Data Preparation Tools
Top Rated Data Preparation Products
These products won a Top Rated award for having excellent customer satisfaction ratings. The list is based purely on reviews; there is no paid placement, and analyst opinions do not influence the rankings. Read more about the Top Rated criteria.
Data Preparation Products
(1-25 of 71) Sorted by Most Reviews
The list of products below is based purely on reviews (sorted from most to least). There is no paid placement and analyst opinions do not influence their rankings. Here is our Promise to Buyers to ensure information on our site is reliable, useful, and worthy of your trust.
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…
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…
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.…
JMP is a division of SAS and the JMP family of products provide statistical discovery tools linked to dynamic data visualizations.
The Talend Integration Suite, from Talend, is a set of tools for data integration.
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’…
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…
Datameer helps businesses clean up, combine, and organize data to make sense of it and use it for reports and machine learning.
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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.
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…
Pecan is an automated AI-based predictive analytics platform that simplifies and speeds the process of building and deploying predictive models in various customer-related and operational use-cases, such as LTV, churn, NBO, risk, and segmentation. Pecan does not require any data…
Upsolver is an In-Memory Data Preparation Platform that aims to remove the complexity from Big Data and Real-Time projects, and shorten their implementation time from weeks/months to several hours. Powered by a cutting edge VolcanoTM technology, it queries an entire data lake in…
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…
Qlik Catalog (formerly Qlik Data Catalyst) builds a secure, enterprise-scale catalog of all the data in an organization available for analytics users as a service across lakes, warehouses, transactional systems, and file systems. It is able to recognize, profile, tag, and secure…
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…
A solution to speed up analytics and data science projects with an automated, simplified data preparation tool.
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…
Data Preparation Tools TrustMap
TrustMaps are two-dimensional charts that compare products based on trScore and research frequency by prospective buyers. Products must have 10 or more ratings to appear on this TrustMap.
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.