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Atlan vs erwin Data Intelligence by Quest 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

Atlan
Ranking in Data Governance
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
erwin Data Intelligence by ...
Ranking in Data Governance
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Atlan is 1.9%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is 2.2%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

Leon Pereira - PeerSpot reviewer
Enhanced data management with intuitive data lineage and metadata visualization
Certain UI changes could make Atlan more user-friendly. While they have an Excel add-in for interaction with Atlan, it's in its early stages and could be improved. Additionally, data observability capabilities could be enhanced to provide more alerts on stale or outdated data via communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack, or email.
Roy Pollack - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution provides more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term.
We have loaded over 300,000 attributes and more than 1000 mappings. The performance is slow, depending on the lineage or search. This is supposed to be fixed in the later versions, but we haven't upgraded yet. 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.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Overall, I rate Atlan a nine out of ten."
"Overall, I rate Atlan as a ten out of ten."
"The best feature of Atlan is its integration with communication platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack, so business users don't have to go into a data catalog to see metadata about data assets."
"The best feature of Atlan is its integration with communication platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack, so business users don't have to go into a data catalog to see metadata about data assets."
"They also offer automated lineage embedded in the connectors, allowing us to track where the data is coming from and where it's going. We find it very efficient in cataloging data sources. Additionally, the user-friendly interface is a big plus, making it easy for users to familiarize themselves with the solution. These two features, in my opinion, stand out the most."
"Atlan is helpful for identifying datasets and discovering PI data, such as the classification levels of datasets (gold, silver, bronze)."
"Atlas is quite intuitive."
"As a senior analytics engineer, Atlan's ability to show end-to-end data lineage is the most important feature for me."
"The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"erwin has tremendous capabilities to map right from the business technologies to the endpoint, such as physical entities and physical attributes, from a lineage standpoint."
"The possibility to write automation scripts is the biggest benefit for us. We have several products with metadata and metadata mapping capabilities. The big difference when we were choosing this product was the ability to run automation scripts against metadata and metadata mappings. Right now, we have a very high level of automation based on these automation scripts, so it's really the core feature for us."
"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."
"The interface is easy to use. I also like Erwin's automatic data classification and data quality checks."
"The biggest benefit with erwin DI is that I have a single source of truth that I can send anybody to. If anybody doesn't know the answer we can go back to it. Just having a central location of business rules is good."
"The biggest impact for us is that erwin generates DDL extremely quickly. We're able to pull in metadata, map it to a target, generate DDL to create the tables, and generate SSIS packages. Previously, especially going back 10 to 15 years ago, hundreds of hours had to be spent to manually perform these tasks. This solution completely automates it and gets it 90% done. We can then pass it off to a developer to create the items in SSIS."
 

Cons

"The challenge is in the lineage, where it requires improvement. Atlas needs to capture areas where organizations use less known applications."
"One area that could be improved is the capability to find duplicates of datasets."
"One area that could be improved is the capability to find duplicates of datasets."
"One of the main areas for improvement is its governance capabilities. Atlan supports only basic out-of-the-box workflows, and it becomes challenging to customize features like how data owners should approve access to data assets."
"The challenge is in the lineage, where it requires improvement."
"One of the main areas for improvement is its governance capabilities."
"Certain UI changes could make Atlan more user-friendly."
"There are some improvements. There is a feature called Playbooks, which basically allows me to automate certain activities that would otherwise be manual. It's a very interesting feature, but there is room to improve it because, depending on the task you automate, the playbooks seem to have a hard time handling the task. So, it could be improved there. Even though it's a great feature, it can evolve further."
"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."
"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."
"We chose to implement on an Oracle Database because we also had the erwin Data Modeler and Web Portal products in-house, which have been set up on Oracle Databases for many years. Sometimes the Oracle Database installation has caused some hiccups that wouldn't necessarily have been caused if we had used SQL Server."
"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."
"The solution's Arabic language processing is limited. The results are limited when you use the interface in Arabic."
"Another area where it can improve is by having BB-Graph-type databases where relationship discovery and relationship identification are much easier."
"The versioning can sometimes be confusing because we use the publishing feature for the mapping. Technical analysts sometimes have two versions, and they should know that the public version is the correct one."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay per-user license. It's a different classification model than with other solutions, where they usually charge you for resources. So, that was a better model for us. And because of this difference in models or classification, it was cheaper for us to go with Atlan."
"erwin's pricing was cheaper than its competitors."
"The solution is aggressively priced."
"You buy a seat license for your portal. We have 100 seats for the portal, then you buy just the development licenses for the people who are going to put the data in."
"The price is reasonable and competitive. When you get into forward and reverse-engineering, the cost could go up. However, if you are a large organization, you would probably be able to access different packages. If, however, you don't need forward and reverse-engineering, then the price is relatively cheap."
"erwin was at a good price. The federal government wouldn't buy something if the pricing wasn't good."
"Smart Data Connectors have some costs, and then there are user-based licenses. We spend roughly $150,000 per year on the solution. It is a yearly subscription license that basically includes the cost for Smart Data Connectors and user-based licenses. We have around 30 data stewards who maintain definitions, and then we have five IT users who basically maintain the overall solution. It is not a SaaS kind of operation, and there is an infrastructure cost to host this solution, which is our regular AWS hosting cost."
"There is an additional fee for the server maintenance."
"The licensing cost is around $7,000 for user. This is an estimation."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Insurance Company
10%
Computer Software Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Non Profit
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Atlan?
They also offer automated lineage embedded in the connectors, allowing us to track where the data is coming from and where it's going. We find it very efficient in cataloging data sources. Additi...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlan?
Atlas is competitively priced compared to other data governance platforms like Collibra and Informatica. The only major drawback is its lack of an integrated data quality module.
What needs improvement with Atlan?
The challenge is in the lineage, where it requires improvement. Atlas needs to capture areas where organizations use less known applications.
What do you like most about erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?
The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature.
What needs improvement with erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?
The data quality assessment requires third-party components and a separate license. I would like to have better integration around the data quality. I would appreciate the inclusion of a non-struct...
 

Also Known As

No data available
erwin DG, erwin Data Governance
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC
Find out what your peers are saying about Atlan vs. erwin Data Intelligence by Quest and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.