Collibra Platform Reviews

We have a client that was planning to do a digital transformation. They came up with the use cases and they have a couple of departments. They are mainly based on legal systems including corporate trust, etc., that they want the data to govern. Their requirement was basically if any new person is hired, they would have everything in Collibra, including all of the business glossary or the tables or the reports. Basically, everything for their onboarding process was available there. It was also necessary to give that to anyone that wanted to know about their department.

We only just started with this project and have only started learning Collibra.

On the client-side right now, any onboarding or any seminars or any training they are conducting, they can just pull the data from Collibra and show it to anyone. Every single data source, we can connect with the Collibra and we can pull out any data. We can create our traceability diagrams or trace any connections, like end-to-end connections, and link the data to the report. Some will be encrypted data, however, we will know which is related to each business term.

We can create our own policies, and we can link with the data quality rules. Collibra can even provide some validation rules. If there is a business term that exists without a description, the validation result will show as false. It is pretty customizable and pretty user-friendly so far.

The most valuable feature of this solution is mainly on the report side. They have a couple of reports in finance and we can connect with Tableau or Power BI, or even SSDT. We have connected with Power BI and Tableau right now. Once we connect with the source, we can pull all the data, and we can create a hierarchy based on that, and then we can link each attribute in the report with the table name and the column name. After that, we can link it with the business terms as well. It's like an end-to-end flow. We can create even traceability diagrams, views inside the system.

The reporting is very good. The solution offers a good business glossary. The diagrams are also pretty easy to understand for everyone. We had to link with the IT department, which had some difficult workflows, and they want to automate everything. The solution can do that for them. It's still a work in progress, however.

The solution is quite customizable. If I took a business term account, I could link it with the table account, and then I could link it with the account ID, and then there'd be some account receivables report. Each attribute in this report account ID, I can link to and create a linked diagram. This can be shown to the business users. The business users need to see the glossary and the attributes and if we can link anything we can create relationships with the data. There are some out-of-the-box attributes, which are present in Collibra, however, in addition to that, we can also create our own any.

If you compare the solution to something like Axon, it's pretty user-friendly. Anyone can come and understand the tool very easily. Axon isn't as user-friendly compared to Collibra. 

It's not a complicated product. Collibra also has Collibra DG and Collibra Console, but in Informatica Axon, everything is all together. Everything, including the backup schedule and all these things, has another web application in order to maintain all that information. 

While connecting with the data source, it's not very easy. If there's a firewall, it is difficult to connect with the database. It's not easy when you are configuring on the database.

Right now, the client is decommissioning the MuleSoft integration and they're moving to APIs. Collibra Connect and MuleSoft integration were there before, however, now there's a move to API. Within a year or two, they will all move to API. Whoever is using it now with MuleSoft and Collibra Connect needs to find another way for connecting with the API. 

I don't think they are providing additional software for MuleSoft integration. Primarily, they are telling us, okay, we will decommission this and move to API. The only thing that's lacking in terms of the change is when connecting to database. Sometimes the connection causes issues if the data is breaking the firewall and ingesting the data.  

I'm currently using the solution. I've been working with the solution since March of 2020.

The stability has been good. We haven't had any complaints. It seems to be quite reliable. We've deployed into production and until now we haven't had any page loading issues or refresh issues.

We had around 100s of business users using collibra, we never faced any performance issue. And we had SSO configuration enabled for all users. Performance wise collibra is stable. 

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand, they should be able to quite easily.

In terms of technical support, they have documentation from Collibra University. They have subcategories that you can search through. That can help with a lot of troublshooting.

However, if we are facing an issue in production, they will reply in a short span of time, usually within half an hour or 15 minutes. They will connect with us to resolve the issue.

If it is in our working environment, it will lag by four or five hours. They try to prioritize service and get to you as quickly as they can only in critical situations.

Our client has taken some Collibra hours as well. We can schedule some sessions with the Collibra team to learn the system. We have taken around 36 hours approximately and have utilized the service alongside purchasing the product.

While I've seen Axon, I haven't worked much with it. From the look and feel, and from my navigation, I find it's very difficult compared to Collibra, which seems to be rather straightforward.

I was involved in the initial setup and I did not find the implementation overly complex.

Once we started setting up the Collibra tool, they provided a pretty detailed user guide. Along with that, there are so many videos available in Collibra University, which is pretty self-explanatory. We just needed to go through that and understand it all. 

You will get all end-to-end details of what software can connect, what data sources it accepts, etc. Lately, they have changed a lot of the certification levels. Earlier, it was level one, level two, level three. Now, they changed in each area. There are certifications for solution architect, business analyst, workflow manager, etc.

We had three people from our organization that assisted with the initial setup. One person was the cloud administrator. He set up everything with the cloud. Another person was doing the console setup, it was a single sign-on, so he was adding all the AD directory. We had two environments, actually, one production and one dev. The third setting up the environments. In the console only, we needed to mainly set up all these things, add all the data sources, JDBC drivers, SSN configuration, email configuration, all these things needed to be done in the console. That was the primary setup.

Deployment took, in total, about two weeks. Post-deployment, there really isn't any maintenance necessary. We can schedule backup, either on a weekly or daily basis. Whatever changes we make, we can take to the backup. If we make a mistake the backup will be available to override it.

The client is pretty happy with the Collibra work so far. They have achieved their digital transformation goals for 2020 and therefore they were pretty satisfied with the tool. We can connect with IDQ or anything we need to. It's been a successful project.

There are two license types - author and consumer. The author has all of the rights. He can edit and catalog anything. The consumer has limited access. We have around 10,000 consumers and 40 author licenses.

Professional training costs are in addition to licensing costs.

The pricing is pretty high if you compare it to other governance tools. 

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing this product.

We are Collibra Partners. We have a business relationship with the organization.

If we have a Collibra expert on your team, it will be easy. Otherwise, new users should expect a bit of a learning curve. ANyone working closely with it should take some Collibra training alongside the product purchase. Professionals will help you and guide you in creating an organization level or department level unit with a glossary and everything. They can give you more insight. I'd also advise users to try to take the certification, which is free of cost in Collibra University, or try a partner training certification.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

I worked with this solution a few months ago and the main use case of Collibra was as the central metadata tool for the enterprise. The plan was to have all of our data dictionaries, our business glossary, to expose data lineage through Collibra and show all of the relationships and connections between our various tables and databases and the actual semantic business layer, in Collibra. It was a way to unify our technical metadata with our business metadata and with our actual applications.

Recently, a lot of work has been done around sensitive data elements. Collibra is really a good tool for centralizing a list of elements that could either be first or second order PII and connecting the top policies around those specific PII elements to the systems they're found in, and how they are implemented. If they're used as different names in different systems, that's valuable because it's helping the company meet its goals in terms of new legal regulations for the EU as well as for California. Those two are our GDPR and CCPA which are the two most recent policies from that domain. It's also very good for data quality issue management. Collibra is essentially the main tool for that. It's a valuable tool in many different companies.

The interface itself is very useful. I think what I find most useful about the tool, if I'm looking at it from the perspective of a data user, would be the search capability. The fact that I can search for any data elements that are in the table and there will be a pretty comprehensive list that are either identical or very similar to one another in the tables where they are found. I think in terms of sourcing, it's really valuable. I also think that the ability to connect your business metadata with your technical metadata, is something that's very valuable from the perspective of the business. People on the business side need to understand where data is coming from, how it's connected. Doing that through one centralized repository, or document, is useful.

The issue may be the way it's been implemented in my company but, for Collibra to be really useful, what's missing is an easy way to connect to different data sources and different types of data sources and actually ingest and profile some of that data. That's the trouble we've always had in getting wider adoption of the tool. Unless there's a mandate from the enterprise data office or the like, regular users are not going to use the tool for really robust business use cases without having some actual data in there. I know there is some out of the box capability for this, but I think it needs to be easier for Collibra to actually ingest and run some basic profiling on the data itself. That's currently missing from the tool. 

I think that today this is a stable solution which wasn't the case in the past. For a couple of years, there were certain outstanding issues and bugs that took a really long time to fully address. Those have been taken care of at this point.

It's a very scalable tool. There is a ton of metadata in there. If they were to roll this out to other lines of business and start getting more adoption, I don't think they would have a problem with scalability. I think the problem is really with getting that adoption in the first place.

The company is very hands-on providing support and solutions but I think the problem is that they might be stretched a little thin. It's a fairly small company, I believe, and there have been cases where we had to wait months to get support to fully patch something that was wrong in the tool. It's even more of an issue if you are connecting Collibra with another third party tool because you have to get everybody on the call. You have to make sure that they're corresponding, following up in a timely manner. It's just not easy.

I have previously used the Sandbox versions of Alation, and Informatica. I remember Alation being overall very similar to Collibra. I think Collibra's UI may be a little better. I think it's very user-friendly. I would say definitely superior to Informatica. I haven't really heard many good things about the Informatica business glossary metadata solution although it has been a while since I have seen or used that and it may have changed. I definitely think Collibra is the gold standard in terms of combining user experience with the actual capabilities. Again, at the end of the day, it's really a matter of implementation as to how good it actually is and how positively it will be adopted.

There have been some issues with the implementation and the adoption rate has not been high. It's not being used extremely extensively. It's being used for those use cases already mentioned, meaning at the enterprise level for identifying PII and complying with regulations. It is being used for data quality issue management in finance but as far as I'm aware it's not being used for data quality issue management for other lines of business.

I don't exactly remember the pricing but my impressions from everybody that I've talked to is that it's an expensive tool. It's more expensive than its competitors. It may well be worth it in terms of how it's being used. I think it's a superior tool, but it's also a premium tool. 

Before purchasing a license or licenses for Collibra, you need to have a data strategy or data governance and a management strategy defined beforehand. You need to have at least some semblance of an idea of how you want the various spaces and communities in Collibra to be organized. Obviously, certain things will change as you get familiar with the tool, but you can't just wing it. You need to have a strategy that also takes into account other tools and other solutions that you want Collibra to be connected to because there could be an issue where maybe you have a data lineage tool that is getting upgraded in three months from now, and your current version of Collibra will be better suited to connect with that tool once it's been upgraded. You're never going to be able to know 100% beforehand when those types of events will happen, but you need to have some kind of strategy in mind. This is where you really need the investment in data governance and management before you define the tool that you're going to use. That has to come before any implementation of Collibra. 

It's a big tool, so it can potentially be difficult to implement if you don't have the right investment in place before deployment. It's also user-friendly with a lot of great out-of-the-box capabilities. There is some room for improvement in certain areas, but overall it's a good solution. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10. 

Our clients are typically using it for metadata management. From a broader perspective, Collibra establishes an excellent foundation on which to build an enterprise data governance program. 

The most valuable aspect of the solution is its collaboration platform, which includes the workflows, the data lineage, and some of the communities. The ability to collaborate and approve business terms for the business glossary data dictionary is excellent.

The breadth of available connectors for metadata ingestion need to grow quickly to support customers as they expand their data governance programs to include a diverse list of source systems from which they want to derive business value. The connectors are needed  to bring metadata into Collibra and enable lineage, workflows, definitions, etc.  That said, this is not just a Collibra problem - this is an everybody problem. The central challenge is the availability of APIs to ingest text structural metadata, which is a common problem across any data governance platform or even any integration platform, honestly.

To be fair, I would say that Collibra's purpose and primary value is as a collaboration platform, which is the core value of business-centric data governance, and not as an integration platform.  For this purpose, they are clearly the leading solution.

We've been using the solution for six or seven years. We've used it longer than almost anybody.

The stability is very good. It's not buggy and it doesn't have glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

It's really scalable, it's really solid. If an organization needs to expand their solution, they should be able to do so easily.

We've reached out to technical support rather frequently. That said, it depends on the topic. I would say that their tech support is excellent, but it is not necessarily an overly large team because they are still a growing company.

They have some really good, smart people, however, they don't have a team of experts for each target subject area.  They don't have a team of 20 people for each application component that can just go, "Oh, yeah. We set an appointment tomorrow!" You might have to wait a few days for the right person.  Having said that, their focus on making detailed self-driven education and training available online enables clients easily to investigate application areas.

The way we view data governance is this: it has to be led by the business. It has to be business-facing. Although there's a number of applications that might have a data catalog, for instance, like Alation, Informatica or Talend, we're vendor-neutral. If we find something better, we'll switch. We're open about that.

With Collibra, their strength is that they were the only data governance platform built specifically to address data governance as it was being formed as a discipline. Virtually every other solution in the marketplace is built as some sort of data management application aimed at IT, and has either morphed from an ETL or something else into that. Alation morphed from a code scanning application into data governance solution (data catalog) for instance. 

Collibra also took a business-centric approach. Their application is the only one that you could throw a business person in front of, and they would understand it intuitively, they'd say, "Oh, okay. So this is where I approve items. This is where I request them. This is where I see things. This is a dashboard that I can look at our progress." You're not going to get a sales VP going into Collibra, but if a sales VP went into Collibra, they would understand it. That's another reason why this has been the data governance solution we have recommended to clients, and still do.

The setup is not complex. It is straightforward. Collibra's very good at doing setups very quickly, so we typically leave this to them. They sell a cloud installation. Essentially, they formerly were both on-prem and cloud, however, now they're focused only on a cloud delivery model based on customer demand.  Thankfully, it is extremely straightforward, as this is the box we need to check prior to helping clients move forward on their data governance program.

The costs vary. I don't have details on the exact pricing of the solution as we do not resell it even though we recommend it.  This enables us to maintain our neutrality as a client advisor.

Their licensing model focuses primarily on the advanced technical users to help to establish the data governance foundation and manage and maintain it as more and more business groups are brought on board.  What I like about their licensing model is that they try to remove barriers to adoption by making it very inexpensive to add "data citizens" across the organization, i.e.  normal, "lite" users who are using, but not developing, connectors, workflows, communities, etc.

In that sense, the marketplace perhaps is not aware of the beneficial TCO of Collibra's license structure, because it causes them to focus on the initial cost of the heavy advanced users, while not realizing that they will be able to bring the overall corporate community onboard at a relatively minimal cost. Therefore, their pricing can appear high per user, however, in fact, for a community or population of data governance users, it's, not actually that high, it's just front-end loaded to establish the technical foundation and basis for the data governance program.

We are experts on implementing business-centric data governance programs, as that is the only model for success.  As such, we are implementation partners with Collibra, and in fact are one of, if not the, longest-standing Collibra partners globally.

The advice I'd give to other potential users would be the same I'd give to people implementing any sort of governance. I would first advise clients to have your data governance business cases ready in advance, or at least start by identifying potential business outcomes that can be delivered through clear and documented access to data. From there, they can target the relevant source systems needed to delivere on these business cases.

From a technical perspective, there are different approaches to ingest structural metadata, i.e.  tools and connectors that are available to assist with this.  While Collibra is hands-down the best data governance collaboration platform, clients should review the different options to ingest metadata based on the targeted source systems.  Of course, Collibra's catalog is the first option that should be considered, but available connectors need to be reviewed.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd give it a nine. based on its excellence as a data governance business collaboration platform.  From the perspective of metadata ingestion,  I'd probably give it a seven - I like their current roadmap and designated approach, but connectors are a work in progress, as they are for everyone.

Collibra Governance helps us set the business rules and define critical data elements.

It is user-friendly, and other companies use Collibra Governance as well.

I have been using this solution for about a year and a half.

It is a stable solution. 

It is a scalable solution. When we initially migrated, it was a little tough, but we are getting used to it.

We had issues during setup, so we had to bring in a third party for the initial setup and migration from IGC to Collibra Governance. We didn't have technical knowledge then, so we needed help.

I do not have details on the licensing costs.

I rate this solution a seven out of ten. However, we like the solution, and I recommend it to others. It is better than the IGC solution we used in the past.

I am part of implementing the workflow through it, setting up the glossaries, and importing the assets to Collibra Governance. 

I would say customization is the most valuable. The workflow is very good and has been embedded. It also has a great user interface.

I would like to see a feature using the runtime dashboard. As of now, we can create the dashboard using the snapshot of the report. But I would recommend having a dashboard that runs the data on the back end.

I have been using Collibra Governance for the past eight months.

I am finding that there is stability in Collibra Governance.

It is scalable and we have the ability to add more users.  Currently, we have one hundred and fifty users.

I was not involved during the setup.

I would say definitely worth the expense. Data governance takes time to see the output and results.

I would rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

We use Collibra Catalog for the business glossary.

We have found that Collibra Catalog is very easy to use. We suggest a small proof of concept because businesses look at things differently in different parts of the company. 

I think they can bring a few more features and align better with other quality products.

I have been using Collibra Catalog for one year now.

We have not had many complaints about stability so I believe it is stable.

Since I have only used the product for a year now I can not really comment on how scalable it is currently.

I would rate Collibra Catalog an eight out of ten.

Neutral

The setup is easy to implement in your market.

Our use case is to manage master data inside of Governance.

The solution is deployed on cloud. We have around 10 data analysts using the solution.

The most valuable feature is the discovery process for the data catalog because we get it in a visual format as a way to understand and classify it. It's good to generate insights and get the context of the data.

When we are doing discovery for unstructured data sources, I would suggest a quality report of the data that would indicate what was unable to process.

The main issue is the data quality and that we can't control dealing with the real-world data. It's good to measure this and compare it between different data sources.

The Collibra products are very consolidated in the market. I think it's harder to analyze different domains of the data. Through Data Lineage, I think Collibra could add a relationship graphic analysis. They could add a feature that is a new way to explore the data.

I have used this solution for six months.

It's pretty stable. It hasn't suffered any outages so far.

I'm not sure if you can improve or optimize the performance to streamline it, but in terms of stability, I haven't had any issues.

We haven't scaled up, so I don't know if we will have any issues with this.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10. 

The entirety of Data Intelligence is good, but I can't talk about all the products inside. I can't give it a 10, at least for the pieces of Collibra that I know.

There are many pieces of the platform, and I think everyone should at least test the Data Catalog and Data Privacy or deploy it and combine it. If we mix with other vendors that can deliver these things, it will be complex to get things done.

It's very tight with the Data Catalog and Data Lineage. It's more than just an integration and an API for your services.

I don't use it as an individual. It's basically for my clients. I serve as a consultant for the tool. The typical use cases for the clients that we get is around metadata management and around building lineage. You can create a lineage by modifying out-of-the-box Collibra asset models.

While, for privacy reasons, I cannot share exact use cases, I can say that the solution helps smooth and streamline the processes of clients. 

The most valuable features of Collibra are the workflows and the data lineage capabilities. They help improve the client's existing processes. You can map those into workflows and those processes can directly be done on Collibra. Basically, what happens is, you directly script the metadata for the process that is happening.

I'm fairly new to the product, however, what I generally hear from my clients is that the requirement around having ways to ingest more metadata. Currently, with Collibra, they provide you a catalog platform, which helps you integrate or get metadata from a few commonly known platforms, like Tableau and IBM Db2, and Informatica. If they could bring them through, or if they could bring in more connectors to help us ingest metadata from other systems as well, that would be really helpful. That would reduce a lot of time and effort from our end.

If people had backward compatibility as well, that would be much better. I've also worked on other technologies, primarily Java, which is very, very much backward compatible. Any new implementation which they bring in does not impact your existing work to a heavy extent. It would be helpful if Collibra was similar.

I've been using this solution for the past two and a half to almost three years.

The stability as of now is quite good. We do get regular updates from the Collibra platform and that is good. In terms of performance, at the end of the day, it boils down to how your infrastructure is. However, we haven't really faced any issues with our clients.

If you have an on-premise setup, then the scalability is entirely in your hands it depends on the sizing. However, if you have a cloud-related Collibra setup then the scalability is pretty good. 

In terms of internal scalabilities, such as the different platforms we can bring on or onboard onto Collibra, it is good as of right now. However, if we have more connections or if you have leads to ingest data from these different sources, it could be better. That is an area where we can still see some improvement.

I'm more of a developer here, therefore, I've not really interacted with the Collibra support team. If a client needs help, we ask them to route it via their fortified product partners. We get a resolution that way. I haven't directly interacted with Collibra.

I was not involved in the initial setup as that is taken care of by the Collibra team.

We implement the solution for our clients according to their requirements. Collibra also does a lot of the implementation process as well.

I do not have visibility into the pricing of the product. It's not an aspect of the product I handle.

My overall IT experience is only for three years. I basically started working with Collibra. Therefore I have not really evaluated other solutions. I've never run a comparison with other market tools like Informatica or other ETL-based tools, for example.

If you know Collibra's history, the tool is fairly new to the market. It is maybe eight to 10 years old. Within the past three years, we've seen the Collibra platform, or the Collibra product, changing a lot and developing a lot. They've been incorporating a lot of user suggestions. I would say the DBA, the system we've learned, the product is still quite immature. However, it's developing. Earlier, they were using a few core APIs, which will now be deprecated in the newer version. Even though those are mapped to a newer functionality, it's an ever-changing thing. That does impact all your backend code and workflows. New users just need to be aware that it's still evolving.

Collibra generally, is trying to incorporate as many new solutions into its product. That sometimes comes at the cost of an existing solution being removed due to coaligned abilities which you have already kind of implemented with the clients. It's kind of a reimplementation on the newer versions for a newer component. It's something to be aware of.

From a client perspective, I rate it as a six out of ten. From a market perspective, I can rate it as a seven or eight. As much as I have heard that tool is comparatively unique and that lineage and the other capabilities like workflows that this brings to the table, compared to other products in the market, is kind of better. From a product perspective, I have to rate it as a six or a seven. And from a developer perspective, I'll rate it as a six. Overall, if I had to rate it on every aspect, I'd give it a seven out of ten.