Varonis Platform vs erwin Data Intelligence comparison

Quest Software and Varonis are both solutions in the Data Governance category. Quest Software is ranked #28, while Varonis is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.0. Quest Software holds a 1.9% mindshare in DG, compared to Varonis’s 10.8% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Quest Software users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 92% of Varonis users who would recommend it.

erwin Data Intelligence

Read 18 erwin Data Intelligence reviews

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2,992 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Varonis Platform

Read 14 Varonis Platform reviews

9,196 Views
4,414 Comparison Views

92% willing to recommend

erwin Data Intelligence

Varonis Platform

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 7, 2025

erwin Data Intelligence and Varonis Platform compete in the data management and security category. erwin seems to have the upper hand in automation and integration features, whereas Varonis is more robust in data security governance and threat management.

Features: erwin Data Intelligence provides robust automation capabilities that significantly reduce time to market, supporting advanced scripting and executing automation scripts. It offers a central source of truth with detailed data lineage and an integrated data catalog and glossary for effective business understanding. Varonis Platform excels in data access governance and threat management, offering insightful alerts and a powerful centralized reporting system. It provides visibility into sensitive areas and enhances data security management.

Room for Improvement: erwin Data Intelligence users note limitations in SDK and API responses, experiencing performance issues with large-scale data management. The interface complexity poses a learning curve, and integration with other data modeling tools could be improved. Varonis Platform users suggest enhancements in remediation processes, simplifying the reporting interface, and a greater focus on transitioning to cloud offerings. The pricing model, which involves multiple module purchases, might complicate value perception for mid-sized enterprises.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: erwin Data Intelligence offers diverse deployment options, facing challenges in integration and mixed technical support responses. Users experience varied response times and effectiveness in support. Varonis Platform provides similar deployment flexibility, predominantly on-premises, with a shift towards cloud services that might impact deployment efficiency. Its customer support is well-regarded for proactiveness and knowledgeable assistance.

Pricing and ROI: erwin Data Intelligence is seen as competitively priced, delivering high ROI through automation and efficiency gains. Its modular pricing can be cost-effective initially, increasing with more functionalities. Varonis Platform is noted for its higher cost but justified by its comprehensive security features and governance capabilities, appealing especially to larger enterprises seeking risk reduction and improved data management.

To learn more, read our detailed Varonis Platform vs. erwin Data Intelligence Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform vs. erwin Data Intelligence

July 2025

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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

Ranking in Data Governance

28th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

AI Governance (17th)

Varonis Platform

Ranking in Data Governance

4th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.4

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Email Security (20th), Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (9th), User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) (6th), SaaS Security Posture Management (SSPM) (5th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (3rd), Compliance Management (7th), Ransomware Protection (10th), Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) (7th)

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of erwin Data Intelligence is 1.9%, down from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Varonis Platform is 10.8%, up from 8.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Governance Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Varonis Platform	10.8%
erwin Data Intelligence	1.9%
Other	87.3%

Data Governance

Featured Reviews

Roy Pollack

Advisor Application Architect at CPS Energy

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.

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Frederic Delos

Senior Cloud Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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.

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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

"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 interface is easy to use. I also like Erwin's automatic data classification and data quality checks."

"Data Intelligence has provided more profound insights into legacy data movements, lineages, and definitions in the short term. We have linked three critical layers of data, providing us with an end-to-end lineage at the column level."

"The solution gives us data lineage which means we can see an impact if we make a change. The ability for us to have that in this company is brilliant because we used to have 49 data stewards from some 23 different groups within six major departments. Each one of those was a silo unto itself. The ability to have different glossaries — but all pointed to the same key terms, key concepts, or key attributes — has made life really simple."

"Being able to capture different business metrics and organize them in different catalogs is most valuable. We can organize these metrics into sales-related metrics, customer-related metrics, supply chain-related metrics, etc."

"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."

"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."

"The solution saves time in data discovery and understanding our entire organization's data."

More erwin Data Intelligence pros

"It can easily identify unusual behavior or access patterns that may pose a potential threat, while operating as a unified reporting system."

"Varonis Platform is transparent and captures everything in the environment without impacting the performance. The tool helps us unify data feeds into a single reporting system."

"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."

"The solution ensures that users have not accidentally shared sensitive information with the wrong people or too many people."

"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 telemetry to capture everything and the reports are very easy to configure without having a developer degree."

"That alerting and reporting service is great."

"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."

More Varonis Platform pros

Cons

"One big improvement we would like to see would be the workflow integration of codeset mapping with the erwin source to target mapping. That's a bit clunky for us. The two often seem to be in conflict with one another. Codeset mappings that are used within the source to target mappings are difficult to manage because they get locked."

"Another area where it can improve is by having BB-Graph-type databases where relationship discovery and relationship identification are much easier."

"There are a lot of little things like moving between read screens and edit screens. Those little human interface type of programming pieces will need to mature a bit to make it easier to get to where you want to go to put the stuff in."

"If we are talking about the business side of the product, maybe the Data Literacy could be made a bit simpler. You have to put your hands on it, so there is room for improvement."

"The metadata ingestion is very nice because of the ability to automate it. It would be nice to be able to do this ingestion, or set it up, from one place, instead of having to set it up separately for every data asset that is ingested."

"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."

"The data quality assessment requires third-party components and a separate license."

"The fact that I sometimes have to go in and out of different applications, even though it's all part of the whole erwin suite, perhaps means it could be architected a little bit better. I think they do have some ideas for improvements there."

More erwin Data Intelligence cons

"I'd like to see automatic updates for this solution. Currently, it's a manual process to update all the keywords"

"Varonis requires more access permissions for its core functions compared to competitors, which can be a concern for companies about data safety."

"The solution's areas of improvement are the interface and the dependency on on-premises deployment for some components."

"The GUI should be more functional. There should be a process for connecting through Chrome, Internet Explorer, etc."

"It is significantly complex."

"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."

"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."

"I would like it to have cloud integration."

More Varonis Platform cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"erwin's pricing was cheaper than its competitors."

"There is an additional fee for the server maintenance."

"erwin is cheaper than other solutions and this should appeal to other buyers. It has a good price tag."

"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."

"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."

"The solution is aggressively priced."

"The price is reasonable and competitive. When you get into forward and reverse-engineering, the cost could go up. However, if you are a large organization, you would probably be able to access different packages. If, however, you don't need forward and reverse-engineering, then the price is relatively cheap."

"The price is reasonable, and a subscription is required."

More erwin Data Intelligence pricing and cost advice

"Varonis Platform wasn't certainly the cheapest solution."

"I would rate the pricing an eight out of ten, with ten being the most expensive."

"It's expensive, kind of, really 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

25%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Non Profit

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Insurance Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	14

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	2
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	11

Questions from the Community

Does anyone experience memory usage issues or memory spikes, when using Quest's Data Intelligence Suite?

Definitely. Part of it is that we haven't beefed up our set-up since the PoC, so it's a little underpowered, but even without that, we were told that anything over a certain number of rows in Mappi...

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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...

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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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 33% of the time

Collibra Governance vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 23% of the time

Alation Data Catalog vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 11% of the time

Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC) vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 9% of the time

Microsoft Purview Compliance Manager vs erwin Data Intelligence

Compared 8% of the time

More erwin Data Intelligence Competitors

Microsoft Purview Data Governance vs Varonis Platform

Compared 20% of the time

Cyera vs Varonis Platform

Compared 11% of the time

BigID vs Varonis Platform

Compared 8% of the time

Wiz vs Varonis Platform

Compared 5% of the time

Microsoft Purview Information Protection vs Varonis Platform

Compared 3% of the time

More Varonis Platform Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

erwin Data Intelligence

September 2025

Download erwin Data Intelligence product report

Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform

August 2025

Download Varonis Platform product report

Also Known As

erwin DG, erwin Data Governance

SlashNext Complete

Overview

Erwin Data Intelligence drives automation, supports data catalog and literacy, and offers Smart Data Connectors for efficient metadata handling. Its customization flexibility and integration facilitate enhanced data governance, visualization, analysis, and compliance.

Erwin Data Intelligence offers automation scripts that accelerate development, integrated data cataloging, data profiling, and lineage analysis to streamline information management. Users appreciate its capability in metadata harvesting, code engineering, and infrastructure integration. The tool provides flexibility to enhance governance and data visualization. While it performs well, users have noted challenges with API robustness and interface complexity, and there are opportunities to improve workflow integration, AI features, and large dataset handling. Companies rely on it for metadata management, automation of metadata mappings, and data governance to support compliance and literacy.

What are the main features of Erwin Data Intelligence?

Automation Scripts: Speeds up development processes through powerful scripts.
Data Catalog: Supports comprehensive data mapping and profiles for better analysis.
Smart Data Connectors: Efficiently handles code engineering and metadata harvesting.
Customization Flexibility: Adapts to existing infrastructure for seamless integration.
Comprehensive Visualization: Empowers data visualization and standardization processes.

What benefits and ROI can users expect?

Increased Development Speed: Automation scripts notably enhance development efficiency.
Improved Data Governance: Streamlines processes, supporting compliance and business definitions.
Effective Integration: Seamlessly fits with ETL tools and existing workflows.
Enhanced Data Literacy: Supports data literacy initiatives with robust cataloging features.
Comprehensive Impact Analysis: Facilitates thorough analysis for informed decision-making.

In industries such as finance, healthcare, and retail, organizations implement Erwin Data Intelligence for efficient metadata management and governance. It assists in automating lineage and mapping, supporting ETL procedures while enhancing compliance and data literacy efforts. Its flexibility and integration support create valuable data insights and governance improvements.

Quest Software

Varonis Platform enhances data security and governance with advanced analytics, identifying unusual access patterns and sensitive areas. Its centralized interface manages permissions across systems, offering essential capabilities for alerting and reporting.

Varonis Platform provides continuous data protection and monitoring by identifying and alerting on unauthorized data access. It offers comprehensive insights into file access and user activities, supporting data classification and simplifying compliance with tracking and monitoring capabilities. Integration with storage systems enables users to manage permissions and access effectively. Room for improvement includes cloud integration and simplifying its interface and calculation engine for ease of use. Challenges include on-premises dependency, licensing costs, and a need for enhanced DLP capabilities.

What are the primary features of Varonis Platform?

24/7 Technical Support: Ensures continuous assistance and issue resolution.
Advanced Analytics: Identifies unusual data access patterns for increased security.
Centralized Permission Management: Manages access permissions across systems.
Data Classification: Categorizes data to enhance protection measures.
Integration with Storage Systems: Simplifies compliance through tracking and monitoring.

What benefits and ROI should users expect?

Increased Security: Protects against unauthorized data access.
Compliance Simplification: Offers comprehensive tracking and monitoring to meet compliance standards.
Efficient Permission Management: Simplifies access controls across platforms.
Enhanced Alerting: Provides timely notifications of potential security breaches.

In finance, Varonis aids in safeguarding sensitive financial data, while in healthcare, it secures patient records. Legal industries utilize it for protecting client information, and retail sectors manage sensitive customer data. These industries benefit from Varonis' ability to prevent unauthorized access and streamline compliance.

Varonis

Sample Customers

Oracle, Infosys, GSK, Toyota Motor Sales, HSBC

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Buyer's Guide

Varonis Platform vs. erwin Data Intelligence

July 2025

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