No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

Atlan vs Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 1, 2026

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
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (5th)
Microsoft Purview Data Life...
Ranking in Data Governance
26th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (9th), Document Management Software (6th), Microsoft Security Suite (27th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Atlan is 1.8%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Atlan1.8%
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management1.2%
Other97.0%
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

Peter Neumann - PeerSpot reviewer
IT consultant at Pathfinder
Has struggled to meet business needs but supports technical data exploration and transparency
Atlan can be improved by concentrating more on business data since it is developed from developers for developers, and it needs to be more business relevant. For instance, when re-importing data model diagrams, Atlan provides some diagram automation that is not connected to the business glossary, which I consider a significant fault. Atlan needs to improve by focusing more on the business side of data, not only on technical aspects.If you want to focus on technical considerations, it would be beneficial to have an interface with a real business data modeling tool such as Erwin or other business data tools, since data modeling is not the same as Draw.io. Additionally, Atlan can improve its workflows, which are hard to understand. Working with templates, Excel import, export, and running automations is not self-explanatory, and you always need help from Atlan support team. If business people want to use it and run their own reports, it must be easier to customize for their business needs.
ST
Ict Systems Manager at Lltnpa
Automated retention has transformed compliance workflows and now simplifies audit responses
The deep native integration with Microsoft 365 is what ultimately made me decide on Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management over Enterprise Vault and OpenText Content Manager. Auto-apply retention labels using machine learning is the specific integration with Microsoft 365 that made it the deciding factor for me over Enterprise Vault or OpenText. Manually labeling content at our data volumes is not realistic. The automated classification based on sensitive information types and trainable classifiers is what makes the program actually scale. That feature gets used constantly. We went from inconsistent ad-hoc retention practices to a consistent, automated, documented program across the whole organization with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management. That shift from a compliance audit perspective is enormous.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Atlas is quite intuitive."
"By switching to Atlan, we have increased our productivity and saved a lot of business time."
"Atlan is helpful for identifying datasets and discovering PI data, such as the classification levels of datasets (gold, silver, bronze)."
"Overall, I rate Atlan a nine out of ten."
"The interfaces and automated imports have helped me with transparency, as we have different sources from different techniques such as DBT, Snowflake, and other regular databases, making it effective to connect these sources and navigate through them, filter them, and enrich the data with additional meter information."
"Atlan has positively impacted the organization since it helps in discovering already available assets, allowing for reduction of redundant ingestion of external data and reduction of time to market for any project."
"As a senior analytics engineer, Atlan's ability to show end-to-end data lineage is the most important feature for me."
"The AI part is integrated for enriching metadata engagement, making it a comprehensive tool."
"We went from inconsistent ad-hoc retention practices to a consistent, automated, documented program across the whole organization with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management."
"The UI is the most valuable feature."
"The impact of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management on my unified data catalog has improved a lot; the improvements I see are in the lineage, the discovery, and the labeling."
"The system is stable; I haven't encountered any worldwide stability issues unlike other office products."
 

Cons

"Working with templates, Excel import, export, and running automations is not self-explanatory, and you always need help from Atlan support team."
"Atlan can be improved by integrating agents that can support users in finding assets of interest."
"The challenge is in the lineage, where it requires improvement. Atlas needs to capture areas where organizations use less known applications."
"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."
"Customer support for Atlan is not so proactive."
"One of the main areas for improvement is its governance capabilities."
"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."
"Certain UI changes could make Atlan more user-friendly."
"Microsoft's Purview Data Lifecycle Management preview features can be unreliable, hindering their usefulness."
"The initial setup took longer than we expected. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is not a turn-it-on-and-go product."
"I think labeling could use a lot more AI assistance. AI implementation into labeling would be beneficial."
"The time it takes to scan is one issue; when we raise high-volume issues and tickets related to scanning failures, it relates to permission errors, which are technical challenges."
 

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."
"The service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, charging an extra one cent per field of metadata scanned in our data."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Governance solutions are best for your needs.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
7%
Insurance Company
6%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise9
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Atlan?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that the licensing cost is a bit flexible but not affordable for smaller organizations. It might be way out of their budget, but it is very ...
What needs improvement with Atlan?
Atlan can be improved by enhancing their support process by reducing the resolution time. They have really bad and incomplete documentation, so they should work on the documentation as well, especi...
What is your primary use case for Atlan?
My main use case for Atlan is to define a flexible set of metadata, including measuring the quality of said data. Atlan is also a partner of ours, so we use it to integrate with our own tool. It al...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?
Better coverage outside Microsoft 365 is a feature I wish Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management had that it does not offer today. If I could change one thing about Microsoft Purview Data Life...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?
Automating retention and deletion across our Microsoft 365 environment is my main use case for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management. At Microsoft scale, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and T...
What advice do you have for others considering Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management implementation is very much a team-wide effort. The policies apply organization-wide across all Microsoft 365 users. The management side, configuring pol...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Microsoft Information Governance, Microsoft Purview Records Management
 

Overview

Find out what your peers are saying about Atlan vs. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.