Alation Data Catalog vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery comparison

The compared Alation and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. Alation is ranked #4 in DG , with an average rating of 7.4, and holds a 7.6% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #2 in eD , with an average rating of 7.8, and holds a 26.6% 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

7,149 Views
4,384 Comparison Views

76% willing to recommend

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Read 8 Microsoft Purview eDiscovery reviews

1,239 Views
1,033 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Alation Data Catalog

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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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: November 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Data Governance

November 2024

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Helped 823,875 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Alation Data Catalog

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Governance (4th), Metadata Management (2nd)

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

eDiscovery (2nd), Microsoft Security Suite (21st)

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 7.6%, down 12.3% compared to last year.
Microsoft Purview eDiscovery, on the other hand, focuses on eDiscovery, holds 26.6% mindshare, up 8.3% 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.…

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Mike McBride

Writer/Blogger at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

It has improved visibility and simplified data review, but it lacks many features found in specialized tools

I see two significant challenges with many of my clients. One is that there are some functionality gaps compared to specialized tools in the legal industry, like a legal hold tool or a document review tool. They have features that Purview eDiscovery lacks. Those gaps create a situation where I almost have to do things twice. I need to collect all my data in eDiscovery and ship it to another platform to complete the review. For example, you can't date stamp documents. I have to put them in another tool to do that. It has legal hold notifications and various decent features, but other tools have more functionality. Those are some minor challenges and gaps, but I wouldn't want to solve the larger issues myself. The other problem is that it's changing all the time. Microsoft has an excellent platform, and they're constantly updating 365. It creates an issue for eDiscovery users when Microsoft makes those changes behind the scenes, and you're unaware. I've experienced this. We were getting ready to have a training session with a customer, and the interface differed when we logged in the next day. It's a general issue with SaaS and cloud-native products, not just Microsoft. With an on-prem solution, I can see that I'm at version 10.0.1, and here are all the new features in the release notes. However, in 365, I'm wherever Microsoft tells me I am, and I never know when new features will hit. I can't stop them from being implemented. I wake up one day to see that everything has changed, and now I need to figure out how it will impact my workflow. It might not even be a change to an eDiscovery feature. You'd be talking about something like loops or any new product. How do I collect this? How does it work with eDiscovery? It's almost a full-time job keeping track of these changes.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The most valuable feature is cloud integration."

"The solution's most valuable feature is the ALLIE AI feature."

"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."

More Alation Data Catalog pros

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

"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."

"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 most valuable feature of Microsoft Purview eDiscovery is the content search. We can use it to find the data we need by searching for keywords, phrases, or the sender or recipient. It helps us gather information from current employees or ones who have left the company."

"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."

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

"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."

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

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery pros

Cons

"The product's data governance features need improvement."

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

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

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

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

"The interface is not user-friendly."

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

"Alation Data Catalog needs to develop a lot in terms of data governance and would be improved with a built-in interactive data quality solution."

More Alation Data Catalog cons

"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."

"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 sorting and filtering of the result data need improvement, and the interface for writing queries is not user-friendly for business users."

"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."

"I would suggest adding more platforms."

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

"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."

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

University

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?

We go through CDW for all of our acquisitions, and they are very easy to work with. With CSP or MCE-style agreements with Microsoft, the process is streamlined since we have reps from both Microsof...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Microsoft Purview eDiscovery?

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 32% of the time

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

Compared 19% of the time

Collibra Governance vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 14% of the time

Atlan vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 4% of the time

erwin Data Intelligence by Quest vs Alation Data Catalog

Compared 3% of the time

More Alation Data Catalog Competitors

Google Vault vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 54% of the time

Veritas Enterprise Vault.cloud vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 6% of the time

Exterro vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 5% of the time

kCura Relativity vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 4% of the time

Nuix eDiscovery vs Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

Compared 4% of the time

More Microsoft Purview eDiscovery Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alation Data Catalog

December 2024

Download Alation Data Catalog product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Purview eDiscovery

November 2024

Download Microsoft Purview eDiscovery product report

Also Known As

Alation

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Alation

Microsoft

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.

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.

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: November 2024.

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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.