allowing them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization as collaboration has definitely improved at my company, allowing us to reach out and know who owns data, which has been especially helpful with turnover and in building out the analytics side of our bank."
"Alation Data Catalog was very useful for sharing SQL queries easily in a platform."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to map data and write workflows with logic inside them."
"You can create a lot of ingestions based on the file levels or based on the time."
 

Cons

"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."
"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."
"The product's data governance features need improvement."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"Alation Data Catalog can be improved by enhancing their lineage capabilities to make it easier for us as users to search the lineage without having to use the Alation Data Catalog user interface."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"Alation Data Catalog can be improved by enhancing their lineage capabilities to make it easier for us as users to search the lineage without having to use the Alation Data Catalog user interface."
"Alation Data Catalog is not user-friendly for business users. Its user experience is comparable to a Wikipedia page, lacking good visualization."
"Technical support is in need of improvement."
"The major pain point with Zaloni is that their exception handling is not good. If any event happens, it doesn't tell you at which point it failed and it doesn't tell the operations team how they should take corrective actions unless you call Zaloni and then identify the issues. That is one issue."
 

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."
"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."
"The solution is a little expensive."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
No data available
 

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.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alation Data Catalog?
I haven't had any experience with pricing, setup costs, or licensing, as I have been strictly an end user and haven't had any administrative or management responsibilities.
What needs improvement with Alation Data Catalog?
Some of the downsides about the lineage is that some of the code is quite difficult to read as the formatting is a bit ugly sometimes. Alation Data Catalog can be improved with the lineage formatti...
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Also Known As

Alation
ZDP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
CDS Global, AIG,
Find out what your peers are saying about Alation Data Catalog vs. Zaloni Data Platform and other solutions. Updated: January 2026.
881,036 professionals have used our research since 2012.