Collibra Governance Reviews

We use Collibra for IT data governance, specifically for GDPR compliance. Our company is in the banking and financial institution sector and we are customers of Collibra. 

In general, this is a valuable solution for us. Collibra provides a good view of where my data is, the type of data we have across the landscape, how it's getting utilized, the quality in terms of correct calibration, and whether the integrity is uniform across the landscape. Everything is in sync and Collibra is a central repository that provides a good snapshot of understanding along with holding the integrity, confidentiality, and security of our data. 

Data discovery would be the major area that requires improvement across the landscape and I'd also like to see data redundancies. Those are the two areas where improvements could be made. A lot of countries have laws that don't allow most of the data to flow into the cloud. That issue needs to be addressed when it comes to personal data protection laws. Collibra needs to take into consideration the local laws and the concerns of those countries.

 I've been using this solution for well over two years. 

The main technical support is from Collibra which has local partners. It's not a critical application that requires 24/7 support so they're available five days a week during work hours. 

In terms of the tool, the initial set up is not a problem, but there can be many legacy factors in any organization that can affect deployment.  Implementation needs to be understood so that the tool can be aligned to the IT setup of the organization. In that sense, implementation is always a challenge. 

We deployed in-house in consultation with Collibra, and implementation took about eight months. We have about 80 users throughout our organization including CTOs, CIO,s and the board which have become more sensitive to data protection over the years. 

There are other companies with solutions in this field; IBM, Informatica and they provide a lot of competition. I believe Collibra has a good standard and is an early bird in this area, I believe they'll keep that lead as they move forward in line with this constantly evolving field. 

It's important to have a clear understanding of your IT landscape and its features and whether they really match up with the roadmap of governance in terms of compliance. Those issues need to be assessed before choosing a solution. 

This is a cost-effective product and to my mind has all the ingredients to satisfy compliance requirements as well as ease of implementation. I recommend this solution and rate it eight out of 10. 

We use the solution mostly for a client. There are a port catalog and dashboard cataloging features that they use. That said, the principal use case, even though there are a number of use cases, is using it as a business glossary for terms throughout the institution.

We're saving a ton of time. There are complex terms like year to date, et cetera, and defining what university means or what college means, and the validations between certain aspects of the organization allow us to have a single source of truth for agreements on that information pulling from whatever status system. It's basically eliminating any data systems that might have been used previously and eliminating any last-minute scramble or days of back and forth questioning from stakeholders to other analysts, trying to figure out what the single source of truth is. This product creates a central repository for terms in their metadata and provides a platform for further changes and approvals for that.

It's incredibly easy to use. As far as the user-friendly aspect is concerned, it's good. The search function within Collibra for desktop is pretty cool with many hotkeys, and especially for having to build a business glossary, if somebody's confused about a term, they can use the hotkey to pull it up on Collibra for desktop, wherever they are.

With the application installed, you don't necessarily have to go to Collibra to utilize it. 

I do like the workflow customization feature as we're able to customize workflows that give ownership to the stewardship organization rather than have to rely on out-of-the-box workflows. You make it an IT function. The IT department can set it up and then put it in the hand of the stewardship organization through customization and a feedback loop, with the stewards able to make it do what they need.

The tried and true features and functions are solid. These features develop in a very good direction as new releases come through.

The stability is good.

The scalability is there if a company would like to expand. 

There are still some new features being released and unveiled such as the certification workflows or questionnaires for dashboard certification, and stuff like that, that will improve a lot as releases go on. There are just minor things here and there that can change. 

Every time you change or publish a new questionnaire for certification, you have to basically go into the code and update the new version of the questionnaire. Just little things here and there like that will, as features improve, be improved as well. 

Much like other tools, some things can be a little bit immature sometimes.

I'm a little bit limited in some of the features that we have available. It can be a little bit clunky or require extra Windows that aren't necessarily needed. It can get a little bit over-complicated here. It would be nice to have some of the workflow functionalities a bit more usable. There could be more advanced customizations and more added features.

I've used the solution for about six months at this point. 

In general, the stability has been good. there have been no hiccups or issues of any kind. It seems to be reliable. 

The solution seems to be very scalable, from what I have witnessed so far. if a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

It's my understanding that we have around 200 users on the solution right now. We have several admin users and 200 business users. I'm not sure of the exact size. It may even be more than that at this point. 

It's a solution we're actively using. I'd say we are using it a moderate amount. 

I haven't personally been in touch with technical support. I know my team has, however, I have not heard any feedback. I can't speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

I wasn't a part of the initial setup process. I can't speak to how simple or complex the process was in terms of implementation.

As I was not a part of the implementation process, I'm not sure if an integrator or consultant was used to assist in the setup process. 

We're partners. 

We're using the most recent version of the solution at this time. What I've been doing is product management on developing features and workflows for the customers or for the stakeholders.

The insight I would have for others considering the solution would be that it's a blank canvas. What makes it effective is understanding the use cases very well with the customer and designing the product to appropriately fill that need. The better you can understand the use case, the better that you can design it in a user-friendly fashion and get feedback from the stakeholders and get by in and organizational and ownership of the data that are you using, the more success you're going to have.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I'm satisfied with what we've done so far. And I'm looking forward to working with the solution in the future.

We are using the product mainly for metadata management as well as some data governance practices such as roles and responsibilities set up. We're also using different workflows - mainly approval workflows or request access workflows where people can actually request access to data. We have use cases based on different teams, based on what they need. It's mainly the glossaries, such as business glossaries, data dictionaries, and report catalogs.

The product is becoming the source of truth for the different business terms, acronyms, measures, etc. At least, this is the goal. Also, I would say the report catalog where the people can go and see what reports there are and can request access to the data if they need to is great. 

The data lineage from the source up to the reporting tools has been very helpful. It's also been very beneficial to be able to run some impact analysis. The visualization property can visualize the overall picture to see how the different assets are connected. This is also very beneficial to our organization. Of course, then there's the social aspect. You can command or you can use different workflows. 

Basically, it's helped our organization in a myriad of ways.

You can tailor the solution to your needs. You can really create different office drives and different attributes or relations that you can customize for your needs, which is a great thing. 

The diagrams are really great due to the fact that there are validations. The search capabilities and the different filters are all great aspects.

It's a user-friendly tool, even for non-technical people. That was one of the reasons why we chose it. It has very good social adoption. There isn't much training needed.

The solution needs to be controlled. It can go sometimes out of hand.

The speed sometimes, especially now, since we have moved to the Collibra Cloud, has not been the best. The management of the speed of the tool is not that great. It's also partially impacted by the fact that we need to use a VPN and we have got a lot of security measures. Sometimes it's not working well together with everything else. That is the main pain point that we are having.

Occasionally we get little bugs that occur, however, this is typical.

We would like to have a data lineage feature. It's just like on a different module. That's already available, as well as some advanced connectors. 

From my perspective, I would like to see improvement in the dashboard creation, to make it easier to create a really nice dashboard, and to also be able to play with the user interface when it comes to those dashboards. 

We haven't used the solution much, however, we have used it within the last 18 months or so.

We do occasionally have bugs in the system.

Now, after we have moved to the Collibra Cloud, we have to do some re-indexing and some restarting. We are at the stage where we are getting to something of a normal state. Sometimes there are some issues, however, we hope that it's just temporary.

We need to scale it more and more, however, that's why also be moved to the cloud. We believe that it will be better in terms of scalability.

There are two types of users and two types of licensing. One group is able to alter the information. Then there are users that can see the content. We have about 500-600 people who have accessed the solution in the past three months.

I am not the one who actually deals with the support, however, I know that some people are dealing with them quite a lot. My understanding is that the quality of technical support depends on if you really emphasize the importance of the issue. Then they react quite well. You really have to make sure that you've set up the importance, the criticality, of that issue properly.

Previously, we had a tool called Samantha, which is quite a local product. It was purchased by Alteryx.

If I compare Samantha and Collibra, they are actually two different worlds. We are quite independent with Collibra and therefore, we can basically really create any kind of item by ourselves rather than using the other tool, Samantha. We were relying too heavily on developers previously. It wasn't ideal.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. I wasn't the one who was taking care of it from a technical point of view, however, if I remember correctly, my colleagues didn't have any problems with it. When it comes to the user interface and how to work everything, it was really straightforward. 

A great advantage is that Collibra has got Collibra University where you have a lot of materials and videos, and tutorials as to how to use Collibra. We also have the Collibra community and documentation where you can search for information. This is really great asset for us.

Now that we are on the cloud, maintenance in terms of updates, etc. will be handled by Collibra. We are developing our own connectors as well, and we'll need occasional maintenance for that.

We haven't specifically tried to measure any ROI. It's not something that I can accurately answer.

You pay for a one year license for the whole Collibra. Then, you have some modules which are paid separately, such as the data lineage or the privacy and security module and others or insights, so that you can access some metrics. Licensing is also based on what you pay for each alter-license. It means that, if you want someone to actually create content in Collibra, you need to have an alter license, which is quite costly.

The way it's done, it ensures that the people who actually use the solution are trained and they can correctly control the content, and how it's created and how it's governed, as opposed to having a free-for-all. It is a good model. That said, it can be costly.

We're just a customer.

We fought pretty hard to have Collibra as opposed to Axon from Informatica. For us, getting Collibra was crucial, and we're really enjoying working with it.

I'd advise people to start small and try to implement small pieces in a POC so you can gauge how it will work on a larger scale. It's important to really have a look at various use cases as well.

You really want to work to sell it to the final users so that it will have a heavier adoption rate.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

The main use case for our organization was to collect and collate information for our business users, such as definitions, business rules, etc. 

The customers' names were stored in a data warehouse on Oracle, and with this product, you could insert information related to the customer. You could use Excel, for example, to add in data. You'd have all the information you collected from other places on one tool that users could navigate across to see all of the information.

One of the projects that we had with a client, was to collect and add all the information related to the HR functions. We collected technical information and data quality checks and so on. We inserted this information into Collibra. Once we did that, the user could enter in and read the collected information. That way, they didn't have to go to IT to pull queries for them. They were empowered to do it themselves. This solution basically reduced the search time. They no longer had to go to IT to open a ticket, or to go to an external supplier to recreate some already captured information.

The solution is very user-friendly, especially in comparison to other tools. 

Even a business user, which no technical competencies can manage this product rather easily. 

There are great workflows and other features that really simplify various aspects of the product.

The log information is easy to navigate.

The customization and the dashboards are pretty good.

Collibra, as far as I know, does not have a connector like Oracle, or a mainframe. It's important to have a connector so that you have access to up-to-date information. Sometimes the data can be out-of-date as the updates are not automatic. Users could be looking at obsolete information.

You need to be precise about the names of the field and you have to develop them yourself.

It's my understanding that they are working on a solution where you can import all the information that you need from a data validation too, or from a CRM. It's something they really need to get better at.

It would be better if there was a way to import all data and metadata in an automatic way in one block form.

I used the solution for one year.

The stability was very good. We never struggled with any downtime at all.

I'm not sure if the solution is scalable. I never really tested it. We only really handled a few areas of the data log analysis. For three functional areas it seemed to be pretty good, however, I couldn't say for sure if that would be the case if there was six or ten functional areas.

I've been in touch with technical support in the past and I found them to be quite helpful and knowledgeable. I've been satisfied with the assistance I've received.

I previously used Informatica as a data governance solution.

Informatica is better from a technical point of view. For example, in Informatica, you can buy these connectors which are very complete. You can import a lot of information from tables, names, matrices, and so on, from, for example, Data Visualization Tool, from Qlik, Tableau, from everything. You do not have to write code either in order to develop an API or to upgrade connectors by yourself. In Collibra, there are connectors, however, you have to upgrade them, if you, for example, need more information, more metadata, and so on. It's just not as easy. Informatica is more mature from a technical point of view. You get a complete data lineage and can see the data life cycle of all of your metadata.

The initial setup was not so complex. It was pretty straightforward. Collibra has, for example, workflows and other features that help you to import information. It's all very simple to understand and to use. You sort-of knew what to do from the outset and setting everything up was pretty easy as you just followed along.

The deployment doesn't take long. It's a matter of days or maybe weeks. It certainly doesn't take months.

I started the initial phase with the development of all the information. We got the metadata that we needed from the business user. Then we added the information to the data model. The data model related to Collibra was done by the Collibra administrator. We added this information to the data model. After that, we deployed everything by exporting metadata that we inserted into an Excel format, and then we deployed this information to the production environment by loading the Excel details into the new environment. 

I was never the administrator of the solution, and therefore, I don't know too much about ongoing maintenance and what might be involved with that. I do not believe there to be a lot of technical maintenance needed.

I handled the deployment myself. I didn't need the assistance of an integrator or consultant.

If you compare the solution to Informatica, it is much cheaper.

The licensing for this product is on a yearly basis and you have to pay for the type of users that access the platform. For example, if you want to have a user in read access mode, you don't have to pay for them. 

However, if you want a write access user, for example, to insert information, to upload data, and so on, you have to pay for that license. Therefore there are two main charges. You have the license cost of the tool and the cost of the users that have write access. Beyond that, it's my understanding that there are no other costs.

We're just customers. We're end-users of the product.

If a company wants to implement a solution more focused on the business aspects, this solution works well. However, if a company needs to, for example, have a solution that covers a 360 overview of a data governance implementation or a project where you have to collect business information, and also need to connect that business information to technical information, to create a data lineage and so on, there are other solutions that cover this part better. That said, Collibra is really user-friendly. It's really easy to use. For a non-technical business user, it's easy to access, to navigate information, and so on. Typically business users don't want to have an interface or don't want to use technical tools, so a company should be mindful of that.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

We have a client that was planning to do a digital transformation. They came up with the use cases and they have a couple of departments. They are mainly based on legal systems including corporate trust, etc., that they want the data to govern. Their requirement was basically if any new person is hired, they would have everything in Collibra, including all of the business glossary or the tables or the reports. Basically, everything for their onboarding process was available there. It was also necessary to give that to anyone that wanted to know about their department.

We only just started with this project and have only started learning Collibra.

On the client-side right now, any onboarding or any seminars or any training they are conducting, they can just pull the data from Collibra and show it to anyone. Every single data source, we can connect with the Collibra and we can pull out any data. We can create our traceability diagrams or trace any connections, like end-to-end connections, and link the data to the report. Some will be encrypted data, however, we will know which is related to each business term.

We can create our own policies, and we can link with the data quality rules. Collibra can even provide some validation rules. If there is a business term that exists without a description, the validation result will show as false. It is pretty customizable and pretty user-friendly so far.

The most valuable feature of this solution is mainly on the report side. They have a couple of reports in finance and we can connect with Tableau or Power BI, or even SSDT. We have connected with Power BI and Tableau right now. Once we connect with the source, we can pull all the data, and we can create a hierarchy based on that, and then we can link each attribute in the report with the table name and the column name. After that, we can link it with the business terms as well. It's like an end-to-end flow. We can create even traceability diagrams, views inside the system.

The reporting is very good. The solution offers a good business glossary. The diagrams are also pretty easy to understand for everyone. We had to link with the IT department, which had some difficult workflows, and they want to automate everything. The solution can do that for them. It's still a work in progress, however.

The solution is quite customizable. If I took a business term account, I could link it with the table account, and then I could link it with the account ID, and then there'd be some account receivables report. Each attribute in this report account ID, I can link to and create a linked diagram. This can be shown to the business users. The business users need to see the glossary and the attributes and if we can link anything we can create relationships with the data. There are some out-of-the-box attributes, which are present in Collibra, however, in addition to that, we can also create our own any.

If you compare the solution to something like Axon, it's pretty user-friendly. Anyone can come and understand the tool very easily. Axon isn't as user-friendly compared to Collibra. 

It's not a complicated product. Collibra also has Collibra DG and Collibra Console, but in Informatica Axon, everything is all together. Everything, including the backup schedule and all these things, has another web application in order to maintain all that information. 

While connecting with the data source, it's not very easy. If there's a firewall, it is difficult to connect with the database. It's not easy when you are configuring on the database.

Right now, the client is decommissioning the MuleSoft integration and they're moving to APIs. Collibra Connect and MuleSoft integration were there before, however, now there's a move to API. Within a year or two, they will all move to API. Whoever is using it now with MuleSoft and Collibra Connect needs to find another way for connecting with the API. 

I don't think they are providing additional software for MuleSoft integration. Primarily, they are telling us, okay, we will decommission this and move to API. The only thing that's lacking in terms of the change is when connecting to database. Sometimes the connection causes issues if the data is breaking the firewall and ingesting the data.  

I'm currently using the solution. I've been working with the solution since March of 2020.

The stability has been good. We haven't had any complaints. It seems to be quite reliable. We've deployed into production and until now we haven't had any page loading issues or refresh issues.

We had around 100s of business users using collibra, we never faced any performance issue. And we had SSO configuration enabled for all users. Performance wise collibra is stable. 

The scalability is good. If a company needs to expand, they should be able to quite easily.

In terms of technical support, they have documentation from Collibra University. They have subcategories that you can search through. That can help with a lot of troublshooting.

However, if we are facing an issue in production, they will reply in a short span of time, usually within half an hour or 15 minutes. They will connect with us to resolve the issue.

If it is in our working environment, it will lag by four or five hours. They try to prioritize service and get to you as quickly as they can only in critical situations.

Our client has taken some Collibra hours as well. We can schedule some sessions with the Collibra team to learn the system. We have taken around 36 hours approximately and have utilized the service alongside purchasing the product.

While I've seen Axon, I haven't worked much with it. From the look and feel, and from my navigation, I find it's very difficult compared to Collibra, which seems to be rather straightforward.

I was involved in the initial setup and I did not find the implementation overly complex.

Once we started setting up the Collibra tool, they provided a pretty detailed user guide. Along with that, there are so many videos available in Collibra University, which is pretty self-explanatory. We just needed to go through that and understand it all. 

You will get all end-to-end details of what software can connect, what data sources it accepts, etc. Lately, they have changed a lot of the certification levels. Earlier, it was level one, level two, level three. Now, they changed in each area. There are certifications for solution architect, business analyst, workflow manager, etc.

We had three people from our organization that assisted with the initial setup. One person was the cloud administrator. He set up everything with the cloud. Another person was doing the console setup, it was a single sign-on, so he was adding all the AD directory. We had two environments, actually, one production and one dev. The third setting up the environments. In the console only, we needed to mainly set up all these things, add all the data sources, JDBC drivers, SSN configuration, email configuration, all these things needed to be done in the console. That was the primary setup.

Deployment took, in total, about two weeks. Post-deployment, there really isn't any maintenance necessary. We can schedule backup, either on a weekly or daily basis. Whatever changes we make, we can take to the backup. If we make a mistake the backup will be available to override it.

The client is pretty happy with the Collibra work so far. They have achieved their digital transformation goals for 2020 and therefore they were pretty satisfied with the tool. We can connect with IDQ or anything we need to. It's been a successful project.

There are two license types - author and consumer. The author has all of the rights. He can edit and catalog anything. The consumer has limited access. We have around 10,000 consumers and 40 author licenses.

Professional training costs are in addition to licensing costs.

The pricing is pretty high if you compare it to other governance tools. 

We didn't evaluate other options before choosing this product.

We are Collibra Partners. We have a business relationship with the organization.

If we have a Collibra expert on your team, it will be easy. Otherwise, new users should expect a bit of a learning curve. ANyone working closely with it should take some Collibra training alongside the product purchase. Professionals will help you and guide you in creating an organization level or department level unit with a glossary and everything. They can give you more insight. I'd also advise users to try to take the certification, which is free of cost in Collibra University, or try a partner training certification.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

I have been working on Collibra for a data governance assignment. Along with that, we also use Ataccama for data quality purposes. It is a Collibra/Ataccama mixture that we use.

We would like to have out-of-the-box automation. We have leveraged some of the out-of-the-box workflows. Collibra does have the workflows such as the creation of business assets. We designed tools to tag the sensitivity information in Collibra and embedded scripts into the workflow. We then deployed that workflow so the user can upload a sheet with metadata and the tags will get tagged across those columns.

Collibra's lineage is a very powerful feature. We have integrated Collibra with Azure and ADLS storage and we create lineage diagrams using the two tools.

This solution does not have an out-of-the-box connector for the cloud platform. If a client does not want their data sent out of their own server, it will be very difficult to ensure this. You can install Collibra Jobserver and DGC on your machine, but you cannot install a newer solution. This is a restriction for us. 

We have been using this solution for one and a half years.

This is a stable solution. If you have data sources for which Collibra can provide an out-of-the-box connector, then it is stable. You can schedule your job to pull metadata or data out of your source system, with Collibra as a connector. However, if you have something out-of-the-box which Collibra does not support as a connector, that is a challenge. 

If you have Teradata or Oracle as a system, you can build that lineage into thw Collibra platform but if you want to build something on Azure, there is no direct way to do this because they don't support that.

This is a scalable solution. 

Collibra are very supportive. If you need anything, they have a customer support portal where you can raise a ticket and they reply immediately. 

Positive

Collibra does have its own university so when we started this assignment, we went through the courses. After that, it was quite easy to complete the setup. 

This is a very good tool and they have upgraded many features including an ADF connector and ADLS connector. You can write your own connector and customize it in the workflow.

I would rate this solution a six out of ten.

We mostly use Collibra Governance for governance-related tasks like building business glossaries and creating policies.

Collibra Governance comes with a lot of features, and we have used it in one of our projects for metadata management and data lineage. I have used the solution to create governance rules and a centralized repository for business glossaries.

The solution's metadata management is pretty novice and could be improved.

I have been using Collibra Governance for around one year.

I rate Collibra Governance a nine out of ten for stability.

Collibra Governance is more suitable for medium-level and enterprise businesses.

I rate Collibra Governance a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution's technical support was good, but there was a delay in their response time, possibly because of the time zones.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is simple.

The solution's deployment will not take more than a week and can be done in five working days.

The solution's pricing is moderate and not very expensive.

Informatica is coming up with some level of data governance. erwin Data Modeler is quickly emerging as a competitor for Collibra in the coming days.

Collibra Governance is deployed on the cloud in our organization.

Overall, I rate Collibra Governance an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case of this product is for metadata information for our technology assets. We also use it for all the governance dictionaries, and for minutes as well.

The solution is very useful for IT people but it's also helpful for those not literate or knowledgeable in IT. The sales department, for example, can track where the information is coming from, where the transformation is happening and where they can find a report for any specific asset. It's very important for them to have it handy, and I believe that for the people who need to know that information, it's very good.

The diagram showing the limits is absolutely magnificent. It shows an end-to-end business term or any asset going from end-to-end. From a visual perspective on the diagram, it's simply beautiful.

The workflows and the language they use needs to be improved. Programming the needs for every user on the workflows is a key improvement that is required. In addition, they haven't updated their training solution in a while. We need to implement a lot of things ourselves and they want us to move to the cloud but there are a lot of glitches in the system. There are three environments - stage, development and production. Often things work well in the first two stages and then when you get to production, they don't work. It happens a lot and their response is slow. 

I've been using this solution for 18 months. 

I would say that stability is around 85%-90%. It's very stable compared to other solutions on the market. 

Scalability is very good, excellent. 

Collibra provides one-on-one technical support, which gives access to a very knowledgeable person and their customer service is amazing. The only problem is that sometimes they don't know the answer so they have to check it out and get back to us. Sometimes you reach a dead end and that's the main problem of their system. We also now get in-house support.

We didn't switch from another solution, but we were using other solutions to control metadata. We used Infomatica for our transformation things. It wasn't like a governance tool. We also used Spark IS, an information solution, to harvest the data we needed.

The initial setup took a week because our systems are tricky due to security considerations. Deployment throughout the company took about six months, but that's an internal issue because of training implementation and that adds to the time. It's our main governance system so we had to move carefully. We already have 2,100 people using it. Operations uses it a lot and sales uses it for everything. 

For now, only 60% of our company is using it, so there's no ROI yet. 

Collibra started at a very reasonable price and then they increased the cost significantly by about 150% and almost lost us as a customer. It was something that the people from procurement and from finance ask whether the solution is really necessary.

At the time we also evaluated Unify, which became Boomi after it was purchased by Dell. That's an amazing tool as is Informatica. The issue there was that the price was too high. We went with Collibra because of the price and what it gives the end user.

Sometimes the technical support is messy but the system is great. It's a very good tool and I would suggest speaking directly with the technicians who develop the tool, rather than customer service. It's a great tool for a medium size company. if you're in a larger company, I would recommend implementing team by team. It's a tool that the end user needs to understand so if you implement it all at the one time, people will have difficulties and you won't have the support. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of 10.