

SAS Data Management and Alation Data Catalog compete in the data management and cataloging category. While SAS excels in data integration and governance, Alation is preferred for its cloud integration and ease of data discovery.
Features: SAS data integration capabilities and effective governance offer a unified view of enterprise data, supporting a variety of environments for robust data quality management. Users also benefit from its comprehensive reporting tools. Alation facilitates active data governance with strong capabilities in cloud integration and metadata management, emphasizing collaborative features and automated metadata tagging despite some feature maturity limitations.
Room for Improvement: SAS faces licensing cost challenges, setup complexity, difficulties with database connectivity, and requires improved documentation and training. Alation needs enhancements in data governance features, end-to-end data lineage, integration with tools like Power BI, and advancements in technical user-friendliness.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: SAS Data Management is deployed on-premises and faces customer service challenges, with dependable deployment but requiring detailed support for technical issues. Alation offers diverse deployment options, including cloud services, and receives better customer service ratings with effective support for user feedback and technical issues.
Pricing and ROI: SAS is considered expensive with significant ROI, especially in sectors like pharmaceuticals, but its licensing model can be a barrier for smaller organizations. Alation's high price point and specific pricing models depend on user types. Users find understanding Alation's pricing offers better deals, with promising ROI similar to SAS, both having high potential in data reliability improvements.
We have seen a return on investment, having saved close to 10.5% of our costs, with expected ROI growing yearly by about 17%.
Instead of going into Google or consulting a colleague, I can just go to Alation Data Catalog, search there, and understand everything by myself.
Some of them have dragged on for six months, which is much longer than we would ever want some support issues to go on.
we have defined several SLAs that have resolved critical issues and incidents with excellent support.
we have been able to contact them, and they have been able to help us whenever we have had issues
The support for SAS in Brazil is not the best one, but the support in Sweden is really good, as they visit the company and work to solve the issues.
As data sizes grow, we can also scale categorizations, calibrations, and the types of data we ingest and catalog through this tool.
Alation Data Catalog's scalability is really good since everything is cloud and everything gets pulled into the system via Snowflake and DBT automatically.
Alation Data Catalog's scalability has met our needs as our data and user base has grown.
It has never gone down when we wanted to access it.
Alation Data Catalog has been stable for me, as I haven't seen much downtime.
From my experience, Alation Data Catalog is stable.
The platform needs improvement in integrating with BI tools, reducing manual efforts, and facilitating a smooth connection.
Additionally, bringing in AI capabilities to automate tracking and labeling can optimize how we handle data information levels.
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.
There is significant room for improvement, especially with regard to using a hybrid approach that involves both CAS and persistent storage.
Collibra is a little bit expensive than Alation, but I presented the benefits of having that platform, so that little bit of money was not a big deal.
Discussions with the vendor partners provided a detailed breakdown of costs and how they can be reduced over time.
From my experience, SAS Data Management is an expensive tool.
It was the only data catalog tool where I could save and even create SQL queries.
Importantly, we establish a single source of truth, centralizing metadata and standardizing definitions, which minimizes confusion and helps with consistent data use across the organization.
My stakeholders can find relevant data assets quickly using a Google search without needing technical jargon, reducing the time spent searching for data.
SAS Data Management stands out because of its data standardization, transformation, and verification capabilities.
The best features I appreciate about SAS Data Management tool are that it's easy to create the flows and schedule data, and the tables are not too big, making it easy to control the ETL process, including user access which is also easy to manage in SAS.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Alation Data Catalog | 4.0% |
| SAS Data Management | 1.4% |
| Other | 94.6% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 4 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 2 |
| Large Enterprise | 15 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 7 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 8 |
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.
Every decision, every business move, every successful customer interaction - they all come down to high-quality, well-integrated data. If you don't have it, you don't win. SAS Data Management is an industry-leading solution built on a data quality platform that helps you improve, integrate and govern your data.
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