We compared Alation Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Alation Data Catalog focuses on data discovery, governance, collaboration, pricing, and ROI. The platform offers exceptional customer service but requires improvements in navigation, search functionality, and integration with other tools. On the other hand, Microsoft Purview emphasizes data management, governance, collaboration, pricing, and ROI. Users appreciate its user-friendly interface and integration with Microsoft products but seek enhancements in functionality, user experience, and integration capabilities for more efficient data management.
Features: Alation Data Catalog stands out for its comprehensive data discovery and search capabilities, data governance functionality, and collaborative features. Microsoft Purview excels in effectively managing data assets, offering a comprehensive view of data, and supporting data governance and compliance requirements. Purview is also praised for its user-friendly interface and seamless integration with other Microsoft products and services.
Pricing and ROI: The setup costs for Alation Data Catalog are deemed reasonable and not overly burdensome, while Microsoft Purview offers comparatively lower setup costs. Alation's licensing agreement is seen as flexible and accommodating, while Purview provides versatile licensing options. Both products offer good value for money and competitive pricing., Alation Data Catalog reportedly achieved positive ROI by providing valuable insights, optimizing data management efficiency, eliminating duplication, and increasing collaboration. Microsoft Purview resulted in a positive ROI by enhancing data governance, accelerating analytics, centralizing data, and enabling cost savings and improved decision-making.
Room for Improvement: The Alation Data Catalog requires enhancement in intuitive navigation, search functionality, collaboration features, and integration with other tools. Microsoft Purview needs improvements in functionality, user-friendliness, data classification, search filters, integration, collaboration, and data ingestion processes.
Deployment and customer support: The reviews for Alation Data Catalog indicate that the duration for establishing the tech solution can vary among users, with some taking three months for deployment and an additional week for setup. However, others have reported only a week for both deployment and setup. The context must be considered to accurately evaluate the time required. In contrast, for Microsoft Purview, user feedback suggests that the duration for deploying, setting up, or implementing the solution also varies. Some mentioned three months for deployment and an additional week for setup, implying that both phases should be considered separately. However, there are also users who only required a week for both, indicating that these terms refer to the same period and should not be evaluated independently., The customer service and support of Alation Data Catalog have received positive feedback, with users appreciating the responsive and efficient assistance. Microsoft Purview also offers helpful and responsive customer service to cater to users' needs effectively.
The summary above is based on 49 interviews we conducted recently with Alation Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"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 can customize templates based on our use cases."
"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."
"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."
"Microsoft Purview is scalable."
"Purview helped us automate and control our data without having to rely on people to manually tag documents with specific retention periods."
"I use the tool in projects as a medium to provide information as reports to the stakeholders."
"MIP also provides strong information rights management settings, such as the ability to specify who has access to content and at what time."
"The user interface is highly intuitive and user-friendly."
"It is critical that Purview delivers data protection across multi-cloud and multi-platform environments. That is the number one reason that people are adopting hybrid and best-of-the-breed approaches. Especially in banking, it is critical because people want to protect, govern, and secure their data. This is one of the first conversations that happens with security and the architecture group on the client side."
"It is designed to seamlessly connect to various data sources, which is particularly beneficial for our customers who primarily use Microsoft technologies."
"The cataloging tool is definitely the most valuable... It tells you about all the data you have in your tables, which helps people understand our data. We now know what data we have."
"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 does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"The product's data governance features need improvement."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"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 tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"One drawback of Microsoft Purview, though it's beneficial and easy to use, is that when you start plugging in connectors for third-party sources when setting the solution up for data collection, it becomes a bit more tricky."
"I have some concerns about the separation of roles in Purview from the Microsoft tenant, as well as how they interact with the security portal and endpoint manager."
"Running eDiscovery once a day takes quite a long time because it has to fetch your data. I also want the eDiscovery results to be improved. At the same time, I would like to get a centralized page where I could see records management applied to my Office 365 tenant visualized instead of waiting for a custom script to run through the complete tenant."
"There are some non-Microsoft file formats that are not supported."
"There are differences when looking at an incident in the M365 portal versus Purview, and the main one is the advanced hunting. In the M365 portal, you can write KQL queries and fetch data. If that was available in Purview, it would be very good."
"Purview's data connector platform for non-Microsoft data sources is good, but there is some functionality that hasn't been developed yet. There are some servers that it can't connect to yet, because they're still in a trial process."
"The product needs improvement to edit the number of assets. It needs to be more inuitive as well."
"Microsoft Purview's compliance processes for handling various Mac and iOS devices could be significantly improved."
More Microsoft Purview Data Governance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Alation Data Catalog is ranked 5th in Data Governance with 7 reviews while Microsoft Purview Data Governance is ranked 1st in Data Governance with 51 reviews. Alation Data Catalog is rated 7.8, while Microsoft Purview Data Governance 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 Microsoft Purview Data Governance writes "User friendly with good documentation but needs to cover more non-Microsoft use cases". Alation Data Catalog is most compared with Collibra Governance, Informatica Axon, Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog, Atlan and erwin Data Intelligence by Quest, whereas Microsoft Purview Data Governance is most compared with Collibra Governance, Varonis Platform, Informatica Axon, Microsoft Intune and Collibra Lineage. See our Alation Data Catalog vs. Microsoft Purview Data Governance report.
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