We performed a comparison between Alation Data Catalog and SAP PowerDesigner based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Metadata Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable features of Alation Data Catalog are the simplicity in onboarding data sources, the security in securing the data sources, and the way the various users of Alation Data Catalog communicate with each other through a messenger."
"Given the relatively low level of maturity, Alation's most relevant feature at the moment is a user interface that's easy to navigate, which helps us find and understand the data. So while Alation has a lot more functionality, our pain point right now is being able to easily find, understand, and trust the information to use it."
"We had some of our data science engineers, who had built out some cloud-based data and data products for users. They were spending a lot of their time, up to 30 to 35% of their time, answering questions about the data and helping people understand how to use it. Once they were able to document that information within Alation, they were only focusing on around 5% of the high-value questions that really couldn't be solved through the catalog itself. It freed them up to be more productive, it made their end-users more productive, and it made the adoption rate of their data products rise more quickly because people were able to get to using them."
"We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"The platform's most valuable features are workflow automation, automated business metadata tagging, technical metadata tagging, and data integration with data quality tools or platforms."
"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."
"I've used the reverse engineering feature a lot. I can take a look at the structure of the database and what relationships it has."
"The solution is a very pragmatic tool. It's quite easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a very fast reverse engineering process. It does a very expansive comparison."
"The most useful feature has been the detailed possibility to model almost anything regarding physical databases."
"The most valuable features of SAP PowerDesigner are the creation the flow charts and folders. It is a powerful tool."
"I like the property sheet capability and the user-defined attributes that you can set up."
"The physical database model is definitely the most valuable feature because it describes normalization exactly the way you understand the data, and it deploys it perfectly with open source systems."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"The product's data governance features need improvement."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"I know that this has been on their roadmap and they're working on it, but as a whole, there's an untapped reservoir of capabilities within their article features that could be used and built upon."
"Alation Data Catalog doesn't support end-to-end lineage. By that, I mean the ability to trace the movement of data from when it first comes into our organization to where it's consumed."
"Alation Data Catalog needs to develop a lot in terms of data governance and would be improved with a built-in interactive data quality solution."
"SAP PowerDesigner can improve the ease of use. It is not the best tool on the market because it is tough to navigate and use. A beginner would not be able to use it well, it requires some experience. If the solution was more user-friendly it would be able to be used by more audiences. I do not think many people are aware of this solution and they should use it."
"There should be a better usage of current hardware including multicore CPUs, higher resolutions, and multiple displays."
"One disadvantage of SAP PowerDesigner is that you cannot reverse engineer the ALTER statements, so that's an enhancement or area for improvement I'm looking forward to seeing from the SAP team in the future. That should directly reflect on the physical data models my company builds."
"It would be helpful if there were glossary, catalog and governance tools. It would help make it a true end-to-end product."
"Technical support needs improvement."
"I have found the solution not easy to use. When publishing you have to download the HTML, make adjustments against the updated HTML, convert it to HTML, then finally paste the HTML. There is not an on-the-fly function available to bypass the step-by-step converting process that other solutions have."
"The tool lags in the area of customer service."
"You have the possibility to complete a connection for abbreviations if you are creating columns or names of the tables. In the Citrix environment, this has been lagging to the point where the PowerDesigner was not usable."
Alation Data Catalog is ranked 2nd in Metadata Management with 7 reviews while SAP PowerDesigner is ranked 4th in Metadata Management with 34 reviews. Alation Data Catalog is rated 7.8, while SAP PowerDesigner is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Alation Data Catalog writes "The catalog now provides an opportunity for people to come together, to share, and to find". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP PowerDesigner writes "Effective in terms of validating everything, but sometimes they don't allow us some flexibility and GUI could improve". Alation Data Catalog is most compared with Microsoft Purview Data Governance, Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog and Atlan, whereas SAP PowerDesigner is most compared with erwin Data Modeler by Quest, Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect, Visio, IDERA ER/Studio and LeanIX. See our Alation Data Catalog vs. SAP PowerDesigner report.
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