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Alation Data Catalog vs MANTA Flow comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 3, 2024

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
4th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (3rd)
MANTA Flow
Ranking in Data Governance
35th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 3.9%, down from 5.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of MANTA Flow is 0.8%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alation Data Catalog3.9%
MANTA Flow0.8%
Other95.3%
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.
LeandroSodré - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Governance Analyst at Data Meaning, Inc.
Very Powerful, with cloud based scalability, and highly efficient for both business and technical teams
I had some difficulties, trying to use the direct link which is metadata through files that you can upload to MANTA Flow and you can just say from there where that data is going. But we just figured out that sometimes, depending on the level of the granularity that if you want to link the object, you can not. For example, if you want to link the objects just by schema, sometimes it does not work. So you need to scroll down and link each table. Sometimes the table level does not work, and you need to go deeper and go to link column to column. We figured out that this was a bug in MANTA Flow, and we talked to them and I think they were fixing it. But in our case, we just realized that if we could link the objects at the lowest level possible, it would work. I was trying to develop, right now, some kind of automation to compare the listed revision that I have in MANTA Flow with some other revision. And I would like to do it in an automatic way. I would like to have some kind of API where I could call this object and the revision that I want and the same object and another revision that I wanted to compare with. And I could not see it as some API in MANTA Flow, and we have this feature on the user interface. I think it would be very powerful because if you want to automate just warn the data owners the structures were updated by looking at the object level, and send an email to these owners to see if that change makes sense.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert, which has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration, and allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert, saving them quite a bit of time and frustration and allowing them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog."
"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."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"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."
"Alation Data Catalog was very useful for sharing SQL queries easily in a platform."
"The solution is stable. We have not found any fatal errors yet."
"I believe it is very powerful. And for technicians, you can see the impact analysis, you can compare versions. So you can see some revisions against some of the oldest ones. You can compare and see which pipelines were updated between them. I think it is very helpful to both sides, the technical and business teams."
 

Cons

"Alation Data Catalog can be improved by enhancing their lineage capabilities to make it easier for us as users to search the lineage without having to use the Alation Data Catalog user interface."
"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."
"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."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"Data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges"
"Alation Data Catalog can be improved by enhancing their lineage capabilities to make it easier for us as users to search the lineage without having to use the Alation Data Catalog user interface."
"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."
"One area of improvement for MANTA Flow is to add as many new data sources as possible. We have found that maybe they can support 100, but not 101, unfortunately."
"I would like to have some kind of API where I could call this object and the revision that I want and the same object and another revision that I wanted to compare with. And I could not see it as some API in MANTA Flow, and we have this feature on the user interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a little expensive."
"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."
"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."
"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."
"As a service company, we don't care about the price because the customer is paying, but the customers consider MANTA to be reasonable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
38%
Insurance Company
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
 

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
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
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Find out what your peers are saying about Alation Data Catalog vs. MANTA Flow and other solutions. Updated: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.