Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs erwin Data Intelligence comparison

Quest Software and Microsoft are both solutions in the Data Governance category. Quest Software is ranked #18 with an average rating of 7.0, while Microsoft is ranked #28 with an average rating of 7.3. Quest Software holds a 1.9% mindshare in DG, compared to Microsoft’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

erwin Data Intelligence

Read 18 erwin Data Intelligence reviews

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3,040 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Microsoft Purview Data Life...

Read 3 Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management reviews

490 Views
348 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

erwin Data Intelligence

Microsoft Purview Data Life...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Aug 19, 2025

erwin Data Intelligence and Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management compete in the data management space. erwin Data Intelligence has an advantage in integration and data governance, while Microsoft Purview excels in data lineage.

Features: erwin Data Intelligence provides comprehensive data integration, governance, and automated metadata management. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management offers advanced data lineage, compliance features, and detailed tracking automation.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Microsoft Purview integrates seamlessly with Microsoft services and Azure, supported by extensive resources. erwin Data Intelligence supports a strong deployment framework, though it may need customization to match Microsoft's breadth of customer support.

Pricing and ROI: erwin Data Intelligence typically has a lower setup cost, yielding favorable ROI through its governance abilities. Microsoft Purview's higher initial costs are balanced by strong compliance and tracking features, promising substantial long-term returns.

To learn more, read our detailed Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. erwin Data Intelligence Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. erwin Data Intelligence

July 2025

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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

erwin Data Intelligence

Ranking in Data Governance

18th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Microsoft Purview Data Life...

Ranking in Data Governance

28th

Average Rating

7.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Microsoft Security Suite (34th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of erwin Data Intelligence is 1.9%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is 0.6%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Governance

Featured Reviews

Roy Pollack

Advisor Application Architect at CPS Energy

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.

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Al Mcpherson

Data Architect at Octopus

Provides clear visibility into our entire information estate, reduces our time to action, and saves us time

The integration across Azure is straightforward. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management has been a game-changer for our data governance. We now have clear visibility into our entire information estate, allowing us to pinpoint data location and implement effective classification. Even though real-time compliance isn't a current need, Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management offers that capability for future requirements. Purview Data Lifecycle Management has reduced our time to action – since we previously lacked such a tool, it's effectively cut our response time in half. Purview Data Lifecycle Management has saved us one working day per month.

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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

"The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature."

"Being able to capture different business metrics and organize them in different catalogs is most valuable. We can organize these metrics into sales-related metrics, customer-related metrics, supply chain-related metrics, etc."

"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."

"They have just the most marvelous reports called mind maps, where whatever you are focused on sits in the middle. They have this wonderful graphic spiderweb that spreads out from there where you can see this thing mapped to other logical bits or physical bits and who's the steward of it. It's very cool and available to your business teams through a portal."

"The solution gives us data lineage which means we can see an impact if we make a change. The ability for us to have that in this company is brilliant because we used to have 49 data stewards from some 23 different groups within six major departments. Each one of those was a silo unto itself. The ability to have different glossaries — but all pointed to the same key terms, key concepts, or key attributes — has made life really simple."

"Data Intelligence has provided more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term. We have linked three critical layers of data, providing us with an end-to-end lineage at the column level."

"It is a central place for everybody to start any ETL data pipeline builds. This tool is being heavily used, plus it's heavily integrated with all the ETL data pipeline design and build processes. Nobody can bypass these processes and do something without going through this tool."

"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."

More erwin Data Intelligence pros

"The UI is the most valuable feature."

"The system is stable; I haven't encountered any worldwide stability issues unlike other office products."

"The automatic data labeling is compelling, and we are investigating its use."

"Purview's built-in functionality provides immediate access to reports, streamlining the entire process."

Cons

"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 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."

"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."

"There was a huge learning curve, and I'd been in software development for most of my career. The application itself, and how it runs menus and screens when you can modify and code, is complex. I have found that kind of cumbersome."

"Another area where it can improve is by having BB-Graph-type databases where relationship discovery and relationship identification are much easier."

"One big improvement we would like to see would be the workflow integration of codeset mapping with the erwin source to target mapping. That's a bit clunky for us. The two often seem to be in conflict with one another. Codeset mappings that are used within the source to target mappings are difficult to manage because they get locked."

"It's a little bit clunky. I think a lot of these features were bolted on, and they don't necessarily transition smoothly in the interface. I would like to see a little more cohesion."

"The data quality assessment requires third-party components and a separate license."

More erwin Data Intelligence cons

"Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management can be challenging to implement due to its complexity and dense documentation, making it difficult to get started."

"Microsoft's Purview Data Lifecycle Management preview features can be unreliable, hindering their usefulness."

"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

"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 licensing cost is around $7,000 for user. This is an estimation."

"We operate on a yearly subscription and because it is an enterprise license we only have one. It is not dependent on the number of users."

"erwin was at a good price. The federal government wouldn't buy something if the pricing wasn't good."

"There is an additional fee for the server maintenance."

"The solution is aggressively priced."

"erwin's pricing was cheaper than its competitors."

"The price is too high."

More erwin Data Intelligence pricing and cost advice

"The service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, charging an extra one cent per field of metadata scanned in our data."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

24%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Non Profit

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Retailer

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

The price is reasonable, and a subscription is required.

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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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?

We opted for Purview Data Lifecycle Management due to its significant cost advantage over competitors. At a 95 percent price reduction, it was a clear winner. The service operates on a pay-as-you-g...

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What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?

One of the requirements is to have data leak policies and data access policies. This is very critical to enforce data governance standards, which relate to data classification, access control, data...

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What is your primary use case for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?

I am a customer and user of the tools. We are a big shop, and both the companies I work for are Microsoft Office 365 customers with over eighty thousand seats. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Mana...

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Comparisons

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Compared 33% of the time

Collibra Governance vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 24% of the time

Alation Data Catalog vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 10% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 10% of the time

Collibra Lineage vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 8% of the time

More erwin Data Intelligence Competitors

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

Compared 78% of the time

Alation Data Catalog vs Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

Compared 22% of the time

More Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Intelligence

August 2025

Download erwin Data Intelligence product report

Buyer's Guide

Data Governance

July 2025

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management report

Download Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management product report

Also Known As

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance

Microsoft Information Governance

Overview

Erwin Data Intelligence drives automation, supports data catalog and literacy, and offers Smart Data Connectors for efficient metadata handling. Its customization flexibility and integration facilitate enhanced data governance, visualization, analysis, and compliance.

Erwin Data Intelligence offers automation scripts that accelerate development, integrated data cataloging, data profiling, and lineage analysis to streamline information management. Users appreciate its capability in metadata harvesting, code engineering, and infrastructure integration. The tool provides flexibility to enhance governance and data visualization. While it performs well, users have noted challenges with API robustness and interface complexity, and there are opportunities to improve workflow integration, AI features, and large dataset handling. Companies rely on it for metadata management, automation of metadata mappings, and data governance to support compliance and literacy.

What are the main features of Erwin Data Intelligence?

Automation Scripts: Speeds up development processes through powerful scripts.
Data Catalog: Supports comprehensive data mapping and profiles for better analysis.
Smart Data Connectors: Efficiently handles code engineering and metadata harvesting.
Customization Flexibility: Adapts to existing infrastructure for seamless integration.
Comprehensive Visualization: Empowers data visualization and standardization processes.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Increased Development Speed: Automation scripts notably enhance development efficiency.
Improved Data Governance: Streamlines processes, supporting compliance and business definitions.
Effective Integration: Seamlessly fits with ETL tools and existing workflows.
Enhanced Data Literacy: Supports data literacy initiatives with robust cataloging features.
Comprehensive Impact Analysis: Facilitates thorough analysis for informed decision-making.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail, organizations implement Erwin Data Intelligence for efficient metadata management and governance. It assists in automating lineage and mapping, supporting ETL procedures while enhancing compliance and data literacy efforts. Its flexibility and integration support create valuable data insights and governance improvements.

Quest Software

Use Microsoft Information Governance (sometimes abbreviated to MIG) capabilities to govern your data for compliance or regulatory requirements.

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

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. erwin Data Intelligence

July 2025

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