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Alation Data Catalog vs Cyera comparison

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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)
Cyera
Ranking in Data Governance
24th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (13th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (9th), AI Data Analysis (18th), AI Security (12th), Data Security Platforms (DSP) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 3.1%, down from 5.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cyera is 2.3%, down from 4.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alation Data Catalog3.1%
Cyera2.3%
Other94.6%
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.
reviewer2795301 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Compliance at a manufacturing company with 1-10 employees
Data discovery has accelerated and now drives faster classification and compliance mapping
The best features Cyera offers include agentless discovery and sampling as well as AI ML-based classifications. I find myself relying on the sampling the most, which makes everything really fast, but also the auto-classification and ML-based functionalities. The main thing that stands out to me and my team about the features is the speed of integration and how fast it does the discovery on the data. Once it discovers the data, it also maps it back to a ton of compliance frameworks and best practices that I can use to operationalize. Cyera has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to identify the highest risk areas but also provide better classification of data, which then leads to better data pillar maturity. Cyera has accomplished all three outcomes: saving time, reducing risk, and improving compliance scores, as the speed at which it discovers data was significantly faster.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"We had nothing before, so we can't compare anything we used before with what we've got now, but what we've got now is infinitely better."
"We do see a return on investment, though I cannot share exact numbers."
"The solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by improving the data marketplace section, the data utilization section, and the quality of the data."
"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."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the ALLIE AI feature."
"Cyera has positively impacted my organization because we have become more compliant."
"Cyera has an inbuilt set of policies implemented towards data security, especially cohering with Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)."
"Cyera has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to identify the highest risk areas but also provide better classification of data, which then leads to better data pillar maturity."
"The data discovery, data classification, and CSPM features are most valuable."
"I like how they model the data. They find data in different places that we didn't know, and they can give us a good idea if it's sensitive or not. They understand whether or not something is in the right region because, with the cloud posture management tool, we could see certain things in the infrastructure, but the way they dig into the data is what we like."
 

Cons

"Data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges"
"I notice a couple of pain points with Alation Data Catalog: they can improve on the lineage perspective and improve their data sources integration."
"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."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."
"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."
"The current search functionality in Alation Data Catalog is not necessarily great. It mostly searches titles, and we would prefer it to search the description and some of the source comments to find answers that we need."
"As a startup company, there is a long way for them to go in terms of scalability."
"I would advise others looking into using Cyera to not do so."
"There is room for improvement in making Cyera more user-friendly. Some parts were difficult to navigate, especially for those new to the IT industry."
"The licensing initially was tricky because it is based on storage as well as user count."
"They need to add a few things in the UI from an enterprise perspective. It's more along the lines of being able to self-service, have integrations, build alerts, and things like that. Outside of that, they work with us on the API and getting alerts into our SIEM and things like that. There's always a way to do something, and they're always available, which is nice."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 solution is a little expensive."
"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."
"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."
"Compared to the competitors, they are very reasonable."
"I don't know how much exactly it costs, but I know that it's a yearly thing. It's something that will cost money for any company because they're storing all this information. They're doing all this machine learning, and there are a lot of services on their backend that they got to pay for. I'm sure it gets translated back to the customers unless you have everything completely on-prem. If you're not doing much in the cloud, then I could see how it'd be cheaper, but if you have anything that's cloud-hosted and does all the work for you, there's going to be a cost associated with it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cyera ?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cyera was that the licensing initially was tricky because it is based on storage as well as user count. I use Cyera to actually identify ho...
What needs improvement with Cyera ?
I think Cyera can improve by expanding beyond Israel.
What is your primary use case for Cyera ?
My main use case for Cyera is security. A quick specific example of how I use Cyera for security is scanning drives for secure information that shouldn't be there. Cyera helps with scanning drives ...
 

Also Known As

Alation
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
Cyera's customers include the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (Cboe), Granicus, Takeda, LifeLabs, United Talent Agency, ACV Auctions, and Armis
Find out what your peers are saying about Alation Data Catalog vs. Cyera and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.