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
dbt
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
dbt is an SQL development environment, developed by Fishtown Analytics, now known as dbt Labs. The vendor states that with dbt, analysts take ownership of the entire analytics engineering workflow, from writing data transformation code to deployment and documentation. dbt Core is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, and paid Teams and Enterprise editions are available.
$0
per month per seat
Matillion
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Matillion is a data pipeline platform used to build and manage pipelines. Matillion empowers data teams with no-code and AI capabilities to be more productive, integrating data wherever it lives and delivering data that’s ready for AI and analytics.
$2.50
Pay as you go per user
Pricing
Alation Data Catalog
dbt
Matillion
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Developer: For Individuals
$2.50/credit
Pay as you go per user
Basic
$1000
per month 500 prepaid credits (additional credits: $2.18/credit)
Advanced
$2000
per month 750 prepaid credits (additional credits: $2.73/credit)
Enterprise
Request a Quote
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Alation
dbt
Matillion
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Billed directly via cloud marketplace on an hourly basis, with annual subscriptions available depending on the customer's cloud data warehouse provider.
Matillion is graphical versus dbt, which is SQL code-based (that, of course, is a matter of personal preference and not an objective advantage). The integrated testing, documentation generation, lineage, etc., were additional criteria that led us to choose dbt.
dbt is great for engineers and those comfortable with coding. Matillion is the low-code alternative with a huge emphasis on collaboration with ease. You don't need to checkout a branch, clone, pull, merge etc. in order to help your colleague with a data pipeline. The simple …
Both the Databricks platform and dbt Cloud are more powerful from the point of view of the development lifecycle and data use cases covered. They are also more complex and require specialized data engineering skills to be used. Matillion has a lower barrier of entry for small …
Fivetran offers a managed service and pre-configured schemas/models for data loading, which means much less administrative work for initial setup and ongoing maintenance. But it comes at a much higher price tag. So, knowing where your sweet spot is in the build vs. buy spectrum …
We decided to move forward with Matillion because it was the best tool among tools that support both ingesting data from a source system to a target database and running transformation workflows on it afterwards. Fivetran and Airbyte only support data ingestion and we had our …
Matillion is a good tool for integrating multiple clouds. Informatica has been a market standard for many years, it provides multiple capabilities for data governance, data quality, etc. However, Informatica is pretty expensive compared to Matillion. Also, Matillion is more …
Matillion was chosen by Schibsted due to the seamless integration with Snowflake. The ease of use and fast workflow have made it an essential tool in our setup, and with the option to integrate nearly every data source there is, plus the ease of use, it really gives a lot of …
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
The prerequisite is that you have a supported database/data warehouse and have already found a way to ingest your raw data. Then dbt is very well suited to manage your transformation logic if the people using it are familiar with SQL. If you want to benefit from bringing engineering practices to data, dbt is a great fit. It can bring CI/CD practices, version control, automated testing, documentation generation, etc. It is not so well suited if the people managing the transformation logic do not like to code (in SQL) but prefer graphical user interfaces.
Great: Need to query simpler APIs, or utilize well known services such as GSheets etc.? Matillion has got some of the best and easiest to use connectors out there. Not so great: Do you need have a competent CI/CD flow that you will be able to update / compare from Matillion as well as other sources at the same time? Good luck, you will need to be extra careful, as you might have to have a deeper dive into your servers Terminal each time you have a git conflict.
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.
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.
Matillion is brilliant at importing data -- it would be amazing to have more ways to export data, from emailed exports to API pushes.
Any Python that takes more than a few lines of code requires an external server to run it. It would be great to have more integration (perhaps in a connected virtual environment) to easily integrate customized code.
Troubleshooting server logs requires quite a bit of technical expertise. More human readable detailed error handling would be greatly appreciated.
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
With the current experience of Matillion, we are likely to renew with the current feature option but will also look for improvement in various areas including scalability and dependability. 1. Connectors: It offers various connectors option but isn't full proof which we will be looking forward as we grow. 2. Scalability: As usage increase, we want Matillion system to be more stable.
Alation Data Catalog is generally easy to use for finding datasets, reviewing documentation, and understanding ownership. The platform makes data discovery more efficient and improves trust in shared assets. I rated it 7 because the navigation can be complex at times, and the search results could be more precise and easier to refine.
dbt is very easy to use. Basically if you can write SQL, you will be able to use dbt to get what you need done. Of course more advanced users with more technical skills can do more things.
We are able to bring on new resources and teach them how to use Matillion without having to invest a significant amount of time. We prefer looking for resources with any type of ETL skill-set and feel that they can learn Matillion without problem. In addition, the prebuilt objects cover more than 95% of our use cases and we do not have to build much from scratch.
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.
Overall, I've found Matillion to be responsive and considerate. I feel like they value us as a customer even when I know they have customers who spend more on the product than we do. That speaks to a motive higher than money. They want to make a good product and a good experience for their customers. If I have any complaint, it's that support sometimes feels community-oriented. It isn't always immediately clear to me that my support requests are going to a support engineer and not to the community at large. Usually, though, after a bit of conversation, it's clear that Matillion is watching and responding. And responses are generally quick in coming.
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.
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.
I actually don't know what the alternative to dbt is. I'm sure one must exist other than more 'roll your own' options like Apache Airflow, say, bu tin terms of super easy managed/cloud data transforms, dbt really does seem to be THE tool to use. It's $50/month per dev, BUT there's a FREE version for 1 dev seat with no read-only access for anyone else, so you can always start with that and then buy yourself a seat later.
Fivetran offers a managed service and pre-configured schemas/models for data loading, which means much less administrative work for initial setup and ongoing maintenance. But it comes at a much higher price tag. So, knowing where your sweet spot is in the build vs. buy spectrum is essential to deciding which tool fits better. For the transformation part, dbt is purely (SQL-) code-based. So, it is mainly whether your developers prefer a GUI or code-based approach.
We're using Matillion on EC2 instances, and we have about 20 projects for our clients in the same instance. Sometimes, we're struggling to manage schedules for all projects because thread management is not visible, and we can't see the process at the instance level.
We've had limited but very positive impact for 3 data subject matter experts. In the past they were fielding very similar questions from users stumbling on their data. Now, rather than responding to each email or chat message, they not only direct users to the catalog but they also reach out to me to do a walk-through of Alation's other features.
Another positive impact is having the data dictionary live in one location. This has been tremendous in making the dictionaries accessible and consistent.
