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Varonis Platform vs erwin Data Intelligence by Quest comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

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

erwin Data Intelligence by ...
Ranking in Data Governance
9th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Varonis Platform
Ranking in Data Governance
6th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (9th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (8th), Compliance Management (8th), Ransomware Protection (8th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (5th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of erwin Data Intelligence by Quest is 2.1%, down from 2.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Varonis Platform is 10.2%, up from 6.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

Roy Pollack - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution provides more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term.
We have loaded over 300,000 attributes and more than 1000 mappings. The performance is slow, depending on the lineage or search. This is supposed to be fixed in the later versions, but we haven't upgraded yet. The integration with various metadata sources, including erwin Data Modeler, isn't smooth in the current version. It took some experimentation to get things working. We hope this is improved in the newer version. The initial version we used felt awkward because Erwin implemented features from other companies into their offering.
Frederic  Delos - PeerSpot reviewer
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

"Data Intelligence creates a single source of truth for all of our metadata. This solution is better for data warehousing, but the metadata features speed up our development work. It's easy to create and manage mappings because we can export them to Informatica and pick up the work where we left off."
"Overall, DI's data cataloging, data literacy, and automation have helped our decision-makers because when a source wants to change something, we immediately know what the impact is going to be downstream."
"Mind map... is a really good feature because it is very helpful in seeing which column's tables are related. Also, you can flag them with "sensitive data" and other indicators. You can also customize your own features for the mind map. That was another very robust feature."
"They have just the most marvelous reports called mind maps, where whatever you are focused on sits in the middle. They have this wonderful graphic spiderweb that spreads out from there where you can see this thing mapped to other logical bits or physical bits and who's the steward of it. It's very cool and available to your business teams through a portal."
"The possibility to write automation scripts is the biggest benefit for us. We have several products with metadata and metadata mapping capabilities. The big difference when we were choosing this product was the ability to run automation scripts against metadata and metadata mappings. Right now, we have a very high level of automation based on these automation scripts, so it's really the core feature for us."
"We always know where our data is, and anybody can look that up, whether they're a business person who doesn't know anything about Informatica, or a developer who knows everything about creating data movement jobs in Informatica, but who does not understand the business terminology or the data that is being used in the tool."
"The solution saves time in data discovery and understanding our entire organization's data."
"It is a central place for everybody to start any ETL data pipeline builds. This tool is being heavily used, plus it's heavily integrated with all the ETL data pipeline design and build processes. Nobody can bypass these processes and do something without going through this tool."
"The solution ensures that users have not accidentally shared sensitive information with the wrong people or too many people."
"On the Varonis side, technical support is phenomenal. Their ability to explain is very good, and they seem to be very knowledgeable. When I get an alert that doesn't quite make sense, they dive in there and kind of take me through it. That's very useful and very good. There are some false alerts, but it is better to have a false alert than no alert at all."
"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 most important feature is remediation. In remediation support, there is no group permission. We'll go ahead and remediate the access from the Dell folder to the parent folder."
"Technical support from Varonis is rated as nine out of ten."
"Varonis offers robust data access governance, allowing us to understand which sensitive data exists and who has access to it."
"The analytics would have to be our most valuable feature."
"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."
 

Cons

"The SDK behind this entire product needs improvement. The company really should focus more on this because we were finding some inconsistencies on the LDK level. Everything worked fine from the UI perspective, but when we started doing some deep automation scripts going through multiple API calls inside the tool, then only some pieces of it work or it would not return the exact data it was supposed to do."
"The versioning can sometimes be confusing because we use the publishing feature for the mapping. Technical analysts sometimes have two versions, and they should know that the public version is the correct one."
"Everything about Data Intelligence is complex. Though we've used the tool for five years, we're still only using about 30 to 40 percent of its capabilities. It would be helpful if we could customize and simplify the user interface because there are so many redundant things."
"We chose to implement on an Oracle Database because we also had the erwin Data Modeler and Web Portal products in-house, which have been set up on Oracle Databases for many years. Sometimes the Oracle Database installation has caused some hiccups that wouldn't necessarily have been caused if we had used SQL Server."
"There was a huge learning curve, and I'd been in software development for most of my career. The application itself, and how it runs menus and screens when you can modify and code, is complex. I have found that kind of cumbersome."
"We still need another layer of data quality assessments on the source to see if it is sending us the wrong data or if there are some issues with the source data. For those things, we need a rule-based data quality assessment or scoring where we can assess tools or other technology stacks. We need to be able to leverage where the business comes in, defining some business rules and have the ability to execute those rules, then score the data quality of all those attributes. Data quality is definitely not what we are leveraging from this tool, as of today."
"The solution's Arabic language processing is limited. The results are limited when you use the interface in Arabic."
"There is room for improvement with the data cataloging capability. Right now, there is a list of a lot of sources that they can catalog, or they can create metadata upon, but if they can add more then that would be a good plus for this tool."
"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."
"It is significantly complex."
"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"
"The GUI should be more functional. There should be a process for connecting through Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc."
"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."
"The solution's interface is a little complicated with regard to setting up filters and reports."
"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You buy a seat license for your portal. We have 100 seats for the portal, then you buy just the development licenses for the people who are going to put the data in."
"erwin's pricing was cheaper than its competitors."
"erwin is cheaper than other solutions and this should appeal to other buyers. It has a good price tag."
"There is an additional fee for the server maintenance."
"The whole suite, not just the DI but the modeling software, the harvester, Mapping Manager — everything we have — is about $100,000 a year for our renewals. That works out to each module being something like $8,000 to $10,000."
"erwin was at a good price. The federal government wouldn't buy something if the pricing wasn't good."
"The price is too high."
"The licensing cost was very affordable at the time of purchase. It has since been taken over by erwin, then Quest. The tool has gotten a bit more costly, but they are adding more features very quickly."
"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."
"It's expensive, kind of, really expensive."
"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."
"The pricing is good. It neither expensive nor cheap. It is average."
"The platform is expensive. I rate the pricing a nine out of ten."
"Licensing is on an annual basis. Maintenance and renewal fees are separate. Varonis Datalert is quite 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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Government
9%
Non Profit
6%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Insurance Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?
The data mapping manager is the most valuable feature.
What needs improvement with erwin Data Intelligence by Quest?
The data quality assessment requires third-party components and a separate license. I would like to have better integration around the data quality. I would appreciate the inclusion of a non-struct...
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?
Varonis started as an on-premises solution and is transitioning to cloud. It hasn't fully moved yet, which is an area for improvement. Varonis requires more access permissions for its core function...
What is your primary use case for Varonis Platform?
The primary use case for Varonis Platform is data discovery, specifically for discovering sensitive data in our organization to protect it. We are looking for a solution that can scan our repositor...
 

Also Known As

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC
Nottingham Building Society
Find out what your peers are saying about Varonis Platform vs. erwin Data Intelligence by Quest and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
845,040 professionals have used our research since 2012.