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 tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."
"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 can customize templates based on our use cases."
"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."
"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 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."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"The most useful feature has been the detailed possibility to model almost anything regarding physical databases."
"The most valuable feature of SAP PowerDesigner is the testing of the models, it has the best function. Reverse engineering is very helpful too."
"It has helped me to develop the as-is state, design its to-be state, and track the capital investment according to gap analysis."
"It allows us to have proper documentation in terms of the databases."
"It's a stable system. It never crashes."
"The feature I found valuable in SAP PowerDesigner is extraction. I also like that my company hasn't faced any issues because of the clear documentation about SAP PowerDesigner."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"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 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."
"Pricing for small consultancies needs improvement. They sustain prices to competing tools. The competing tools tend to do special offers. PowerDesigner SAP doesn't pay much attention to the pricing of it and there are no special offers."
"Technical support needs improvement."
"Technical support could be better and more human."
"Connectivity can be improved because it's not very good."
"The solution itself does not need to be improved. However, they could add support for different languages."
"In the future, I would like to see data manipulation capability where you can actually write SQL queries and manipulate data from directly within the tool."
"The solution is very, very expensive. It would be ideal if it was a more affordable product."
"Checking-in models to the repository, especially when working remotely, is a slow process than can sometimes have problems with models being corrupted."
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 Collibra Lineage, 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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