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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

(1-2 of 2)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Allen Goldschmidt | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Our leadership once said "Uncataloged data is useless to us." We use Alation to catalog our data, track lineage, and explain our business.
  • Entering and editing content. The UI is easy to use and understand.
  • Browsing and searching for content is intuitive and detailed.
  • Adding data sources is easy to do through the UI without having to fiddle with configuration files.
  • 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.
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.
  • Data documentation and editing of content
  • Finding data documentation via searching and browsing
  • Accessing Alation's content via API
  • Alation has allowed us to quickly document our data with minimal training of existing subject matter experts
  • We've been able to use Alation's APIs to access our data documentation without having to build a custom data dictionary
Alation is much easier to use than Ataccama ONE. Specific technical training and skills are necessary to use Ataccama whereas Alation is easy to use right out of the box.
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.
I'm not sure
Yes
Yes
I had an Alation production server go down after patching and Alation support jumped into action and helped me get the server back up quickly.
September 26, 2020

Best data exploration tool

Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
We use Alation as a data discovery tool at our company. It's highly used as a query running tool as well. It's been used across EDW systems and helps in identifying the metadata about data. It is ensuring a single source of truth and you can find all the information in one place.
  • Query builder
  • Entity relationship
  • Metadata
  • Conversations
  • Data flow
  • Impact analysis
  • User experience
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.
  • Single source of truth
  • One application to all queries about metadata
  • Query platform
Apache atlas, LinkedIn Datahub, Lyft Amundsen are some of the open-source tools we've explored before using Alation. Alation is way advanced over these tools and it has AI capabilities to help you write queries in an automated fashion. and learn more about the data in an easy way. It's very helpful in the data world.
You get great support from Alation right from setting up the system to using them.
It's a great tool in terms of user experience.
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