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Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs Quest Data Intelligence comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 16, 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

Microsoft Purview Data Life...
Ranking in Data Governance
26th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
5.2
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Email Archiving (9th), Document Management Software (6th), Microsoft Security Suite (27th)
Quest Data Intelligence
Ranking in Data Governance
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (7th), AI Governance (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is 1.2%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Data Intelligence is 2.7%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Quest Data Intelligence2.7%
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management1.2%
Other96.1%
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Jog Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

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."
"HPE Apollo Systems has positively impacted our organization by improving business operations by eighty percent, saving time, improving efficiency, and facilitating the management of large data sets."
"The UI is the most valuable feature."
"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 system is stable; I haven't encountered any worldwide stability issues unlike other office products."
"The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature."
"The solution saves time in data discovery and understanding our entire organization's data."
"Erwin DI checked all the boxes for us."
"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."
"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."
"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 client is thrilled with higher quality, lower-cost products, and the services."
"By using the data catalog, we have definitely improved in terms of maturity as a data-driven decision-maker organization, and we are now getting to a level where everybody understands the data, understands how it is organized, and how they can use this data for different business decisions."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is no specific improvement I would suggest for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management, but I think if they can work on policy design and usability, adding more granular control for the organization regarding controlling the movement of data outside would definitely improve the solution."
"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."
"Microsoft's Purview Data Lifecycle Management preview features can be unreliable, hindering their usefulness."
"There is room for improvement in automation, no question."
"Improvement is required for the AIMatch feature, which is supposed to help automatically discover relationships in data."
"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."
"There were some issues when drawing the data models. If you have more than 500 or 600 tables, it takes a long time to display those in the right position on the screen."
"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."
"We chose to implement on an Oracle Database because we also had the erwin Data Modeler and Web Portal products in-house, which have been set up on Oracle Databases for many years. Sometimes the Oracle Database installation has caused some hiccups that wouldn't necessarily have been caused if we had used SQL Server."
"In my opinion, the analytics part of erwin Data Intelligence is not satisfactory."
"The technical support could be improved."
 

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."
"Smart Data Connectors have some costs, and then there are user-based licenses. We spend roughly $150,000 per year on the solution. It is a yearly subscription license that basically includes the cost for Smart Data Connectors and user-based licenses. We have around 30 data stewards who maintain definitions, and then we have five IT users who basically maintain the overall solution. It is not a SaaS kind of operation, and there is an infrastructure cost to host this solution, which is our regular AWS hosting cost."
"There is an additional fee for the server maintenance."
"erwin is cheaper than other solutions and this should appeal to other buyers. It has a good price tag."
"erwin's pricing was cheaper than its competitors."
"Erwin Data Catalog is very expensive."
"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."
"I am not very familiar with its pricing. I know it is not cheap, but it is also not super expensive. It depends on the company size. For a company making $1 million, it is very expensive. For a company making 10 million and above, it might be okay."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
9%
Construction Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business3
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft Information Governance, Microsoft Purview Records Management
erwin DG, erwin Data Governance, erwin Data Catalog
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. Quest Data Intelligence and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
911,549 professionals have used our research since 2012.