Data Preparation Tools

TrustRadius Top Rated for 2023

Top Rated Products

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1
Alteryx

Alteryx aims to be the launchpad for automation breakthroughs. Be it for personal growth, achieving transformative digital outcomes, or rapid innovation, Alteryx converges analytics, data science and process automation to enable users across organizations to make business-altering…

2
IBM Cognos Analytics

IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.…

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(1-25 of 96)

1
Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI is a visualization and data discovery tool from Microsoft. It allows users to convert data into visuals and graphics, visually explore and analyze data, collaborate on interactive dashboards and reports, and scale across their organization with built-in governance…

2
Alteryx

Alteryx aims to be the launchpad for automation breakthroughs. Be it for personal growth, achieving transformative digital outcomes, or rapid innovation, Alteryx converges analytics, data science and process automation to enable users across organizations to make business-altering…

3
IBM Cognos Analytics

IBM Cognos is a full-featured business intelligence suite by IBM, designed for larger deployments. It comprises Query Studio, Reporting Studio, Analysis Studio and Event Studio, and Cognos Administration along with tools for Microsoft Office integration, full-text search, and dashboards.…

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4
JMP Statistical Discovery Software from SAS

JMP is a division of SAS and the JMP family of products provide statistical discovery tools linked to dynamic data visualizations.

5
RapidMiner

RapidMiner is a data science and data mining platform, from Altair since the late 2022 acquisition. RapidMiner offers full automation for non-coding domain experts, an integrated JupyterLab environment for seasoned data scientists, and a visual drag-and-drop designer. RapidMiner’…

6
Talend Data Integration

The Talend Integration Suite, from Talend, is a set of tools for data integration.

7
Databricks Lakehouse Platform

Databricks in San Francisco offers the Databricks Lakehouse Platform (formerly the Unified Analytics Platform), a data science platform and Apache Spark cluster manager. The Databricks Unified Data Service aims to provide a reliable and scalable platform for data pipelines, data…

8
SAS Data Management

A suite of solutions for data connectivity, enhanced transformations and robust governance. Solutions provide a unified view of data with access to data across databases, data warehouses and data lakes. Connects with cloud platforms, on-premises systems and multicloud data sources.…

9
Toad Data Point

Toad Data Point is a cross-platform, self-service, data-integration tool that simplifies data access, preparation and provisioning. It provides data connectivity and desktop data integration, and with the Workbook interface for business users, it provides simple-to-use visual query…

10
Datameer

Datameer helps businesses clean up, combine, and organize data to make sense of it and use it for reports and machine learning.

11
dbt

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…

12
AWS Glue

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…

13
Tableau Prep

Tableau Prep enables users to get to the analysis phase faster by helping them quickly combine, shape, and clean their data. According to the vendor, a direct and visual experience helps provide users with a deeper understanding of their data, smart features make data preparation…

14
IBM SPSS Modeler

IBM SPSS Modeler is a visual data science and machine learning (ML) solution designed to help enterprises accelerate time to value by speeding up operational tasks for data scientists. Organizations can use it for data preparation and discovery, predictive analytics, model management…

15
IBM InfoSphere Information Server

IBM InfoSphere Information Server is a data integration platform used to understand, cleanse, monitor and transform data. The offerings provide massively parallel processing (MPP) capabilities.

16
Altair Monarch

Altair Monarch (formerly Datawatch Monarch, acquired by Altair in December, 2018) works with both relational and multi-structured data including support for a wide range of formats including PDF, XML, HTML, text, spool and ASCII files. The product can access data from invoices, sales…

17
Dataiku

Dataiku is a French startup and its product, DSS, is a challenger to market incumbents and features some visual tools to assist in building workflows.

18
Alteryx Designer Cloud

Trifacta is a "data wrangling" (or data preparation) platform particularly of use with Hadoop, developed by the company Trifacta headquartered in San Francisco, California. Alteryx announced their acquisition of Trifacta in January of 2022.

19
Composable DataOps Platform

Composable Analytics is a business intelligence solution that provides both cloud-based services and on-premise solutions. Some key features include data flow-based applications, data process automation and application reusability.

20
Datastreamer

Datastreamer is turnkey data platform to source, unify, and enrich unstructured data with less work than building data pipelines in-house. Traditional ETL processes and pipelines might not meet the needs of organizations who want to implement unstructured and semi-structured sources…

21
Explorium

Explorium, headquartered in San Mateo, provides an External Data Platform that automatically discovers thousands of relevant data signals and uses them to improve analytics and machine learning. The automated Explorium Platform enables organizations to discover and use third party…

22
Keboola Connection

Keboola provides an open and extensible cloud based data integration platform that enables clients to combine, enhance and publish data for their internal analytics projects and data products. Keboola aims to help companies of all sizes: Reduce time to launch for analytics projectsEnable…

24
Datazoom

Datazoom, headquartered in New York, is an enterprise Video Data Platform technology company that standardizes and enriches data for video teams and their technology partners. Through a variety of real-time data collection software and routing services, the Datazoom’s platform offers…

25
Informatica Data Prep

A solution to speed up analytics and data science projects with an automated, simplified data preparation tool.

Data Preparation Tools TrustMap

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Learn More About Data Preparation Tools

What are Data Preparation Tools?

Data preparation tools are a new class of software products designed to enable business analysts and data scientists to bypass data warehouses to perform some data integration and data preparation themselves before analysis. Data preparation tools handle as much of the data “cleaning” process as possible. Data prep features are often found within larger tools, such as data analytics platforms, BI tools, integration platforms, and broader machine learning platforms.


Data preparation tools can search for and access data throughout an organization, combine it with other external data sets, and do data cleansing and conversions as required before feeding the data back into business intelligence systems for analysis.These emerging tools use machine learning under the hood so that they can iterate and learn where to find insights in data sets, without being explicitly programmed to do so.


Self-service Data Preparation

A big role of data preparation tools is to get data into an analysis-ready state for end users with minimal, or no, data science knowledge. Historically, data preparation has required IT or data science resources for any sort of scaled preparation. Data preparation tools aim to democratize this process by making data preparation accessible for a wider range of users, from IT specialists to data analysts to line-of-business users.


Data preparation tools use several different features and capabilities to enable business-wide self-service. The most important features that virtually all modern data preparation tools include are:


  • Visual interfaces

  • Integration with all sources of data within the business

  • Machine learning for automated insights and recommended preparation steps

  • Data governance for repeatability and tracking



Data Preparation Tools Comparison

Data preparation tools can be challenging to compare. When evaluating different options, consider these factors:


  • Visual Interface: Visual interfaces have become the norm for data preparation tools. Buyers should try to work with each interface to get a better sense of how easy to use each one is, especially for the sophistication level of the expected user base (i.e. data scientists vs. non-specialized users). The quality and usability of interfaces are also often a point of note within data preparation reviews.

  • Tech Stack Integrations: How well does each tool integrate with the existing data sources the organization has? Data prep tools should make data accessibility easy for end-users, but if the tool does not cleanly interface with each data source, users will continue to struggle to centralize data for cleaning, and may even resort to manual processes.

  • Machine learning capabilities: Most data preparation tools advertise some element of machine learning or AI assistance. However, not all smart tech is created equal. Followup with each vendor on just what this technology can do for users, especially assisting less data-savvy users working within the data preparation tool.


Start a data preparation tool comparison here.


Pricing Information

Pricing will vary primarily depending on whether the product is a standalone data prep tool or a larger integration or analytics solution. Leaders in the space will charge between $100-450/user/month. There are some free open source options as well.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What do data preparation tools do?

Data preparation tools help streamline and automate the process of extracting, compiling, and “cleaning” data so it can be easily analyzed and reported on.

Who uses data preparation tools?

Data preparation tools are primarily used by data analysts and similar roles, but many tools are becoming more accessible for line-of-business users as well.

What other tools have data preparation features?

Data preparation can also be found in many analytics platforms, BI tools, and integration platforms.

What are the benefits of data preparation tools?

Data preparation tools can save analysts massive amounts of manual time and labor and also mitigate the risk of human error in the preparation process.

How much do data preparation tools cost?

Leading data preparation tools can range from $100-500/month per seat, depending on the number of users and range of features included.