Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs erwin Data Intelligence comparison

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. erwin Data Intelligence

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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

16th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Governance (3rd)

Microsoft Purview Data Life...

Ranking in Data Governance

25th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Archiving (8th), Document Management Software (2nd), Microsoft Security Suite (30th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of erwin Data Intelligence is 1.9%, down from 2.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is 1.2%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
erwin Data Intelligence	1.9%
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management	1.2%
Other	96.9%

Data Governance

Featured Reviews

Jog Raj

Senior Consultant at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Automated lineage and business glossaries have improved data understanding and collaboration

I am open to answering a few questions about erwin Data Intelligence and sharing my opinion about the product. Regarding the analytic part of the product, I find it very interesting that erwin Data Intelligence has its own inbuilt reporting toolset, with a new version coming out in January that will be AI-powered. This means you will be able to write analytical reports and questions based on the metadata and data lineage, making it more powerful than the current version, as AI will assist in creating those reports and performing analysis on the metadata. I find that the time taken to realize value from erwin Data Intelligence can be quite long. Creating a data catalog and developing data lineage takes significant time, and I expect that AI will help accelerate the process of creating data products by streamlining the steps involved. I can recommend erwin Data Intelligence to other users. I would rate this review as an eight out of ten overall.

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Ram-Krish

Cloud Security & Governance at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

A comprehensive data management solution shows potential for improvement while providing strong integration with existing infrastructure

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 protection, and retention. It covers the entire lifecycle, helping us to protect, detect, and classify the documents. Challenges are mostly related to the security products onboarded into the bank; they have challenges in terms of those products complying with the internal standards. Sometimes, we cannot just use the DLP across the state. For example, using Microsoft products has been easy to adopt, such as OneDrive and SharePoint on-premise, but it becomes a challenge when it comes to AWS, as data also exists in S3 buckets. Testing is still ongoing, but it will eventually be done. 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. These take time because we have high volume tickets in terms of connectivity, scanning failures, and related matters. There are also frequent change requests, especially regarding scoping or rescoping due to complexities, creating several challenges. In both organizations I work with, there are gaps, and there is no enterprise-wide data classification available. However, there are pockets of implementations for various products. Some agencies are using it, but otherwise, there's no product existing across the enterprise. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is definitely a good solution, but there is significant room for improvement from a product perspective. Reporting is another area that needs improvement.

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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

"Mind map... is a really good feature because it is very helpful in seeing which column's tables are related. Also, you can flag them with "sensitive data" and other indicators. You can also customize your own features for the mind map. That was another very robust feature."

"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."

"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."

"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 interface is easy to use. I also like Erwin's automatic data classification and data quality checks."

"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."

"We use the codeset mapping quite a bit to match value pairs to use within the conversion as well. Those value pair mappings come in quite handy and are utilized quite extensively. They then feed into the automation of the source data extraction, like the source data mapping of the source data extraction, the code development, forward engineering using the ODI connector for the forward automation."

More erwin Data Intelligence pros

"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 UI is the most valuable feature."

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

Cons

"Really huge datasets, where the logical names or the lexicons weren't groomed or maintained well, were the only area where it really had room for improvement. A huge data set would cause erwin to crash. If there were half a million or 1 million tables, erwin would hang."

"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."

"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."

"The SDK behind this entire product needs improvement. The company really should focus more on this because we were finding some inconsistencies on the LDK level. Everything worked fine from the UI perspective, but when we started doing some deep automation scripts going through multiple API calls inside the tool, then only some pieces of it work or it would not return the exact data it was supposed to do."

"If we are talking about the business side of the product, maybe the Data Literacy could be made a bit simpler. You have to put your hands on it, so there is room for improvement."

"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."

"In my opinion, the analytics part of erwin Data Intelligence is not satisfactory."

"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."

More erwin Data Intelligence cons

"I think labeling could use a lot more AI assistance. AI implementation into labeling would be beneficial."

"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

"The solution is aggressively priced."

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

"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."

"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 too high."

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

"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."

"The licensing cost was very affordable at the time of purchase. It has since been taken over by erwin, then Quest. The tool has gotten a bit more costly, but they are adding more features very quickly."

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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884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

10%

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

13%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	15

No data available

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

In my opinion, the analytics part of erwin Data Intelligence is not satisfactory. The name 'Intelligence' is not related specifically to analytics; it is focused on data governance with no advanced...

What is your primary use case for erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

My main use case for erwin Data Intelligence is applying it and the DQ Labs in a financial institution.

What advice do you have for others considering erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

The integration of business glossaries has significantly helped improve collaboration in our organization. We define the business glossaries first during meetings with the business, and then we bul...

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...

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?

I think labeling could use a lot more AI assistance. AI implementation into labeling would be beneficial.

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

My major use case for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is for the classification of data.

Collibra Platform vs erwin Data Intelligence

Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

Alation Data Catalog vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 7% of the time

SAS Data Management vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 5% of the time

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Alfresco vs Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

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OpenText Content Manager vs Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

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

Compared 7% of the time

Barracuda Cloud Archiving Service vs Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

Compared 3% of the time

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Product Reports

erwin Data Intelligence

Download erwin Data Intelligence product report

Data Governance

Download Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management product report

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management report

Also Known As

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance

Microsoft Information Governance, Microsoft Purview Records Management

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

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management helps businesses manage data effectively, enhancing compliance and control while optimizing data usage across the organization.

Designed for comprehensive data governance, Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management aids businesses in automating data retention, labeling, and protection policies. It integrates seamlessly with existing systems, facilitating robust data management, which supports compliance and risk management efforts. Suitable for businesses seeking to consolidate data management processes, it ensures that valuable data is efficiently cataloged, accessible, and secured, contributing to informed decision-making and resource optimization.

What features should users be aware of?

Automated Data Retention: Simplifies data management by automatically applying retention policies.
Sensitivity Labeling: Offers robust capabilities to classify and protect sensitive information.
Data Insights: Provides analytical insights that help in monitoring compliance and data usage.
Policy Enforcement: Integrated tools for automating policy application across data assets.

What benefits can users expect from reviews?

Improved Compliance: Ensures adherence to regulations through automated policy enforcement.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines data management tasks, reducing manual intervention and potential errors.
Cost Effectiveness: Reduces the need for multiple tools by consolidating data management activities.
Enhanced Security: Protects sensitive data through advanced labeling and encryption features.

In finance, Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management facilitates compliance with strict regulations, in healthcare, it safeguards patient data while streamlining retention policies, and in retail, it organizes customer data for better insights and tailored marketing strategies, ensuring data is a strategic resource across sectors.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC

Information Not Available

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. erwin Data Intelligence