Alation Data Catalog vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

The compared Alation and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Alation is ranked #7 in DG , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 5.9% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #2 in eD , with an average rating of 7.5, and holds a 27.3% mindshare. Additionally, 76% of Alation users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

Alation Data Catalog

Read 11 Alation Data Catalog reviews

5,876 Views
3,492 Comparison Views

76% willing to recommend

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Read 8 Microsoft Purview eDiscovery reviews

1,557 Views
1,247 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Alation Data Catalog

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Alation Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Collibra and others in Data Governance.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Governance Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Data Governance

March 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 845,040 peers since 2012

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Alation Data Catalog

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Governance (7th), Metadata Management (2nd)

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

eDiscovery (2nd), Microsoft Security Suite (24th)

Mindshare comparison

Alation Data Catalog and Microsoft Purview eDiscovery aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Alation Data Catalog is designed for Data Governance and holds a mindshare of 5.9%, down 11.1% compared to last year.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, on the other hand, focuses on eDiscovery, holds 27.3% mindshare, up 15.5% since last year.

Data Governance

eDiscovery

Featured Reviews

Brahma Lam

Developer at CVS Health

Has metadata cataloging features but needs changes in domain model

The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature. The tool's domain model needs to be changed. Alation Data Catalog is stable. The solution is scalable. Alation Data Catalog's deployment is easy. I rate it a nine out of ten. Deployment takes only two to three hours to complete.…

Read full review

Frank Radeck

Director, IT Infrastructure & Cloud Technology at a legal firm with 501-1,000 employees

Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented the solution now take just 30 minutes.

The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms. It is critical for Purview to be able to connect to iOS, Mac, and Android devices and data in other SaaS apps. From a support perspective, I can do things while I'm eating lunch or something else. It's more dynamic and responsive. I think everybody appreciates it. We're not tied to one device. Purview's multi-cloud capabilities are also essential for the same reasons. Keeping everything under one umbrella further increases the time savings. Purview accounts for critical regulations from around the world. This is crucial because we hold ourselves accountable to standards and need to align with them. Working at a law firm, we have clients who dictate to us what standards they expect. The visibility is excellent. As we move more things into the cloud, more opportunities exist to put everything under one umbrella.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."

"The solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."

"The most valuable features of Alation Data Catalog are the simplicity in onboarding data sources, the security in securing the data sources, and the way the various users of Alation Data Catalog communicate with each other through a messenger."

"We can customize templates based on our use cases."

"The platform's most valuable features are workflow automation, automated business metadata tagging, technical metadata tagging, and data integration with data quality tools or platforms."

"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."

"Alation Data Catalog provides a nice interface for connecting to the database, querying the data, and working on it."

"Given the relatively low level of maturity, Alation's most relevant feature at the moment is a user interface that's easy to navigate, which helps us find and understand the data. So while Alation has a lot more functionality, our pain point right now is being able to easily find, understand, and trust the information to use it."

More Alation Data Catalog pros

"The return on investment is saving the equivalent of one or two full-time IT department employees and a few hours per week for legal staff."

"The most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is its ability to search across various platforms, including Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive. It enables a streamlined, unified process for searching across these platforms."

"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery has saved me personally a lot of time because I can query it, and it touches everything we have as a full Microsoft shop."

"The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and they didn't disclose it. Thanks to the product, it's easy for me to search and find out what communication a specific user has done, whether it's from SharePoint or any other platform. With Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, we can easily retrieve and restore this data."

"I think eDiscovery Premium has made dealing with data from Teams much more accessible than any other platform."

"Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented Purview now take just 30 minutes."

"The machine learning wasn't half bad. I really like that part. I thought it was novel. It pretty much automated it, once you trained the model."

"Purview eDiscovery has made it significantly easier to handle rare litigation requests."

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery pros

Cons

"Alation Data Catalog doesn't support end-to-end lineage. By that, I mean the ability to trace the movement of data from when it first comes into our organization to where it's consumed."

"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."

"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."

"Data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges"

"The interface is not user-friendly."

"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."

"I know that this has been on their roadmap and they're working on it, but as a whole, there's an untapped reservoir of capabilities within their article features that could be used and built upon."

"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."

More Alation Data Catalog cons

"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders."

"We find that many critical functions are available only to E5 license holders. It would be beneficial to have more options available for E3 customers. Enhanced Teams functionalities and better capture of text message data, both SMS and MMS, would also be improvements."

"The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially."

"I would suggest adding more platforms. Currently, it's compatible with OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint, and Exchange. Adding more features, as Microsoft continues to expand their cloud offerings, would be beneficial. Exploring options like Azure Files might be an avenue for improvement."

"Purview eDiscovery works, but it's not entirely perfect. There were times when search results would get hung up or error codes would be presented and we'd have to contact Microsoft to get that sorted out."

"The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be beneficial. Copilot is expected to add such functionality in the future."

"It has been one of the most solid tools I have worked with. However, Purview Data Loss Protection for remediating policy violations needs refinement, for example, in defining what constitutes a credit card because that is where I get the most false positives."

"I would suggest adding more platforms."

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is a little expensive."

"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."

"A three-year agreement is better than a one-year rolling 12-month agreement from a price point of view. I'd recommend looking at a three-year deal because you can't stand up a catalog and produce value in 12 months."

"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."

"In the positions that I've had through contracting over the years, I've heard talk of it being overpriced and underperforming compared to its competitors."

"The costs associated with E5 licensing are currently expensive for us, so we use the E3 license, which comes with fewer features and functionalities."

"With the full bundle, pricing is not a significant concern. As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile."

"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comes as part of Microsoft 365 licenses."

"The pricing and licensing with Microsoft can be complex, and licensing is known to be a challenge because it changes frequently. While the licensing for Purview is not as tricky as other Microsoft products, navigating licenses since the shift to E3 and E5 plans has been a task, as individual licenses must now be purchased separately."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Governance solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

14%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Legal Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alation Data Catalog?

The platform's most valuable features are workflow automation, automated business metadata tagging, technical metadata tagging, and data integration with data quality tools or platforms.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alation Data Catalog?

I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected. On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solut...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Alation Data Catalog?

When issues arise, two key concerns arise. First, how can we perform root cause analysis faster? Second, how can we optimize resource allocation, considering the associated costs? Every customer is...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?

The tool has been beneficial. Some of our previous users left the organization without sharing the information they had at a personal level. This information was related to the organization, and th...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?

The setup process was very straightforward. We acquired pricing through our reseller in NASDAQ, eliminating the need to search for prices ourselves.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?

The query language can be time-consuming to figure out if you don't know it initially. While there are options with dropdowns to select criteria, having a natural language feature would be benefici...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 38% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 16% of the time

Collibra Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 12% of the time

Ataccama ONE Platform vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 4% of the time

BigID vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 3% of the time

More Alation Data Catalog Competitors

Google Vault vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 49% of the time

Veritas Enterprise Vault.cloud vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 7% of the time

Exterro vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 5% of the time

Varonis Platform vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 5% of the time

kCura Relativity vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alation Data Catalog

March 2025

Download Alation Data Catalog product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

March 2025

Download Microsoft Purview eDiscovery product report

Also Known As

Alation

No data available

Overview

Alation pioneered the data catalog market and is now leading its evolution into a platform for a broad range of data intelligence solutions including data search & discovery, data governance, lineage, stewardship, analytics, and digital transformation.

Thanks to its powerful Behavioral Analysis Engine, inbuilt collaboration capabilities, and open interfaces, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to successfully tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. With Alation, analysts are empowered to search, query and collaborate on their data to achieve faster, more accurate insights.

Trusted by 400+ enterprises worldwide like Salesforce, Nasdaq, LinkedIn, Finnair, and Cisco.

Alation

Efficiently respond to legal matters or internal investigations with intelligent capabilities that reduce data to only what’s relevant. Discover data where it lives. Discover and collect data in place, within your Microsoft Purview boundary. Manage workflows efficiently. Streamline your eDiscovery process with an end-to-end workflow from one platform. Accelerate your process. Get insights quickly with built-in capabilities, reducing review time and costs.

To learn more about our solution, ask questions, and share feedback, join our Microsoft Security, Compliance and Identity Community.

Microsoft

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.

Information Not Available

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, Collibra and others in Data Governance. Updated: March 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.

We monitor all Data Governance reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.