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Alation Data Catalog vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
11
Ranking in other categories
Data Governance (7th), Metadata Management (2nd)
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
8
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 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.…
Frank Radeck - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"We had some of our data science engineers, who had built out some cloud-based data and data products for users. They were spending a lot of their time, up to 30 to 35% of their time, answering questions about the data and helping people understand how to use it. Once they were able to document that information within Alation, they were only focusing on around 5% of the high-value questions that really couldn't be solved through the catalog itself. It freed them up to be more productive, it made their end-users more productive, and it made the adoption rate of their data products rise more quickly because people were able to get to using them."
"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 solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."
"The solution's most valuable feature is the ALLIE AI feature."
"Alation Data Catalog provides a nice interface for connecting to the database, querying the data, and working on it."
"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."
"Tasks that took an entire day before we implemented Purview now take just 30 minutes."
"Purview eDiscovery has made it significantly easier to handle rare litigation requests."
"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."
"Our legal team benefits from using Microsoft Purview eDiscovery."
"I think eDiscovery Premium has made dealing with data from Teams much more accessible than any other platform."
"The ability to query everything that's in Microsoft and send links or add people, like managers, to review the documents is valuable. It's easy as I don't have to download and email anything. I just add them as a reviewer, and they can access it from there."
"The most valuable features are automatic content logging tagging. Performing these tasks manually would be impossible. Since most of our data is already in Microsoft, it's convenient to run it through this tool."
"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."
 

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."
"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"The product's data governance features need improvement."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."
"Data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges"
"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."
"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."
"I would suggest adding more platforms."
"The sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users. We still need all the backend stuff. We have to use Graph API to interface with everything and create custom interfaces on the front end to make it easier for the end users, which is costly. The reporting, sorting, and filtering capabilities that other products have aren't available natively in Purview."
"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."
"Microsoft Purview eDiscovery should be cheaper."
"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."
"The sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."
"The solution is a little expensive."
"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."
"With the full bundle, pricing is not a significant concern. As an M3, I find the Purview pricing of 1250 per user worthwhile."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
University
6%
 

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.
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...
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...
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...
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.
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...
 

Also Known As

Alation
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
Information Not Available
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