Alation Data Catalog vs. AWS Glue

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Alation
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Alation offers enterprise data intelligence solutions, including data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation operates in thethe data catalog market. With its Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight with the goal of tackle the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management.N/A
AWS Glue
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
AWS Glue is a managed extract, transform, and load (ETL) service designed to make it easy for customers to prepare and load data for analytics. With it, users can create and run an ETL job in the AWS Management Console. Users point AWS Glue to data stored on AWS, and AWS Glue discovers data and stores the associated metadata (e.g. table definition and schema) in the AWS Glue Data Catalog. Once cataloged, data is immediately searchable, queryable, and available for ETL.
$0.44
billed per second, 1 minute minimum
Pricing
Alation Data CatalogAWS Glue
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
per DPU-Hour
$0.44
billed per second, 1 minute minimum
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AlationAWS Glue
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Alation Data CatalogAWS Glue
Considered Both Products
Alation
Chose Alation Data Catalog
1.Alation is cheaper.
2.Manta meets the needs only in discovering lineage.
3.AWS Glue is more technical data catalog and it doesn`t allow to describe source or table in detailed way.
AWS Glue

No answer on this topic

Best Alternatives
Alation Data CatalogAWS Glue
Small Businesses

No answers on this topic

IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 9.2 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
ER/Studio
ER/Studio
Score 9.9 out of 10
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.0 out of 10
Enterprises
ER/Studio
ER/Studio
Score 9.9 out of 10
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
IBM InfoSphere Information Server
Score 8.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Alation Data CatalogAWS Glue
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(17 ratings)
8.8
(10 ratings)
Usability
7.3
(2 ratings)
9.2
(3 ratings)
Support Rating
9.1
(2 ratings)
7.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Alation Data CatalogAWS Glue
Likelihood to Recommend
Alation
Alation is well suited to helping a user find a column or even a query using a business term search. In this regard Alation is excellent because it's easy to not only associate these items with each other, but there are also many ways to link the column and/or query to that business term/concept
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Amazon AWS
One of AWS Glue's most notable features that aid in the creation and transformation of data is its data catalog. Support, scheduling, and the automation of the data schema recognition make it superior to its competitors aside from that. It also integrates perfectly with other AWS tools. The main restriction may be integrated with systems outside of the AWS environment. It functions flawlessly with the current AWS services but not with other goods. Another potential restriction that comes to mind is that glue operates on a spark, which means the engineer needs to be conversant in the language.
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Pros
Alation
  • Ability to link objects using the @ symbol. It allows us to easily provide a way to get more information or context. So if the business concept is part of a hierarchy, we can link to the other terms in that hierarchy.
  • The customization is really helpful. Most object types have robust customization options. Others are less so, but it is improving. We've created multiple custom fields to support our data governance framework.
  • The search feature with filtering is helpful in narrowing down what you're looking for.
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Amazon AWS
  • It is extremely fast, easy, and self-intuitive. Though it is a suite of services, it requires pretty less time to get control over it.
  • As it is a managed service, one need not take care of a lot of underlying details. The identification of data schema, code generation, customization, and orchestration of the different job components allows the developers to focus on the core business problem without worrying about infrastructure issues.
  • It is a pay-as-you-go service. So, there is no need to provide any capacity in advance. So, it makes scheduling much easier.
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Cons
Alation
  • The lineage UI is not ready for primetime. I would not recommend this feature for my users at this time because it's too complex to understand and is visually difficult to track down specific paths.
  • The underlying infrastructure of the on-premise version of the software is fragile and unnecessarily complicated, using too many modules and technologies.
  • The license model of the on-premise version contains too many add-ons. I would like to pay one price and get all of the features.
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Amazon AWS
  • In-Stream schema registries feature people can not use this more efficiently
  • in Connections feature they can add more connectors as well
  • The crucial problem with AWS Glue is that it only works with AWS.
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Likelihood to Renew
Alation
Overall, we are happy with the functionality of the platform. While there are are areas that we would like to see further improvement in, the tooling is highly configurable and aligns well with our use case. A mature API layer makes it straightforward to integrate with other data tooling. Alation stands out for its pro-active engagement with their customers, both to resolve issues and in communicating their feature roadmap
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Usability
Alation
Mostly because the search feature is case sensitive. This causes issues when users are searching for an industry standard acronym. These acronyms exist as attributes in thousands of places across our data ecosystem. Alation allows stewards to endorse attributes so that these endorsed items rise to the top of search results. The problem is no one types acronyms in caps in a search field. Alation returns results matching the case (lower-case) and in several instances the endorsed attributes don't even appear on the first page of results
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Amazon AWS
While easy to set up and manage monitoring for large datasets, its complexity can be a barrier for new users. Integration with AWS Ecosystem, Managed Monitoring, Dashboards and monitoring tools for AWS Glue are generally easy to set up and maintain, Automated Data Pipelines. Automates data pipeline creation, making it efficient for certain data integration
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Support Rating
Alation
The account management and technical support teams are both excellent. There is regular account manager engagement, and technical issues are generally resolved very quickly. The vendor engages us in product development through regular updates on the product strategy & feature roadmap.
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Amazon AWS
Amazon responds in good time once the ticket has been generated but needs to generate tickets frequent because very few sample codes are available, and it's not cover all the scenarios.
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Implementation Rating
Alation
Key insight from implementing Alation is that, as a cloud-based SaaS product, the majority of effort is not infrastructure-related but instead focused on security configuration and integration with existing platforms, including identity management, access controls, and metadata connectivity to core data systems. Because of its data profiling functionality, careful consideration had to be given to data security and data sovereignty.
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Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Alation
Alation provided the right balance of connection with systems in use, trusted reputation and affordability. The product integrates with current ways of working and does not require reorganisation within other lines of business.
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Amazon AWS
AWS Glue is a fully managed ETL service that automates many ETL tasks, making it easier to set AWS Glue simplifies ETL through a visual interface and automated code generation.
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Return on Investment
Alation
  • Provides a place where people can go to find things
  • When we first implemented, someone was concerned that people would now see what a mess our data environment was. I consider that a feature. We can't clean up if we can't see what we have.
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Amazon AWS
  • We are using GLUE for our ETL purpose. it’s ease with other our AWS services makes our ROI, 100% ROI.
  • One missing piece was compatibility with other data source for which we found a work around and made our data source as S3 only, so our dependencies on other data source is also reducing
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ScreenShots

Alation Screenshots

Screenshot of Alation Intelligent Search, which helps to democratize access to enterprise data and foster a robust data culture.Screenshot of a display of end-to-end lineage to understand data flows, relationships, health, and impact analysis.Screenshot of where users can access the privacy policies. This helps everyone in an organization to make data-driven decisions while also ensuring compliance and security.