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Alation Data Catalog vs Varonis Platform comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 8, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Alation Data Catalog
Ranking in Data Governance
4th
Average Rating
7.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (2nd)
Varonis Platform
Ranking in Data Governance
8th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (13th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (4th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (8th), Compliance Management (8th), Ransomware Protection (9th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 8.0%, down from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Varonis Platform is 9.1%, up from 7.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

Brahma Lam - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 7, 2023
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.…
Frederic  Delos - PeerSpot reviewer
Mar 5, 2024
Offers the ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data
The most effective feature for me is its ability to identify sensitive areas, allowing you to drill down into the sensitive data, provided you have access, to determine whether it's a false positive or a true positive. That's the best thing for me, out of all of it. It's got everything, like other ones, but I like to be able to look at something if I'm doing forensics on the alert and say, "Okay, do I really need to do something with this?" For example, we don't want sensitive data in our OneDrive. So it identifies the sensitive data that's possibly in the OneDrive. And what I can do is look at it and identify whether it's actually sensitive data in Datalert or whether it looks like sensitive data, but I know it's a false positive. If it is a false positive, I can basically say ignore this pattern based on X, Y, and Z, you know, whether it's Redjax or keyword proximity. So I like that. With other tools, I gotta go through a whole process because it's a little bit more complex. Here, I can tag it and bag it in one shot. And the next good time I scan, it slips over it. So it helps in that.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is cloud integration."
"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."
"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 solution is used to query MySQL clients and store data and documentation."
"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable 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."
"Alation Data Catalog's best feature is the SQL query publication."
"We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"The telemetry to capture everything and the reports are very easy to configure without having a developer degree."
"The 24/7 support is the most valuable feature. They have been able to answer support questions pretty quickly."
"The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand what's happening in our environment."
"It can easily identify unusual behavior or access patterns that may pose a potential threat, while operating as a unified reporting system."
"There's also a 90-day policy where if a user is not using the warehouse, it will automatically delete that username."
"That alerting and reporting service is great."
"I also appreciate the reporting feature, which allows for the extraction of various reports based on specific needs. These reports can be used for audit purposes, such as tracking changes in file locations or deletions."
"The analytics would have to be our most valuable feature."
 

Cons

"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"The interface is not user-friendly."
"The tool's domain model needs to be changed."
"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."
"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."
"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."
"Data observability within Alation would be incredibly helpful for addressing these challenges"
"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."
"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"
"It is significantly complex."
"I would like it to have cloud integration."
"We have Microsoft Office 365. I just saw an article today which says that they're actually getting integrated with Microsoft Office 365, which would be a useful feature. For user-based reports, log on activity, and stuff like that, it doesn't seem to really be present like Log360. That could just be my inexperience with it. I've been dealing with it for only about two and a half months."
"For unstructured data monitoring, it's one of the top ones, if not the top one, due to its usability."
"One area for improvement is the calculation engine. When applying rules in Varonis, especially for large datasets (terabytes of data), the calculations can be slow and require time to process. Speeding up this process would be beneficial."
"There is one thing that if I add something manually, I get so many alerts. That's the biggest bad thing."
"The product is very complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."
"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"You could do a subscription, where you pay yearly, or you could purchase it outright. The licensing cost is based on the number of users on the system that you are monitoring."
"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."
"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."
"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."
"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."
"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
8%
 

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 Varonis Platform?
The solution has significantly improved data security and compliance posture by allowing us to track and monitor activities. We can see who accesses data and when files are created and understand w...
What needs improvement with Varonis Platform?
The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some components. The interface has improved with the move to a SaaS model, but aspects could s...
What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?
Customers use the product to identify sensitive information, correlate it with access permissions, and utilize its automation engine for remediation. It includes fixing broken permissions and manag...
 

Also Known As

Alation
No data available
 

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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
Nottingham Building Society
Find out what your peers are saying about Alation Data Catalog vs. Varonis Platform and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,763 professionals have used our research since 2012.