Collibra Governance Reviews

We use it for metadata management, data lineage, and automated governance processes. I am working on the SaaS deployment, but I have also worked on the on-premise deployment. I am currently using its latest version.

We get to see the end-to-end data life cycle or the data flow in our organization. In my previous project, I implemented the Collibra Governance solution. We got the metadata right from the landing layer, and then throughout the intermediate layer, that is, the staging layer, the application layer, and the data warehouse layer. We then connected all the metadata together. So, in one single go, you can see how your data is landing, how it is getting transformed while it is moving throughout, and who is consuming this data through the reports, and in which report it is getting used. You can see the entire snapshot in one single click, which is a great feature for an organization.

The end-to-end solution itself is great. The most valuable is the workload feature that Collibra offers. There is a vast amount of flexibility in terms of how much we can customize. It gives us a lot of options to implement for a lot of purposes.

One problem is the data lineage, especially extracting the ETL transformation from different ETL tools and identifying how the data is getting changed from one layer to different layers and how the transformation is applied. It doesn't support all the ETL tools for extracting the transformation logic. It supports some of the tools, but there are still some tools that need to be supported. 

There is also a small pain point in terms of integration. There is a little bit of change in their strategy from Collibra's end. Earlier, they used to offer two solutions. One was out of the box, and one was a custom-built solution for which they used to provide a dual connector. Now the focus from the Collibra side is more on using the out of the box connector. They are discouraging doing the custom integration. That leaves us with two problems. The first problem is that the out-of-the-box connecter is not yet enabled for a lot of systems, and the second problem is that the out-of-the-box connecter has certain limitations. If we want to tweak those as per our needs, it is not possible. However, the custom-built is still supported, and you can still build a custom integration by using the API, but it is not very encouraged by Collibra.

Its dashboard also needs to be improved. There are options to use the HTML code to customize your dashboard, but it has a lot of limitations.

I have been using it for two and a half years.

It is a stable product. In the past, whenever a new version was introduced, there were a few issues, and a few things didn't work, but Collibra has improved the quality now. In the last couple of upgrades, I have not seen such an issue.

It supports the entire enterprise's data governance, which means that you can have a vast amount of metadata and bring metadata from any system. That could mean millions of tables and columns. I haven't seen its performance deteriorate too much. It is just that when you are trying to integrate with a new system and you are also trying to profile the data, it can give some challenges with a huge data set.

It is used very heavily in my latest project. The customer has a lot of expectations. They are trying to replace the existing system and want to completely move to Collibra Governance. So, it is being used pretty extensively, and they will add more and more to it.

I would rate their technical support as medium. I have had several interactions with Collibra. The response is usually within eight hours. You may or may not get a good answer in the first go. You may have to do a follow-up, again explain the question, and then they get back.

I have some experience with Informatica EDC and Axon, which together provide a data governance solution. The main difference is that Informatica has separated the business and technical aspects of data governance. EDC or Enterprise Data Catalog handles the data catalogs, integration, and harvesting the metadata, and Axon focuses on the business aspect of data governance, such as data lineage, data quality, and workflows. Collibra has everything in one solution. As far as integrations are concerned, Informatica has the edge over Collibra. It provides more connectors and more flexibility for building custom solutions.

If you are using the SaaS version, it is very straightforward. Otherwise, it could have complications. You won't realize those complications in the beginning because the product really starts running. However, when you start bringing the metadata from different sources, you will realize that there are some configuration changes that you need to make. Maybe the connectivity is not happening, and some firewalls need to be opened. Collibra is no longer providing the on-premise option for new customers. They are asking everyone to go for the cloud version.

In terms of deployment duration, if you are using a SaaS version, it hardly takes a day to get your product up and running. Implementing the use cases is an ongoing process. It typically takes six months to a year for implementing the high priority use cases.

It does not generally require a lot of people for deployment, but it also depends on the use cases. Generally, two to four people are enough. In terms of the team, we have a Collibra workflow developer, metamodel developer, Collibra architect, and integration developer. They all handle different aspects of the work.

In terms of maintenance, it does require maintenance, and you have to keep updating it. Most of the stuff is done automatically for you, but you still need to verify your custom code to check if anything is broken.

I have worked with two or three implementations. Even though my current client has a lot of expectations from Collibra, they have not realized the full ROI. They are still exploring it and have not yet reached that stage where they can make a decision. One of my earlier customers was pretty happy and satisfied with this solution, and they did realize the ROI.

I think it is on a yearly basis, but I'm not involved with the pricing session, so I have no idea. There are several licenses for different models. You get one license per product, but a lot of features are controlled separately through different licenses. So, as and when you want to use a feature, you have to procure the license for that feature.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but I would say that before starting the implementation, just understand what the product is, what it can do, and what it cannot do. Don't focus too much on the technical aspects of the product. Data governance should be used from the business point of view.

Data governance was a new concept for me. By using this product, I got to know a lot of different aspects of data governance, and how should you go about implementing it. One main lesson that I have learned from using this solution is that don't just focus on bringing the metadata from the whole system and dumping it into the tool. It will become unreadable for other users. You will end up with too much data that no one is using. It is better to start small.

I would rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten. There are two main bottlenecks for my use cases that can cause trouble for me. It needs better data lineage functionality for extracting the transformations. It also needs better integration. I would like to see more connectors and more flexibility in terms of integrating it with different systems. 

Our clients are typically using it for metadata management. From a broader perspective, Collibra establishes an excellent foundation on which to build an enterprise data governance program. 

The most valuable aspect of the solution is its collaboration platform, which includes the workflows, the data lineage, and some of the communities. The ability to collaborate and approve business terms for the business glossary data dictionary is excellent.

The breadth of available connectors for metadata ingestion need to grow quickly to support customers as they expand their data governance programs to include a diverse list of source systems from which they want to derive business value. The connectors are needed  to bring metadata into Collibra and enable lineage, workflows, definitions, etc.  That said, this is not just a Collibra problem - this is an everybody problem. The central challenge is the availability of APIs to ingest text structural metadata, which is a common problem across any data governance platform or even any integration platform, honestly.

To be fair, I would say that Collibra's purpose and primary value is as a collaboration platform, which is the core value of business-centric data governance, and not as an integration platform.  For this purpose, they are clearly the leading solution.

We've been using the solution for six or seven years. We've used it longer than almost anybody.

The stability is very good. It's not buggy and it doesn't have glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

It's really scalable, it's really solid. If an organization needs to expand their solution, they should be able to do so easily.

We've reached out to technical support rather frequently. That said, it depends on the topic. I would say that their tech support is excellent, but it is not necessarily an overly large team because they are still a growing company.

They have some really good, smart people, however, they don't have a team of experts for each target subject area.  They don't have a team of 20 people for each application component that can just go, "Oh, yeah. We set an appointment tomorrow!" You might have to wait a few days for the right person.  Having said that, their focus on making detailed self-driven education and training available online enables clients easily to investigate application areas.

The way we view data governance is this: it has to be led by the business. It has to be business-facing. Although there's a number of applications that might have a data catalog, for instance, like Alation, Informatica or Talend, we're vendor-neutral. If we find something better, we'll switch. We're open about that.

With Collibra, their strength is that they were the only data governance platform built specifically to address data governance as it was being formed as a discipline. Virtually every other solution in the marketplace is built as some sort of data management application aimed at IT, and has either morphed from an ETL or something else into that. Alation morphed from a code scanning application into data governance solution (data catalog) for instance. 

Collibra also took a business-centric approach. Their application is the only one that you could throw a business person in front of, and they would understand it intuitively, they'd say, "Oh, okay. So this is where I approve items. This is where I request them. This is where I see things. This is a dashboard that I can look at our progress." You're not going to get a sales VP going into Collibra, but if a sales VP went into Collibra, they would understand it. That's another reason why this has been the data governance solution we have recommended to clients, and still do.

The setup is not complex. It is straightforward. Collibra's very good at doing setups very quickly, so we typically leave this to them. They sell a cloud installation. Essentially, they formerly were both on-prem and cloud, however, now they're focused only on a cloud delivery model based on customer demand.  Thankfully, it is extremely straightforward, as this is the box we need to check prior to helping clients move forward on their data governance program.

The costs vary. I don't have details on the exact pricing of the solution as we do not resell it even though we recommend it.  This enables us to maintain our neutrality as a client advisor.

Their licensing model focuses primarily on the advanced technical users to help to establish the data governance foundation and manage and maintain it as more and more business groups are brought on board.  What I like about their licensing model is that they try to remove barriers to adoption by making it very inexpensive to add "data citizens" across the organization, i.e.  normal, "lite" users who are using, but not developing, connectors, workflows, communities, etc.

In that sense, the marketplace perhaps is not aware of the beneficial TCO of Collibra's license structure, because it causes them to focus on the initial cost of the heavy advanced users, while not realizing that they will be able to bring the overall corporate community onboard at a relatively minimal cost. Therefore, their pricing can appear high per user, however, in fact, for a community or population of data governance users, it's, not actually that high, it's just front-end loaded to establish the technical foundation and basis for the data governance program.

We are experts on implementing business-centric data governance programs, as that is the only model for success.  As such, we are implementation partners with Collibra, and in fact are one of, if not the, longest-standing Collibra partners globally.

The advice I'd give to other potential users would be the same I'd give to people implementing any sort of governance. I would first advise clients to have your data governance business cases ready in advance, or at least start by identifying potential business outcomes that can be delivered through clear and documented access to data. From there, they can target the relevant source systems needed to delivere on these business cases.

From a technical perspective, there are different approaches to ingest structural metadata, i.e.  tools and connectors that are available to assist with this.  While Collibra is hands-down the best data governance collaboration platform, clients should review the different options to ingest metadata based on the targeted source systems.  Of course, Collibra's catalog is the first option that should be considered, but available connectors need to be reviewed.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd give it a nine. based on its excellence as a data governance business collaboration platform.  From the perspective of metadata ingestion,  I'd probably give it a seven - I like their current roadmap and designated approach, but connectors are a work in progress, as they are for everyone.

In my company, we use Collibra Governance for data catalog.

Pricing policy of the product is an area with certain shortcomings that needs improvement. I would like to see better pricing in future releases of the product. Collibra Governance needs to develop some new technology, like Atlan, that has been incorporating AI in the automation area of its products.

I have been using Collibra Governance for five years. I have ensured that one of my company's customers uses the solution's latest version. My company has a partnership with Collibra.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Around 30 people in my organization use the solution.

The solution's technical support is helpful and responsive. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

I have probably worked with most of the products in the market related to data governance and data catalog, including products like Informatica Axon. I still do work with Informatica Axon at times.

The product's deployment phase was straightforward.

The solution is deployed on an AWS Cloud, which is a private cloud.

The deployment process is carried out by Collibra Governance's technical team.

There is definitely a return on investment from using the product, especially if you associate it with a data catalog tool. The return on investments is in terms of optimizing the process of development, data quality improvement, and having a single repository source of information for the metadata of the entire organization.

I don't know the licensing costs of the product since it is a SaaS solution.

I rate the pricing a three on a scale of one to ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap.

The maintenance is something that is carried out automatically by Collibra Governance.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

Collibra Governance is mainly used as a one-stop solution for data discovery.

Using Collibra Governance means that we know the end to the life cycle of data across the team, which provides our data science and analytics team with sample data they can use to make decisions on what to do next.

Collibra Governance's most valuable features are data lineage and stewardships.

There are a lot of gaps in Collibra's support and documentation. In the next release, I would like Collibra Governance to include better integration with data ecosystem tools.

I've been using Collibra Governance for approximately a year.

Collibra Governance is stable with limited data sizes, but with bigger data sizes, you need to invest a lot in the job servers, which becomes a very costly operation.

Collibra Governance isn't that scalable.

It's very difficult to get support from Collibra.

Neutral

Previously, we used Apache Atlas and switched because it had very limited features.

The initial setup was very difficult - if you're looking at a high-availability or a production scale setup, you need to be technically sound. I would rate the ease of the setup process as two out of five. Deployment took around six months.

We used an in-house team.

Collibra Governance helps our organization, but getting a GMV or dollar value out of it is tough. I would rate its ROI as two or three out of five.

Collibra Governance is expensive - I would rate its pricing as one out of five. There are also additional costs for everything except the basic setup.

We evaluated Alation and OvalEdge.

Before implementing Collibra Governance, go through the tool very thoroughly because doing a POC or MVP is fine, but when you're looking at a production-scale deployment, it's very complicated. So explore other tools before jumping in with Collibra. I would rate Collibra Governance as six out of ten.

The most important feature in Collibra Governance is the ability to gather data or a collection of data into one repository. If a client creates a repository at his place, then it will get updated to the cloud automatically.

It's easy to operate and understand.

Also, you can have different views for business people and for technical people, and there are some helpful customizations in it as well.

Collibra is not very user-friendly in terms of lineage generation. The lineage generation process is quite tough, and it takes lots of time to understand it.

Business staff are also struggling to generate lineages and to understand them. So, it is not very user-friendly.

They need to improve support. They have so many features, but nobody is much of an expert in the market at present. If they have easy, friendly support, it will help improve the product and help understand their own product.

I worked on a project related to this solution for six months.

It is quite a stable solution.

It is quite scalable. I think in the past, they had an in-house, on-premises version, but now they have come up with a cloud version, so it's quite scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward. Collibra helped with that process, but we found it to be straightforward and not complicated.

For functional users, one or two persons are adequate for deployment and maintenance. For preparation, four to five persons should be enough for the overall job. Two people will be needed for hands on work, and two consultants who can guide the people and resolve queries will be needed as well. You will also need a project manager who can monitor everything and assign tasks etc. A total of  five or six people is more than enough.

Collibra helped with the deployment, and we shadowed them during the setup and upgrading processes.

I would rate Collibra Governance at seven  on a scale from one to ten.

Collibra Governance is a stable solution.

The solution's data lineage is a little difficult and will not support all the source systems on the database.

I have been working with Collibra Governance since last year.

Collibra Governance is a scalable solution.

Collibra Governance's documentation is clear. We can get all the documents from Collibra University.

Collibra Governance's initial setup is complex.

It takes more than 15 to 20 days to deploy Collibra Governance.

Collibra Governance is an expensive solution.

Collibra Governance is a good tool that has some pros and cons.

Overall, I rate Collibra Governance a seven out of ten.

We use the solution to organize data. The IT team has access to the data and knows where it is stored, but when it comes to legal compliances and various regulations, the business itself does not have control over where the data is stored and how it is stored. Typically, the business wants to have control over where the data is stored, the various data classifications, and data sensitivity. That is the main reason why we use Collibra Governance.

I appreciate the range of features it has. Based on the reviews of some of the other tools we use, we find that the other tools lack in certain areas. If I had to choose a comprehensive tool across all the fields of data governance, I would opt for Collibra Governance.

The most valuable feature is the Technical Lineage. The fact that you can trace the auditability of a particular field or attribute across various systems is very useful.

There are a few things that need improvement. From a usability perspective, customers usually find some areas of the solution a bit complex. It takes a long time for the customers to get used to the UI and the interface. Another thing that the customers complain about when they opt for Collibra is the pricing. There are fees for additional features which mess with the customers' overall budgets.

I've been using Collibra Governance for about two and a half years.

It is a very stable solution. I would give it a nine out of ten. It works very well compared to other solutions on the market.

The scalability of the solution is good. I give it an eight out of ten.

The response time of technical support is typically high.

Neutral

Nowadays, most customers are looking into Microsoft Stack, so we use Microsoft Purview as well, although Calibra Governance is our preferred choice since it's much more stable than Purview.

Up until now, Collibra Governance has been the market leader and is always the first one to add new features. Purview tries to bring out a lot of features as fast as possible, but those features are not very stable and have a lot of bugs. Purview has the upper hand when it comes to the usability of the app system. It is easier for customers to understand the feature list while using Purview. For example, after using both solutions for a few weeks, they usually have a better grasp of Purview than Callibra Governance.

Since it is a SaaS platform in a way, the solution is deployed on Collibra cloud. The deployment is pretty straightforward since Collibra deploys it on its own. It takes about a week to get the core of the system up and running. After, we configure it to fit the specific needs.

On a scale from one to ten, the simplicity of the setup would be an eight.

Collibra Governance's pricing is based on its features. You get what you pay for. There are other solutions that are cost-effective but lower quality. With Collibra, you get a fair-value product if you pay a bit more.

I would not recommend using the Big Bang approach with Collibra Governance. You should understand the bigger picture of what you want to do. Start off with a few systems and four small modules. Get feedback from the business and then continuously evolve it. It is better to have the implementation spread out over a one-year period than have it crammed down within three to six months while trying to implement everything at once.

I would say that Collibra Governance is suitable for small to medium businesses. 

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

There is a master glossary which includes all of our business fields. The fields are related to particular lines of business such as account numbers. We then build business rules around these fields and complete data integrity checks. 

We plan to increase our usage of this solution over time. We will have to use other functionality within this application as it is currently limited. We currently have 12 team members using this solution. 

This solution is user friendly and offers multiple functionalities. It operates like a kind of a repository that allows you to find anything about a particular data set or field.

This solution could be improved with the the addition of process diagrams to help the many users of the platform understand all the fields.

We have used this solution for six months. 

This is a stable solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward. It was made easier due to the access we had to the Collibra team. The deployment took three months and involved three to four people.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.