Senior Data Analyst at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 10
Nov 25, 2025
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 formatting, which is a little bit hard to read sometimes, and there are things like data flow objects where the naming conventions are a bit odd. I believe the catalog sets could be improved since currently, we have a lot of catalog sets just to apply stewards to different schemas, columns, and tables.
Regarding improvements for Alation Data Catalog, I mention pain points, but I find it difficult to identify any. I do not have any pain points with Alation Data Catalog as of now; I could not think of anything that needs improvement.
Data Governance Systems Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Top 5
Nov 5, 2025
One limitation I would mention is that Collibra excels in workflow management, and Alation Data Catalog has some constraints in this area. It would be beneficial if Alation Data Catalog offered more flexible or configurable workflow options.Additionally, another improvement point would be regarding connectors for scanning metadata. While Alation Data Catalog has many connectors, integrating with legacy or niche systems can be challenging, often requiring data engineers to create extensive API configurations or bridges. It would help if Alation Data Catalog could develop more out-of-the-box connectors and simpler integration workflows to ease the burdens on data engineers.
Senior Data Governance at a university with 51-200 employees
Real User
Top 10
Apr 28, 2025
Alation Data Catalog is not user-friendly for business users. Its user experience is comparable to a Wikipedia page, lacking good visualization. In a fast-paced world, we need to grasp information quickly, and Alation does not facilitate that well. The platform needs improvement in integrating with BI tools, reducing manual efforts, and facilitating a smooth connection. Also, several use cases I presented, including certain configurations, were scheduled to be developed only in 2022, which did not meet my timeline.
Vice President at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
Vendor
Top 20
Sep 12, 2024
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 focused on reducing the cost of computing and resources deployed in the cloud. These two aspects should be more stable. In a nutshell, data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges.
Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement. It would be helpful if the solution included data classification and an easier streamlining of the process of workflow creation.
Senior Business Intelligence Consultant at Stellar Consulting Group
MSP
Top 20
Oct 25, 2023
It was not very clear how to connect to databases. The interface is not user-friendly. Some things in the interface must be made user-friendly. Some features are quite technical. A non-technical user might find the tool difficult to use.
Alation Data Catalog cannot scan the custom pages of Power BI. Having the capability to scan the custom pages of Power BI would be a great feature in Alation Data Catalog. Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage. It cannot provide a data lineage where the data is going from one data source to another. Alation Data Catalog currently lacks these features.
Project Manager - Data Governance, Master Data Systems at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
Jul 21, 2022
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. It also has fewer features than competitors like Informatica and has issues with integration. In the next release, Data Catalog should include a visualization feature for data quality and profiling.
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. Along the way, the data is stored in different places, transformed, aggregated, etc. The journey can be quite a long one from the perspective of a single piece of data, so we needed to track the lineage, and it didn't work as expected. It worked in parts, but it wasn't end-to-end. And we've had to rely on some workarounds to overcome some issues and still not where we want it to be. We understand that there's a lot of functionality coming up that we'll just have to wait for. When we purchased the tool, we knew that Alation was innovating and would be releasing new features and functionality every quarter. We were more excited than we would be about a stable product that puts out one update per year. And we knew we would find areas where Data Catalog either couldn't support a use case or we had to do a workaround. That has been the case, but Alation has been fairly quick to show us where these fixes or features will come out on their product roadmap. We've only had to rely on them a couple of times to provide workarounds for alternative solutions or options. However, that might be more tactical in nature rather than getting to what we want to do. There have been points where we haven't been able to do exactly what we want to do, but we've always been able to work around these issues or wait until the features have been made available. That lineage would be an excellent example where it didn't support our requirements out of the box from day one. But it's been a journey where we've understood what they've released, how it worked, what doesn't work, what's coming up, and when we'll be able to kick that off again.
Senior Data Governance Specialist at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Oct 14, 2021
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.
Alation Data Catalog offers dynamic cloud integration and robust data stewardship, aiding organizations in managing metadata and ensuring efficient data governance. Its active governance model enhances collaboration and productivity through seamless API integration.Alation Data Catalog empowers organizations by providing tools like seamless cloud integration, automatic data crawling, and a business glossary to strengthen data management. It supports enhanced data discoverability,...
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 formatting, which is a little bit hard to read sometimes, and there are things like data flow objects where the naming conventions are a bit odd. I believe the catalog sets could be improved since currently, we have a lot of catalog sets just to apply stewards to different schemas, columns, and tables.
Regarding improvements for Alation Data Catalog, I mention pain points, but I find it difficult to identify any. I do not have any pain points with Alation Data Catalog as of now; I could not think of anything that needs improvement.
One limitation I would mention is that Collibra excels in workflow management, and Alation Data Catalog has some constraints in this area. It would be beneficial if Alation Data Catalog offered more flexible or configurable workflow options.Additionally, another improvement point would be regarding connectors for scanning metadata. While Alation Data Catalog has many connectors, integrating with legacy or niche systems can be challenging, often requiring data engineers to create extensive API configurations or bridges. It would help if Alation Data Catalog could develop more out-of-the-box connectors and simpler integration workflows to ease the burdens on data engineers.
Alation Data Catalog is not user-friendly for business users. Its user experience is comparable to a Wikipedia page, lacking good visualization. In a fast-paced world, we need to grasp information quickly, and Alation does not facilitate that well. The platform needs improvement in integrating with BI tools, reducing manual efforts, and facilitating a smooth connection. Also, several use cases I presented, including certain configurations, were scheduled to be developed only in 2022, which did not meet my timeline.
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 focused on reducing the cost of computing and resources deployed in the cloud. These two aspects should be more stable. In a nutshell, data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges.
Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement. It would be helpful if the solution included data classification and an easier streamlining of the process of workflow creation.
We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues.
It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying.
The product's data governance features need improvement.
It was not very clear how to connect to databases. The interface is not user-friendly. Some things in the interface must be made user-friendly. Some features are quite technical. A non-technical user might find the tool difficult to use.
The tool's domain model needs to be changed.
Alation Data Catalog cannot scan the custom pages of Power BI. Having the capability to scan the custom pages of Power BI would be a great feature in Alation Data Catalog. Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage. It cannot provide a data lineage where the data is going from one data source to another. Alation Data Catalog currently lacks these features.
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. It also has fewer features than competitors like Informatica and has issues with integration. In the next release, Data Catalog should include a visualization feature for data quality and profiling.
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. Along the way, the data is stored in different places, transformed, aggregated, etc. The journey can be quite a long one from the perspective of a single piece of data, so we needed to track the lineage, and it didn't work as expected. It worked in parts, but it wasn't end-to-end. And we've had to rely on some workarounds to overcome some issues and still not where we want it to be. We understand that there's a lot of functionality coming up that we'll just have to wait for. When we purchased the tool, we knew that Alation was innovating and would be releasing new features and functionality every quarter. We were more excited than we would be about a stable product that puts out one update per year. And we knew we would find areas where Data Catalog either couldn't support a use case or we had to do a workaround. That has been the case, but Alation has been fairly quick to show us where these fixes or features will come out on their product roadmap. We've only had to rely on them a couple of times to provide workarounds for alternative solutions or options. However, that might be more tactical in nature rather than getting to what we want to do. There have been points where we haven't been able to do exactly what we want to do, but we've always been able to work around these issues or wait until the features have been made available. That lineage would be an excellent example where it didn't support our requirements out of the box from day one. But it's been a journey where we've understood what they've released, how it worked, what doesn't work, what's coming up, and when we'll be able to kick that off again.
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.