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Alation

Alation

Overview

What is Alation?

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…

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Recent Reviews

Alation Data Catalog

10 out of 10
March 29, 2023
Incentivized
Our Data Catalog team has used Alation Data Catalog to create technical and business metadata for Snowflake data. Essentially, we are …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Product Demos

Self-Service Analytics Guide

app.getreprise.com
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Product Details

What is Alation?

Alation offers enterprise data intelligence solutions, including data search & discovery, data governance, data stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation. Alation operates in the 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.

The vendor states that more than 450 enterprises drive data culture, improve decision-making, and realize business outcomes with Alation, including AbbVie, American Family Insurance, Autozone, Cisco, Draft Kings, Exelon, Fifth Third Bank, Finnair, Munich Re, NASDAQ, Parexel, Pfizer, Salesforce, Virgin Australia, and Vistaprint.

Alation Screenshots

Screenshot of Search: Finds data with natural language or advanced search capabilities like tags, and asset typesScreenshot of Curate: Documents data with valuable context for everyone to better understand and trust dataScreenshot of Compose: Queries multiple databases and provides guided navigation with recommended data to use

Alation Videos

Building a data-driven culture with Alation.
Alation makes it easier to power data intelligence across hybrid cloud.

Alation Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac, CentOS, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Debian, SUSE Linux, Fedora, Amazon Linux
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported LanguagesEnglish

Frequently Asked Questions

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.

Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud, data.world, and Atlan are common alternatives for Alation.

The most common users of Alation are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(42)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-16 of 16)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Miriam Barberena | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Alation is pretty easy to implement. We were able to do it ourselves with Alation's help, no 3rd party needed. We are currently migrating to Snowflake, and it has been helpful with prioritizing what gets migrated. It's great for searching for tables and views. I even use it when I'm trying to find fields in a large table. If I'm not sure if the field is called first_name, firstname, or fname, I can use Alation's table page, filter for fields with "name", and easily find it.
March 29, 2023

Alation Data Catalog

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our business units goal was to have a data catalog used as a repository for data and definitions that are widely used within our organization. Alation has been perfect for making this goal come to life.
Allen Goldschmidt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Alation has a very intuitive UI that is great for content authors (i.e., Stewards) to write documentation for their data. It is easy to browse through and search for your data. It's easy to keep in sync with your data sources so you're always working on the latest version.

I would not recommend it for tracking lineage as that feature is immature and difficult to use.
Jamie Hughes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
A data catalog is a necessity for any business that has and uses data. Alation is a top competitor in the industry and has an consistently evolving roadmap. The only reason that I gave a 9 instead of a 10 is because I have not used any other catalog products to compare to Alation.
March 29, 2023

Alation Data Catalog

Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Alation is perfect for managing data ownership and stewardship, acting as the 'front door' or 'window' to data, glossary terms, domain homepages. It is great for consumers to find out about the update schedule on their current data sources or ones they will potentially use in future.

I'm less inclined to use the 'direct connection' via Alation to data sources, mainly for decoupling dependencies for any production supporting applications with Alation (if Alation goes down, we don't want it to take the connection down). But it is a great tool for putting the producers and consumers in touch with each other to arrange the connection.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
At an early stage:
  • Discovery of data is great
  • Notations work well
  • Implementation support gives a lot of confidence to the user group
However, support for legacy environments where SRSS and SSIS are used (a lot of public sector in NZ) could be stronger.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
More appropriate:
  • Startup governance programs
  • Less technical user base
  • High focus on curation abilities
  • vetting/approval workflows in business signoff
  • Non microsoft stack
Less Appropriate:
  • Complex governance structure
  • Advanced user base
  • Heavy reliance on ACTION based workflows
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We are still in the set up phase but the sheer ease-of-use has led to a pretty smooth implementation so far. We are receiving outstanding customer service from the Alation team and feel confident we will have a working, customized, robust implementation for our data. We would have like to see some data quality present inside the tool, we have had to find different solutions to help our teams with those checks.
Nicole Guaetta-Hoffmann, CDMP | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you want to get up and running for governance and cataloging with little learning curve for stewards and end users, Alation is a wonderful tool. People take to it like a duck to water because it is so intuitive.

If you want a full integrated, powerful lineage solution, Alation requires add on products and their partners are not the best choice for automated lineage without manual components for some highly used types of connections like SSIS.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Great tool for data catalog maintenance. Compose, articles, tags are great features. Custom templates and flexibility around homepage customization. Lineages could have been improved for the datasets which are database views and Alation could read the view definition to form lineage out of it, instead of having to wait users to write queries and then have Alation learn connections through those queries.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Where Alation Data Catalog is well suited:
1.Collecting metadata in one place with easy access to its.2. Providing possibility to find metadata by techical names as well as business description. It`s possible to search among all objects being on Advanced search page or to search certain schema/table/column being on respective objects` pages.
Where it is less appropriate: 1.There is a lineage functionality, but it shows lineage mostly for views within one data source. It`s impossible to see the lineage for any table viewer is interested in and the one way to do this - create lineage manually, what can do only Admins.

Joe Harrington | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It is a pricey investment but if you can find the budget for it I don’t feel like you will be disappointed. It is a great tool for data governance, meta data, lineage and overall collaboration with articles. Things just start to come together seamlessly and the connectivity is awesome.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Great as a data analytics and queries tool; pretty easy to use with a user-friendly interface. I would not recommend it for anyone with zero SQL or knowledge, or even without basic Microsoft Excel formula function knowledge. I would suggest taking some online SQL courses to build up your knowledge of data queries
September 26, 2020

Best data exploration tool

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Alation is best suited for data analysts and data scientists to understand the business using the metadata that it curates. It provides a platform for users to be able to run queries and share them with other users, which creates a collaborative environment. It is a single source of truth to learn more about the data you work with daily.
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