Alation Data Catalog vs erwin Data Intelligence by Quest comparison

Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Intelligence by Quest

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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

7th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Metadata Management (2nd)

erwin Data Intelligence by ...

Ranking in Data Governance

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 5.9%, down from 11.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is 2.1%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Governance

Featured Reviews

Brahma Lam

Developer at CVS Health

Has metadata cataloging features but needs changes in domain model

The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature. The tool's domain model needs to be changed. Alation Data Catalog is stable. The solution is scalable. Alation Data Catalog's deployment is easy. I rate it a nine out of ten. Deployment takes only two to three hours to complete.…

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Roy Pollack

Advisor Application Architect at CPS Energy

The solution provides more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term.

We have loaded over 300,000 attributes and more than 1000 mappings. The performance is slow, depending on the lineage or search. This is supposed to be fixed in the later versions, but we haven't upgraded yet. The integration with various metadata sources, including erwin Data Modeler, isn't smooth in the current version. It took some experimentation to get things working. We hope this is improved in the newer version. The initial version we used felt awkward because Erwin implemented features from other companies into their offering.

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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."

"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."

"The solution's most valuable feature is the ALLIE AI 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."

"The solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."

"Alation Data Catalog provides a nice interface for connecting to the database, querying the data, and working on it."

"The most valuable feature is cloud integration."

More Alation Data Catalog pros

"They have just the most marvelous reports called mind maps, where whatever you are focused on sits in the middle. They have this wonderful graphic spiderweb that spreads out from there where you can see this thing mapped to other logical bits or physical bits and who's the steward of it. It's very cool and available to your business teams through a portal."

"Data Intelligence has provided more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term. We have linked three critical layers of data, providing us with an end-to-end lineage at the column level."

"Being able to capture different business metrics and organize them in different catalogs is most valuable. We can organize these metrics into sales-related metrics, customer-related metrics, supply chain-related metrics, etc."

"The solution gives us data lineage which means we can see an impact if we make a change. The ability for us to have that in this company is brilliant because we used to have 49 data stewards from some 23 different groups within six major departments. Each one of those was a silo unto itself. The ability to have different glossaries — but all pointed to the same key terms, key concepts, or key attributes — has made life really simple."

"The biggest impact for us is that erwin generates DDL extremely quickly. We're able to pull in metadata, map it to a target, generate DDL to create the tables, and generate SSIS packages. Previously, especially going back 10 to 15 years ago, hundreds of hours had to be spent to manually perform these tasks. This solution completely automates it and gets it 90% done. We can then pass it off to a developer to create the items in SSIS."

"The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature."

"There is a wide range of widgets that enables the user to find the proper information quickly. The presentation of information is something very valuable."

"We use the codeset mapping quite a bit to match value pairs to use within the conversion as well. Those value pair mappings come in quite handy and are utilized quite extensively. They then feed into the automation of the source data extraction, like the source data mapping of the source data extraction, the code development, forward engineering using the ODI connector for the forward automation."

More erwin Data Intelligence by Quest pros

Cons

"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."

"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."

"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."

"The interface is not user-friendly."

"Data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges"

"The product's data governance features need improvement."

"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."

"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."

More Alation Data Catalog cons

"Everything about Data Intelligence is complex. Though we've used the tool for five years, we're still only using about 30 to 40 percent of its capabilities. It would be helpful if we could customize and simplify the user interface because there are so many redundant things."

"We still need another layer of data quality assessments on the source to see if it is sending us the wrong data or if there are some issues with the source data. For those things, we need a rule-based data quality assessment or scoring where we can assess tools or other technology stacks. We need to be able to leverage where the business comes in, defining some business rules and have the ability to execute those rules, then score the data quality of all those attributes. Data quality is definitely not what we are leveraging from this tool, as of today."

"Really huge datasets, where the logical names or the lexicons weren't groomed or maintained well, were the only area where it really had room for improvement. A huge data set would cause erwin to crash. If there were half a million or 1 million tables, erwin would hang."

"The versioning can sometimes be confusing because we use the publishing feature for the mapping. Technical analysts sometimes have two versions, and they should know that the public version is the correct one."

"We chose to implement on an Oracle Database because we also had the erwin Data Modeler and Web Portal products in-house, which have been set up on Oracle Databases for many years. Sometimes the Oracle Database installation has caused some hiccups that wouldn't necessarily have been caused if we had used SQL Server."

"The metadata ingestion is very nice because of the ability to automate it. It would be nice to be able to do this ingestion, or set it up, from one place, instead of having to set it up separately for every data asset that is ingested."

"The integration with various metadata sources, including erwin Data Modeler, isn't smooth in the current version. It took some experimentation to get things working. We hope this is improved in the newer version. The initial version we used felt awkward because Erwin implemented features from other companies into their offering."

"It's a little bit clunky. I think a lot of these features were bolted on, and they don't necessarily transition smoothly in the interface. I would like to see a little more cohesion."

More erwin Data Intelligence by Quest cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."

"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 whole suite, not just the DI but the modeling software, the harvester, Mapping Manager — everything we have — is about $100,000 a year for our renewals. That works out to each module being something like $8,000 to $10,000."

"erwin was at a good price. The federal government wouldn't buy something if the pricing wasn't good."

"erwin is cheaper than other solutions and this should appeal to other buyers. It has a good price tag."

"The price is too high."

"The licensing cost was very affordable at the time of purchase. It has since been taken over by erwin, then Quest. The tool has gotten a bit more costly, but they are adding more features very quickly."

"The solution is aggressively priced."

"Smart Data Connectors have some costs, and then there are user-based licenses. We spend roughly $150,000 per year on the solution. It is a yearly subscription license that basically includes the cost for Smart Data Connectors and user-based licenses. We have around 30 data stewards who maintain definitions, and then we have five IT users who basically maintain the overall solution. It is not a SaaS kind of operation, and there is an infrastructure cost to host this solution, which is our regular AWS hosting cost."

"You buy a seat license for your portal. We have 100 seats for the portal, then you buy just the development licenses for the people who are going to put the data in."

More erwin Data Intelligence by Quest pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

Non Profit

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alation Data Catalog?

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.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alation Data Catalog?

I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solut...

What needs improvement with Alation Data Catalog?

When issues arise, two key concerns arise. First, how can we perform root cause analysis faster? Second, how can we optimize resource allocation, considering the associated costs? Every customer is...

What do you like most about erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

The price is reasonable, and a subscription is required.

What needs improvement with erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

The data quality assessment requires third-party components and a separate license. I would like to have better integration around the data quality. I would appreciate the inclusion of a non-struct...

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Comparisons

Compared 38% of the time

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Compared 12% of the time

Ataccama ONE Platform vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 4% of the time

Atlan vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 32% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

Collibra Lineage vs erwin Data Intelligence by Quest

Compared 9% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs erwin Data Intelligence by Quest

Compared 9% of the time

BigID vs erwin Data Intelligence by Quest

Compared 6% of the time

More erwin Data Intelligence by Quest Competitors

Product Reports

Alation Data Catalog

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erwin Data Intelligence by Quest

Download erwin Data Intelligence by Quest product report

Also Known As

Alation

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance

Overview

Alation pioneered the data catalog market and is now leading its evolution into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions including data search & discovery, data governance, lineage, stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation.

Thanks to its powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. With Alation, analysts are empowered to search, query and collaborate on their data to achieve faster, more accurate insights.

Trusted by 400+ enterprises worldwide like Salesforce, Nasdaq, LinkedIn, Finnair, and Cisco.

Alation

The erwin Data Intelligence Suite (erwin DI) combines data catalog and data literacy capabilities for greater awareness of and access to available data assets, guidance on their use, and guardrails to ensure data policies and best practices are followed. Automatically harvest, transform and feed metadata from a wide array of data sources, operational processes, business applications and data models into a central data catalog. Then make it accessible and understandable within context via role-based views. This complete metadata-driven approach to data governance facilitates greater IT and business collaboration.

erwin by Quest

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC

Alation Data Catalog vs. erwin Data Intelligence by Quest