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."We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"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."
"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."
"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."
"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."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"The most valuable features of SAP PowerDesigner are the creation the flow charts and folders. It is a powerful tool."
"The most useful feature has been the detailed possibility to model almost anything regarding physical databases."
"The solution is a very pragmatic tool. It's quite easy to use."
"Provides the flexibility to create logical and conceptual data models."
"It's a stable system. It never crashes."
"It's a great tool for documentation."
"I like the connectivity or the lineage between the models and usability."
"The most valuable feature is that it is a very fast reverse engineering process. It does a very expansive comparison."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"The product's data governance features need improvement."
"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."
"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 needs to develop a lot in terms of data governance and would be improved with a built-in interactive data quality solution."
"The portal of SAP PowerDesigner could be better. The tool also needs more features and integration with other products, such as Collibra. It would be interesting for SAP PowerDesigner to have more integration."
"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."
"The user interface could be more user-friendly."
"There are some minor things that could be easier. We're writing up procedures to bring all the modeling back into one group as this reduces delays in production."
"There should be a better usage of current hardware including multicore CPUs, higher resolutions, and multiple displays."
"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."
"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."
"I've tried to use Power Designer to bring in images, which didn't work very well at all."
Alation Data Catalog is ranked 2nd in Metadata Management with 7 reviews while SAP PowerDesigner is ranked 4th in Metadata Management with 33 reviews. Alation Data Catalog is rated 7.8, while SAP PowerDesigner is rated 8.0. 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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