IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs Quest Data Intelligence comparison

Why PeerSpot?

IBM and Quest Software are both solutions in the Metadata Management category. IBM is ranked #10, while Quest Software is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 2.7% mindshare in MM, compared to Quest Software’s 7.5% mindshare. Additionally, 72% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Quest Software users who would recommend it.

IBM InfoSphere Information ...

Read 9 IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog reviews

1,225 Views
1,225 Comparison Views

72% willing to recommend

Quest Data Intelligence

Read 22 Quest Data Intelligence reviews

6,485 Views
2,789 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM InfoSphere Information ...

Quest Data Intelligence

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 16, 2026

In the realm of data intelligence and information governance, erwin Data Intelligence and IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog compete fiercely. While erwin is favored for automation and flexibility, IBM is preferred for handling complex data scenarios through superior integration.

Features: Erwin Data Intelligence includes smart data connectors, business glossaries, and data mapping capabilities. Automated reverse engineering and strong metadata management make it valuable for simplifying collaboration and standardizing data. IBM InfoSphere offers lineage and data analytics, interfacing with diverse sources, making it ideal for complex data management.

Room for Improvement: Erwin faces issues with its user interface, customization, and integration complexities. Its automation scripts need enhancement. IBM has a complex interface with limited connectors and scalability concerns. Simplifying user experience and expanding connector support would benefit IBM.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Erwin offers hybrid cloud deployment and generally responsive support, though some report slow responses. IBM is primarily on-premises, experiencing deployment and integration difficulties. Erwin is noted for outstanding support, whereas IBM is seen as adept but occasionally inflexible.

Pricing and ROI: Erwin is more cost-effective with reasonable feature-based pricing, offering strong ROI through process efficiency. However, it incurs costs for additional connectors and licenses. IBM is regarded as costly, with pricing based on record numbers leading to high expenses. Erwin is perceived to provide better value for money.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs. Quest Data Intelligence Report (Updated: September 2026).

Buyer's Guide

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs. Quest Data Intelligence

September 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 916,956 peers since 2012

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

IBM InfoSphere Information ...

Ranking in Metadata Management

10th

Average Rating

7.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Quest Data Intelligence

Ranking in Metadata Management

7th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Governance (17th), AI Governance (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Metadata Management category, the mindshare of IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is 2.7%, down from 3.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Data Intelligence is 7.5%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Metadata Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Quest Data Intelligence	7.5%
IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog	2.7%
Other	89.8%

Metadata Management

Featured Reviews

Giuseppe Innamorato

Senior Client Director at Alkemy digital_enabler

Reasonably priced, easy to install, and reliable

We recently suggested FlexiCapture and the ABBYY platform to a customer in Italy, but we are now waiting for their response. Unfortunately, we have no direct experience with the platform. We are a consulting service and a consulting company that also works on system integration. We use a variety of platforms ranging from IBM to Microsoft. We are specifically focused on data management and artificial intelligence solution. We use many different solutions, such as InfoSphere, and Db2 for databases for example. We have many projects also on Information Governance where we use not only IBM products but also Informatica products, for example, in the MDM arena. We work with both IBM InfoSphere Information Server and Governance Catalog.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The ability to create special rules inside the solution using Portuguese is the most valuable feature."

"IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is a stable product."

"It helped us streamline and organize our data."

"The feature I found most valuable in IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is the lineage as it's very powerful and it provides data analytics in terms of where the data lives and where it goes. The interface is also clear, though it could still be sorted out, but the lineage is the most powerful thing in the solution."

"Anyone looking into using IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog should go for it because it's a leading governance provider, and IBM is known across the globe."

"It is easy to use."

"Working on the roles, actually, is the most valuable aspect."

"What I liked about IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is that it seemed to have most of the options that you would want from a government catalog and the features of the product are very rich and comprehensive."

More IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog pros

"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."

"We always know where our data is, and anybody can look that up, whether they're a business person who doesn't know anything about Informatica, or a developer who knows everything about creating data movement jobs in Informatica, but who does not understand the business terminology or the data that is being used in the tool."

"Data Intelligence creates a single source of truth for all of our metadata. This solution is better for data warehousing, but the metadata features speed up our development work. It's easy to create and manage mappings because we can export them to Informatica and pick up the work where we left off."

"The data catalog feature is pretty good."

"This tool has taken us from having nothing to being very efficient."

"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."

"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 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 Quest Data Intelligence pros

Cons

"An area for improvement in IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is that it's missing a lot of connectors. Clients complain about not being able to connect some data sources because there's no available connector, so my company raised that issue with IBM. In some cases, third-party connectors are available, but not for all data sources. Another area that needs improvement in the solution is stability because it also has some stability issues. This is the same issue with the other IBM products bundled with IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog. The solution is connected with IBM Infosphere Information Analyzer and IBM InfoSphere DataStage in my company, so if one has issues with stability, the rest of the products are affected as well."

"The simplicity of usage could improve. Perhaps the simplicity of use for end users, not for system integrators, but for the user, the end users."

"Sometimes, if the product is new, getting support is difficult and the team was facing some challenges."

"What could be improved in IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is its query tool, including its terms, labels, and reports because the query tool isn't user-friendly. This would also be an additional feature or enhancement in the solution that would make it more attractive to users and would make IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog a really good solution."

"Stability is a concern, actually. As a heavy tool, it always has some performance-related issues, and there are some cases that have a constraint on the stability."

"There were two failed installations and IBM could never actually get the product to work."

"The scalability has room for improvement."

"A complex solution that requires a lot of coding."

More IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog cons

"There is room for improvement in automation, no question."

"The integration with various metadata sources, including erwin Data Modeler, isn't smooth in the current version."

"The metadata ingestion is very nice because of the ability to automate it. It would be nice to be able to do this ingestion, or set it up, from one place, instead of having to set it up separately for every data asset that is ingested."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

More Quest Data Intelligence cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Licensing for IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is per user."

"Licensing fees are paid on a yearly basis."

"In terms of pricing, I find IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog excessive. It's at the top end of the price range in terms of what you get for your money. It's an expensive product, and contractually, IBM is difficult to deal with. I can't remember the exact cost of IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, but it could be in the region of three hundred thousand pounds."

"IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog is expensive."

"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 is cheaper than other solutions and this should appeal to other buyers. It has a good price tag."

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

"The solution is aggressively priced."

"Erwin Data Catalog is very expensive."

"The price is reasonable, and a subscription is required."

More Quest Data Intelligence pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Metadata Management solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

916,956 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Construction Company

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Government

Construction Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

Ask a question

Earn 20 points

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...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

erwin Data Literacy vs IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

Compared 19% of the time

Alation Data Catalog vs IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

Compared 18% of the time

IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog vs IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

Compared 17% of the time

Collibra Platform vs IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

Compared 16% of the time

IBM InfoSphere Information Server vs IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

Compared 10% of the time

More IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog Competitors

Collibra Platform vs Quest Data Intelligence

Compared 17% of the time

Alation Data Catalog vs Quest Data Intelligence

Compared 9% of the time

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

Compared 6% of the time

Global Data Excellence DEMS vs Quest Data Intelligence

Compared 5% of the time

Ataccama ONE Platform vs Quest Data Intelligence

Compared 4% of the time

More Quest Data Intelligence Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog

October 2026

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog report

Download IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog product report

Buyer's Guide

Quest Data Intelligence

September 2026

Download Quest Data Intelligence product report

Also Known As

IBM Information Governance Catalog

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance, erwin Data Catalog

Overview

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog delivers a user-friendly, automated, and scalable data governance solution that enhances data management through features like role management, metadata asset management, and data lineage capabilities.

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog revolutionizes data management by offering comprehensive features designed to simplify and enhance data governance. While it integrates seamlessly with modern data sources and supports data lineage, the platform faces challenges with legacy systems and licensing flexibility. Its user-friendly interface and automation features make it a valuable tool in data analytics and governance, enabling organizations to streamline operations and improve decision-making.

What are the key features of IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog?

User-friendly interface: Simplifies navigation and access to data management tools.
Automation: Streamlines workflows and reduces manual effort in data governance.
Scalability: Adapts to growing data needs and expands with organizational growth.
Role management: Efficiently manages user roles and permissions.
Metadata asset manager: Organizes and categorizes data for easy access and management.
Data lineage: Tracks data flow across systems for enhanced analytics and compliance.
Multiple data source connectors: Integrates with various data inputs for seamless data management.

What benefits and ROI should be considered when evaluating IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog?

Enhanced decision-making: Provides structured data insights to drive strategic decisions.
Improved data consistency: Ensures uniformity in data naming conventions and source monitoring.
Business term association: Links business jargon with data assets for better understanding.
End-to-end data workflows: Facilitates comprehensive data management from source to analytics.

In industries such as automotive, insurance, and healthcare, IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog aids by addressing data inconsistencies and supporting the creation of business glossaries. It supports end-to-end data workflows, significantly impacting these sectors by enhancing metadata management and glossary maintenance. Through integration with existing tools, it helps enhance data-driven decision-making by defining and enriching critical information.

IBM

erwin Data Intelligence is a comprehensive platform for metadata management, data cataloging, and governance. It enables organizations to gain insights, improve traceability, and streamline compliance through its advanced features.

Focusing on data lineage, metadata repositories, and seamless integrations, erwin Data Intelligence provides a unified perspective of enterprise data. Its robust capabilities include Smart Data Connectors for automation, efficient data visualization with mind maps, and adaptable metadata properties. While the platform integrates well into existing systems, areas for improvement include automation, SDK inconsistencies, and the need for better data quality assessments. Use cases highlight its importance in enhancing business data models and regulatory compliance.

What are the key features of erwin Data Intelligence?

Single Source of Truth: Centralizes data for consistent information across the organization.
Smart Data Connectors: Automate connections to data sources, enhancing efficiency.
Data Lineage: Tracks data pathways for better traceability and understanding.
Business Glossaries: Enables clear definitions and shared vocabulary for all users.
Metadata Management: Streamlines metadata organization and retrieval.
Impact Analysis: Assesses implications of data changes rapidly and accurately.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automation scripts reduce manual processes and increase productivity.
Improved Data Visualization: Mind maps facilitate an intuitive understanding of complex data.
Customizable Properties: Adapt metadata attributes to fit specific organizational requirements.
Unified View: Offers a comprehensive perspective of data governance practices.

Industries implementing erwin Data Intelligence often focus on mapping data sources and integrating governance with ETL tools. This supports comprehensive data management strategies, enabling business teams to better locate, understand, and utilize data effectively. Its application in metadata management and automated reporting is particularly valuable in sectors requiring stringent regulatory compliance.

Quest Software

Sample Customers

Rabobank, QuadReal Property Group, Jakarta Smart City

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC

Buyer's Guide

IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs. Quest Data Intelligence

September 2026

Free Report: IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs. Quest Data Intelligence

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs. Quest Data Intelligence and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.

DOWNLOAD NOW

916,956 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog vs. Quest Data Intelligence report.

See our list of best Metadata Management vendors.

We monitor all Metadata Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.