Alation Data Catalog vs. SAP Information Steward

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

SAP Information Steward is well suited for companies looking for profiling data, monitoring data quality and managing policies. It provides dashboards and features to create the awareness on Data Quality dimensions. SAP IS is not suited to manage huge amount of data due to performance issues. It is not designed to correct data by its own. However, It can remediate data through integration with SAP Master Data Governance or SAP Data Services.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Audit trail management of Metadata to ensure due diligence with respect to the quality of data
• Control features and identification of risk wrt data
• Ready recknor in form of advance bi reports for procurement and costing kpi
• Flexible comparison and filter functio ality across cross organisation data

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• More real-time integration scenarios needed.
• Needs more generic standard content for metadata management.
• The user interface can be more intuitive based on AI.

Incentivized

Out of the box solution

Incentivized

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

It provides out of box solution for information management at organisation level

Incentivized

From the RightStart Program to the Customer Success team to technical support, Alation has it all covered. They respond quickly and expertly to answer my questions and fix my problems.

Incentivized

I believe many features from SAP Information Steward are available in other SAP products as well hence it is more confusing for business or customers to do the right selection. Moreover SAP strategy is not very clear for this particular product hence often we are confused while exploring more related scenarios

Incentivized

Ready recknoer tools that act as reference are missing that can help to formulate ;Decision Driven Framework' for various strategic decesions

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Both are great products and I highly recommend both

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Improvement on Organization Data Quality
• Real time Data Quality Issues discovery
• Data Policies effective management

Incentivized