Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs Quest Data Intelligence comparison

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. Quest Data Intelligence

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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

Microsoft Purview Data Life...

Ranking in Data Governance

26th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

5.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Archiving (9th), Document Management Software (6th), Microsoft Security Suite (27th)

Quest Data Intelligence

Ranking in Data Governance

18th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Metadata Management (7th), AI Governance (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is 1.2%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quest Data Intelligence is 2.5%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Quest Data Intelligence	2.5%
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management	1.2%
Other	96.3%

Data Governance

Featured Reviews

Steven Thomson

Ict Systems Manager at Lltnpa

Automated retention has transformed compliance workflows and now simplifies audit responses

The deep native integration with Microsoft 365 is what ultimately made me decide on Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management over Enterprise Vault and OpenText Content Manager. Auto-apply retention labels using machine learning is the specific integration with Microsoft 365 that made it the deciding factor for me over Enterprise Vault or OpenText. Manually labeling content at our data volumes is not realistic. The automated classification based on sensitive information types and trainable classifiers is what makes the program actually scale. That feature gets used constantly. We went from inconsistent ad-hoc retention practices to a consistent, automated, documented program across the whole organization with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management. That shift from a compliance audit perspective is enormous.

Read full review

Jog Raj

Senior Consultant at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

Automated lineage and business glossaries have improved data understanding and collaboration

I am open to answering a few questions about erwin Data Intelligence and sharing my opinion about the product. Regarding the analytic part of the product, I find it very interesting that erwin Data Intelligence has its own inbuilt reporting toolset, with a new version coming out in January that will be AI-powered. This means you will be able to write analytical reports and questions based on the metadata and data lineage, making it more powerful than the current version, as AI will assist in creating those reports and performing analysis on the metadata. I find that the time taken to realize value from erwin Data Intelligence can be quite long. Creating a data catalog and developing data lineage takes significant time, and I expect that AI will help accelerate the process of creating data products by streamlining the steps involved. I can recommend erwin Data Intelligence to other users. I would rate this review as an eight out of ten overall.

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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

"We went from inconsistent ad-hoc retention practices to a consistent, automated, documented program across the whole organization with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management."

"HPE Apollo Systems has positively impacted our organization by improving business operations by eighty percent, saving time, improving efficiency, and facilitating the management of large data sets."

"The UI is the most valuable feature."

"The impact of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management on my unified data catalog has improved a lot; the improvements I see are in the lineage, the discovery, and the labeling."

"The system is stable; I haven't encountered any worldwide stability issues unlike other office products."

"Erwin DI checked all the boxes for us."

"Data Intelligence allows us to automate multiple tasks we had previously done manually, such as restructuring the metadata for our purposes, setting up ETL flows, and defining the data tables we create. It also enables us to standardize our approach and our technical processes."

"The main benefits end users receive from erwin Data Intelligence include saving time and money while streamlining processes."

"The client is thrilled with higher quality, lower-cost products, and the services."

"The automated data lineage and impact analysis being driven from the mapping documents are astounding in reducing the time to research impact analysis from six to 16 weeks down to minutes, because it's a couple of clicks with a mouse."

"If I use a traditional ETL tool and build it through an IT port, it would take five days to build very simple data mapping to get it to the deployment phase, whereas using this solution, the IT cost will be cut down to less than a day."

"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."

"It is a central place for everybody to start any ETL data pipeline builds. This tool is being heavily used, plus it's heavily integrated with all the ETL data pipeline design and build processes. Nobody can bypass these processes and do something without going through this tool."

More Quest Data Intelligence pros

Cons

"I think labeling could use a lot more AI assistance. AI implementation into labeling would be beneficial."

"The time it takes to scan is one issue; when we raise high-volume issues and tickets related to scanning failures, it relates to permission errors, which are technical challenges."

"The initial setup took longer than we expected. Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management is not a turn-it-on-and-go product."

"There is no specific improvement I would suggest for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management, but I think if they can work on policy design and usability, adding more granular control for the organization regarding controlling the movement of data outside would definitely improve the solution."

"Microsoft's Purview Data Lifecycle Management preview features can be unreliable, hindering their usefulness."

"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."

"In my opinion, the analytics part of erwin Data Intelligence is not satisfactory."

"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."

"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."

"There are a lot of little things like moving between read screens and edit screens. Those little human interface type of programming pieces will need to mature a bit to make it easier to get to where you want to go to put the stuff in."

"I find that the time taken to realize value from erwin Data Intelligence can be quite long."

"One big improvement we would like to see would be the workflow integration of codeset mapping with the erwin source to target mapping. That's a bit clunky for us. The two often seem to be in conflict with one another. Codeset mappings that are used within the source to target mappings are difficult to manage because they get locked."

"Improvement is required for the AIMatch feature, which is supposed to help automatically discover relationships in data."

More Quest Data Intelligence cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The service operates on a pay-as-you-go basis, charging an extra one cent per field of metadata scanned in our data."

"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."

"We operate on a yearly subscription and because it is an enterprise license we only have one. It is not dependent on the number of users."

"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."

"I am not very familiar with its pricing. I know it is not cheap, but it is also not super expensive. It depends on the company size. For a company making $1 million, it is very expensive. For a company making 10 million and above, it might be okay."

"The solution is aggressively priced."

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

"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."

"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."

More Quest Data Intelligence pricing and cost advice

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911,493 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

12%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

Construction Company

Outsourcing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	3
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	16

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?

Better coverage outside Microsoft 365 is a feature I wish Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management had that it does not offer today. If I could change one thing about Microsoft Purview Data Life...

What is your primary use case for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?

Automating retention and deletion across our Microsoft 365 environment is my main use case for Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management. At Microsoft scale, Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and T...

What advice do you have for others considering Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management?

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management implementation is very much a team-wide effort. The policies apply organization-wide across all Microsoft 365 users. The management side, configuring pol...

What needs improvement with erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

In my opinion, the analytics part of erwin Data Intelligence is not satisfactory. The name 'Intelligence' is not related specifically to analytics; it is focused on data governance with no advanced...

What is your primary use case for erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

My main use case for erwin Data Intelligence is applying it and the DQ Labs in a financial institution.

What advice do you have for others considering erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?

The integration of business glossaries has significantly helped improve collaboration in our organization. We define the business glossaries first during meetings with the business, and then we bul...

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Product Reports

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management

Download Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management product report

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management report

Quest Data Intelligence

Download Quest Data Intelligence product report

Also Known As

Microsoft Information Governance, Microsoft Purview Records Management

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance, erwin Data Catalog

Overview

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management helps businesses manage data effectively, enhancing compliance and control while optimizing data usage across the organization.

Designed for comprehensive data governance, Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management aids businesses in automating data retention, labeling, and protection policies. It integrates seamlessly with existing systems, facilitating robust data management, which supports compliance and risk management efforts. Suitable for businesses seeking to consolidate data management processes, it ensures that valuable data is efficiently cataloged, accessible, and secured, contributing to informed decision-making and resource optimization.

What features should users be aware of?

Automated Data Retention: Simplifies data management by automatically applying retention policies.
Sensitivity Labeling: Offers robust capabilities to classify and protect sensitive information.
Data Insights: Provides analytical insights that help in monitoring compliance and data usage.
Policy Enforcement: Integrated tools for automating policy application across data assets.

What benefits can users expect from reviews?

Improved Compliance: Ensures adherence to regulations through automated policy enforcement.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlines data management tasks, reducing manual intervention and potential errors.
Cost Effectiveness: Reduces the need for multiple tools by consolidating data management activities.
Enhanced Security: Protects sensitive data through advanced labeling and encryption features.

In finance, Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management facilitates compliance with strict regulations, in healthcare, it safeguards patient data while streamlining retention policies, and in retail, it organizes customer data for better insights and tailored marketing strategies, ensuring data is a strategic resource across sectors.

Microsoft

erwin Data Intelligence is a comprehensive platform for metadata management, data cataloging, and governance. It enables organizations to gain insights, improve traceability, and streamline compliance through its advanced features.

Focusing on data lineage, metadata repositories, and seamless integrations, erwin Data Intelligence provides a unified perspective of enterprise data. Its robust capabilities include Smart Data Connectors for automation, efficient data visualization with mind maps, and adaptable metadata properties. While the platform integrates well into existing systems, areas for improvement include automation, SDK inconsistencies, and the need for better data quality assessments. Use cases highlight its importance in enhancing business data models and regulatory compliance.

What are the key features of erwin Data Intelligence?

Single Source of Truth: Centralizes data for consistent information across the organization.
Smart Data Connectors: Automate connections to data sources, enhancing efficiency.
Data Lineage: Tracks data pathways for better traceability and understanding.
Business Glossaries: Enables clear definitions and shared vocabulary for all users.
Metadata Management: Streamlines metadata organization and retrieval.
Impact Analysis: Assesses implications of data changes rapidly and accurately.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automation scripts reduce manual processes and increase productivity.
Improved Data Visualization: Mind maps facilitate an intuitive understanding of complex data.
Customizable Properties: Adapt metadata attributes to fit specific organizational requirements.
Unified View: Offers a comprehensive perspective of data governance practices.

Industries implementing erwin Data Intelligence often focus on mapping data sources and integrating governance with ETL tools. This supports comprehensive data management strategies, enabling business teams to better locate, understand, and utilize data effectively. Its application in metadata management and automated reporting is particularly valuable in sectors requiring stringent regulatory compliance.

Quest Software

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC

Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management vs. Quest Data Intelligence