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Alation Data Catalog vs AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3) comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Alation Data Catalog
Ranking in Data Governance
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (3rd)
AtScale Adaptive Analytics ...
Ranking in Data Governance
44th
Average Rating
5.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
Data Virtualization (7th), BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (45th), BI on Hadoop (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 3.1%, down from 5.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3) is 0.6%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alation Data Catalog3.1%
AtScale Adaptive Analytics (A3)0.6%
Other96.3%
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2776527 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data and Analytics Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Increases data discoverability and boosts self-service analytics through enriched metadata and intuitive search
The best features that Alation Data Catalog offers are its search capabilities and the fact that it works with many different data platforms; it is essentially platform agnostic. The other piece that I really think is important is how easy it is to use as well as to manage. What makes the search capabilities of Alation Data Catalog stand out for me is the fact that every item within the catalog is indexed and searchable, as well as the filtering features that allow you to narrow down to just the types of assets that you need. Wildcard searches are also very helpful. It is a very intuitive tool, as long as you are using the filters. Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert. This has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration. It has allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog. We have been measuring the curation of content within the catalog that has gone up over time, and we have also seen the number of users in the catalog increase, as well as the amount of activity within the catalog increase. We were seeing about an average of about 20% increase month over month for the last few months.
it_user822762 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior BI and Reporting Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
The GUI interface is nice and easy to use, but the organization of the icons is not saved across users
Connecting to a Hadoop database to create a cube to connect to Tableau. We want to be able to easily create cubes which can be connected to Tableau for visualization The product had many issues. We had great collaboration with the product development team, but the product was not able to meet our…

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"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 solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the ALLIE AI feature."
"Alation Data Catalog provides a nice interface for connecting to the database, querying the data, and working on it."
"We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by improving the data marketplace section, the data utilization section, and the quality of the data."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization as collaboration has definitely improved at my company, allowing us to reach out and know who owns data, which has been especially helpful with turnover and in building out the analytics side of our bank."
"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 GUI interface is nice and easy to use."
 

Cons

"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 interface is not user-friendly."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"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."
"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."
"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."
"The product was not able to meet our 10 second refresh requirements."
"The organization of the icons is not saved across users."
"There was an issue with the incremental aggregation not working as indicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a little expensive."
"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."
"A three-year agreement is better than a one-year rolling 12-month agreement from a price point of view. I'd recommend looking at a three-year deal because you can't stand up a catalog and produce value in 12 months."
"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."
Information not available
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
6%
Healthcare Company
5%
Healthcare Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Comms Service Provider
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise15
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alation Data Catalog?
I haven't had any experience with pricing, setup costs, or licensing, as I have been strictly an end user and haven't had any administrative or management responsibilities.
What needs improvement with Alation Data Catalog?
Some of the downsides about the lineage is that some of the code is quite difficult to read as the formatting is a bit ugly sometimes. Alation Data Catalog can be improved with the lineage formatti...
What is your primary use case for Alation Data Catalog?
I have been using Alation Data Catalog for the past year now. My main use case for Alation Data Catalog is updating data descriptions and making sure analysts have what they need to do their job. W...
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Also Known As

Alation
AtScale, AtScale Intelligence Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
Rakuten, TD Bank, Aetna, Glaxo-Smith Kline, Biogen, Toyota, Tyson
Find out what your peers are saying about Collibra, Microsoft, Informatica and others in Data Governance. Updated: July 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.