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Melissa Data Quality vs Microsoft Data Quality Services comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Melissa Data Quality
Ranking in Data Quality
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Scrubbing Software (4th)
Microsoft Data Quality Serv...
Ranking in Data Quality
16th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
4.4
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Quality category, the mindshare of Melissa Data Quality is 4.0%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Data Quality Services is 2.1%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Quality Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Melissa Data Quality4.0%
Microsoft Data Quality Services2.1%
Other93.9%
Data Quality
 

Featured Reviews

GM
Data Architect at World Vision
SSIS MatchUp Component is Amazing
- Scalability is a limitation as it is single threaded. You can bypass this limitation by partitioning your data (say by alphabetic ranges) into multiple dataflows but even within a single dataflow the tool starts to really bog down if you are doing survivorship on a lot of columns. It's just very old technology written that's starting to show its age since it's been fundamentally the same for many years. To stay relavent they will need to replace it with either ADF or SSIS-IR compliant version. - Licensing could be greatly simplified. As soon as a license expires (which is specific to each server) the product stops functioning without prior notice and requires a new license by contacting the vendor. And updating the license is overly complicated. - The tool needs to provide resizable forms/windows like all other SSIS windows. Vendor claims its an SSIS limitation but that isn't true since pretty much all SSIS components are resizable except theirs! This is just an annoyance but needless impact on productivity when developing new data flows. - The tool needs to provide for incremental matching using the MatchUp for SSIS tool (they provide this for other solutions such as standalone tool and MatchUp web service). We had to code our own incremental logic to work around this. - Tool needs ability to sort mapped columns in the GUI when using advanced survivorship (only allowed when not using column-level survivorship). - It should provide an option for a procedural language (such as C# or VB) for survivor-ship expressions rather than relying on SSIS expression language. - It should provide a more sophisticated ability to concatenate groups of data fields into common blocks of data for advanced survivor-ship prioritization (we do most of this in SQL prior to feeding the data to the tool). - It should provide the ability to only do survivor-ship with no matching (matching is currently required when running data through the tool). - Tool should provide a component similar to BDD to enable the ability to split into multiple thread matches based on data partitions for matching and survivor-ship rather than requiring custom coding a parallel capable solution. We broke down customer data by first letter of last name into ranges of last names so we could run parallel data flows. - Documentation needs to be provided that is specific to MatchUp for SSIS. Most of their wiki pages were written for the web service API MatchUp Object rather than the SSIS component. - They need to update their wiki site documentation as much of it is not kept current. Its also very very basic offering very little in terms of guidelines. For example, the tool is single-threaded so getting great performance requires running multiple parallel data flows or BDD in a data flow which you can figure out on your own but many SSIS practitioners aren't familiar with those techniques. - The tool can hang or crash on rare occasions for unknown reason. Restarting the package resolves the problem. I suspect they have something to do with running on VM (vendor doesn't recommend running on VM) but have no evidence to support it. When it crashes it creates dump file with just vague message saying the executable stopped running.
Satyam Saxena - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Lead at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Automation in data management improves with built-in error rejection but technical support needs enhancement
Multiple areas in Microsoft Data Quality Services could be improved, such as its ability to perform changes automatically, as it currently identifies but does not correct data issues. Regular expression processing is complicated and slow. Technical support from Microsoft is poor, as they do not provide adequate assistance with issues encountered in integration or forming automation. Sometimes solutions to problems take several weeks due to a lack of support, relying instead on personal networks and experience.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"By far the best pricing and licensing option we have found for a small organization, since we can buy credits in small increments and they don't expire."
"Cleansing addresses of referring healthcare facilities to improve duplicate identification and geocoding their addresses."
"The high value in this tool is its relatively low cost, ease of use, tight integration with SSIS, superior performance (compared to competitors), and attribute-level advanced survivor-ship logic."
"​Initial setup was fairly straightforward. The documentation was very good in terms of how to integrate and consume the service(s) that we use. It did not take an abundance of time to set up things on our side to use the service."
"Customer Service: Great Technical Support: Great"
"It saves a huge amount of time. Before using this service, we used a vendor that manually ran our lists through this NCOA list, which might have taken one to three business days to return the file. This was a huge bottleneck in our process, and the data returned was not always accurate. After switching to Melissa Data’s SmartMover, the process has been reduced to between ten minutes and three hours, depending on the amount of records sent."
"We have only been using this for about two months, but it has sped up our processing significantly, making data mining easy and fast so we no longer have to spend an entire month gathering correct information on leads, as all we need is a list of home addresses and in minutes we have names and phone numbers to increase our chance of these leads becoming customers."
"​We are able to more accurately identify valid, and better formatted, data which improves the data we store in our database.​"
"This solution is particularly useful for data enrichment."
"The primary advantage of Microsoft Data Quality Services is its capability to automate certain tasks, which are otherwise achieved through SQL queries."
 

Cons

"An area for improvement is where an end customer's address is not found in the Melissa Data database, even though it is a valid address."
"MatchUp is a more complex product and I recommend a test area before upgrading to production. Performance can change from version to version."
"Address validation and parsing in a few countries have room for improvement."
"We are very pleased with the pricing but they need to have some good licence tracking mechanism."
"Overall there is a room for improvement in Customer Address Appends and Email Appends."
"I wish there was a way to do a "test run" and see what a particular format will give you."
"The use case I'm familiar with is for a merchant who was contrasting this technology with data from Dun and Bradstreet: so my recommendation is that Melissa Data purchase Dun and Bradstreet to combine their data breadth."
"It would be helpful if a list of the codes and explanations could be included."
"I would rate my experience with the initial setup a six out of ten, with one being very easy and ten being extremely challenging. So, there is room for improvement in the setup process."
"Technical support from Microsoft is poor, as they do not provide adequate assistance with issues encountered in integration or forming automation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Be sure to determine how the data is priced (record-based versus credit-based or some hybrid of data and services)."
"This vendor has no equal in pricing for equivalent functionality."
"The only complaint that I have towards it is they sell licenses based on a range of usage, and I feel those ranges are too large."
"Melissa pricing is competitive."
"Buy a lot more credits than you think you’re going to need."
"The price for address validation is similar in all software. However, the price for geocoding decides the actual pricing. If you get their most accurate geocoding (called GeoPoints), then it will add about $10k+ per million requests."
"Generally, the cost is ROI positive, depending on your shipping volume."
"​You should have a good idea of the size of your data and the amount of cleansing you will be doing, so you will purchase the appropriate size bundle.​"
"The pricing is in the midrange. It's not cheap, but it depends on the licenses you require."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
20%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Comms Service Provider
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise14
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Data Quality Services?
Microsoft Data Quality Services comes as part of SQL Server without additional costs, making it a competitive solution.
What needs improvement with Microsoft Data Quality Services?
Multiple areas in Microsoft Data Quality Services could be improved, such as its ability to perform changes automatically, as it currently identifies but does not correct data issues. Regular expre...
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Data Quality Services?
I use Microsoft Data Quality Services ( /products/microsoft-data-quality-services-reviews ) to handle data inconsistencies, such as missing or improperly formatted data. The tool serves purposes li...
 

Also Known As

No data available
MS Data Quality Services
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Boeing Co., FedEx, Ford Motor Co, Hewlett Packard, Meade-Johnson, Microsoft, Panasonic, Proctor & Gamble, SAAB Cars USA, Sony, Walt Disney, Weight Watchers, and Intel.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Melissa Data Quality vs. Microsoft Data Quality Services and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.