We performed a comparison between Alation Data Catalog and erwin Data Intelligence by Quest based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Governance solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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."
"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."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The possibility to write automation scripts is the biggest benefit for us. We have several products with metadata and metadata mapping capabilities. The big difference when we were choosing this product was the ability to run automation scripts against metadata and metadata mappings. Right now, we have a very high level of automation based on these automation scripts, so it's really the core feature 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."
"The data management is, obviously, key in understanding where the data is and what the data is. And the governance can be done at multiple levels. You have the governance of the code sets versus the governance of the business terms and the definitions of those business terms. You have the governance of the business data models and how those business data models are driving the physical implementation of the actual databases. And, of course, you have the governance of the mapping to make sure that source-to-target mapping is done and is being shared across the company."
"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 solution saves time in data discovery and understanding our entire organization's data."
"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."
"The product's data governance features need improvement."
"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 does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"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."
"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 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."
"Everything about Data Intelligence is complex. Though we've used the tool for five years, we're still only using about 30 to 40 percent of its capabilities. It would be helpful if we could customize and simplify the user interface because there are so many redundant things."
"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."
"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."
"Another area where it can improve is by having BB-Graph-type databases where relationship discovery and relationship identification are much easier."
"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."
"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."
More erwin Data Intelligence by Quest Pricing and Cost Advice →
Alation Data Catalog is ranked 5th in Data Governance with 7 reviews while erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is ranked 4th in Data Governance with 18 reviews. Alation Data Catalog is rated 7.8, while erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is rated 8.6. 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 erwin Data Intelligence by Quest writes "Enabled us to centralize a tremendous amount of data into a common standard, and uniform reporting has decreased report requests". Alation Data Catalog is most compared with Microsoft Purview Data Governance, Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog and IBM InfoSphere Information Governance Catalog, whereas erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is most compared with Microsoft Purview Data Governance, Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, Collibra Lineage and AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3). See our Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Intelligence by Quest report.
See our list of best Data Governance vendors.
We monitor all Data Governance 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.