--- title: Alation Reviews meta_title: 'Alation Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 91 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how Alation works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 91 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-17' parent_category: name: IT Infrastructure url: https://www.g2.com/categories/it-infrastructure --- # Alation Reviews **Vendor:** Alation **Category:** [Machine Learning Data Catalog Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/machine-learning-data-catalog) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 91 ## About Alation Alation is the creator of AIOS™, the open, governed, self-improving intelligence operating system for enterprises that cannot afford to get AI wrong. Having pioneered the data catalog market, Alation helps organizations establish trust in the agents, data, and context that power AI-driven decisions. The result is AI organizations can trust—enabling them to navigate regulatory complexity, maintain data fidelity, accelerate operational outcomes, and transform AI ambition into trusted business impact. Alation partners with the world’s leading to leverage better data to solve their most critical challenges. ## Alation Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of Alation, allowing for efficient navigation and intuitive data discovery. (16 reviews) - Users value the **intuitive data discovery** capabilities of Alation, enhancing their ability to find and understand data. (10 reviews) - Users appreciate Alation's **intuitive navigation** , enhancing productivity and streamlining access to essential project documentation. (10 reviews) - Users value the **intuitive catalog structure** of Alation, enhancing data discovery and governance through effective collaboration. (9 reviews) - Users value Alation's **intuitive user interface** , simplifying navigation and enhancing productivity in data discovery and documentation. (9 reviews) - Data Lineage (8 reviews) - Efficiency Improvement (7 reviews) - Search Functionality (7 reviews) - Easy Setup (6 reviews) - Metadata Management (6 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users experience **slow performance** with Alation, particularly during search with larger datasets and metadata freshness issues. (8 reviews) - Users are frustrated by **missing features** like data quality tools and lack of visual indicators for hidden assets. (6 reviews) - Users note the **limited functionality** in Alation, especially regarding data quality and custom workflows. (4 reviews) - Users report **significant lineage limitations** in Alation, facing bugs and inconsistent support that complicate data tracking tasks. (4 reviews) - Users find the **user interface lacking** and suggest improvements for better organization and intuition in Alation. (4 reviews) - Complex Setup (3 reviews) - Difficult Interface (3 reviews) - Expensive (3 reviews) - Integration Issues (3 reviews) - Limited Tools (3 reviews) ## Alation Reviews ### 1. Understanding the value of a data catalog **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Legal Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 02, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Support for wide range of platforms to pull in our enterprise data. Ability to customize the end user portal to hide noise from actionable insights **What do you dislike about Alation?** Mostly wonder if the effort to maintain an accurate data catalog will be worth the business value of the information **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Standardizing our metric definitions and building trust in our data ### 2. Alation Experience **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Higher Education | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** The data catalog and it's search capabilities are the best in the industry. The employees are great and we have had fantastic support over the years. **What do you dislike about Alation?** The last of a DSA workflow request for those in our organization who would like to request data access. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is providing a central data catalog solution for our organization. ### 3. User friendly while going deep technically **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Apparel & Fashion | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 27, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Alation offers a great user interface that is intuitive to business users. Their customer support is also fantastic **What do you dislike about Alation?** Alation offers open data connector and data quality plug ins. This means you have to license vendors seperately **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Find and understand data ### 4. Best Data intelligence providers **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jaydip B. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 10, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Alation's data catalog and search capabilities make it easier for users to find and access relevant data. **What do you dislike about Alation?** no dislike for Alation products on my side. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Alation addresses the data governance challenges by providing tools and features for establishing and enforcing data policies, standards, and best practices. This ensures data integrity and compliance with regulations and reduces the risk of data breaches. Users benefit from improved data governance and increased confidence in their data assets. So we solved our Data related issue solved. **Official Response from Michelle Cloutier:** > Hi Jaydip - thank you for your positive review of Alation. We're very glad it's meeting your needs, particularly in the area of data governance! ### 5. Powerful and simple to use Metadata Catalog Tool **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Government Administration | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Ease of Use. Caters for a customised user requirement implementation. Good product support. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Not historically focused on UK Public Sector and unawareness of the culture challenges coupled with disparate source system landscape to implementing a Metadata Catalog Tool. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Lack of awareness on what data is available in the organisation, who owns it, who manages it, repeated data discovery exercises for the same data, lack of metadata accuracy, lack of organisational business glossary and management thereof ### 6. Informative **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Non-Profit Organization Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 25, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** One stop shop for information on organizations data assets. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Unable to give lineage with synonyms with oracle **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Distributed information ### 7. Alation is an amazing data catalogue tool. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vinod K. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** The thing that appeals to me most about Alation is that it is a user-friendly tool with superior data catalog capabilities. It is also very cost effective. Additionally, Alation by far has the smartest sales and professional development teams. **What do you dislike about Alation?** The only issue that I have with Alation is that I wish they had a fully integrated Data Quality tool. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed a data catalog/business glossary tool to support the implementation of our Data Catalog tool. **Official Response from Michelle Cloutier:** > Hi Vinod - thank you for your positive sentiments about both Alation and our amazing sales and support teams! I hope that someone has shared our Open Data Quality Framework with you. It allows customers the flexibility to choose the Data Quality tool that best fits their needs, since one size definitely doesn't fit all when it comes to data quality. ### 8. Great tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 28, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Semantic Datacatalog search helps to find product catalogs easily **What do you dislike about Alation?** Data Quality being integrated in tool, one of the key platform feature which is most waited **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data Cataloging, effective technical Metadata management ### 9. First Impressions **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 02, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Seems like a great UI and well organized **What do you dislike about Alation?** Without data custodians will require a large effort from the team to curate everything **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data cataloging ### 10. Great experience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Manufacturing | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 26, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Future product development opportunities look promising. Great customer experience and on-boarding. **What do you dislike about Alation?** User interface is not to par with competitors. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Too early to determine benefit of this tool. ### 11. New to Alation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Oil & Energy | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Interface and workflow help engage the business asynchronously **What do you dislike about Alation?** Lineage difficult to view when there are many complex layers **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Workflow and guiding to stewards to review and approve ### 12. Great cataloging & governance product **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 24, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Ease of use. Seamless integration with snowflake. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Nothing that I can think of. Works great. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Not a customer but a partner. Great for data cataloging and discovery. ### 13. Good Product and User friendly **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 28, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** Being user friendly , help us to democratize our data sets faster **What do you dislike about Alation?** Reporting, Visulization option for Custom development **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Democratization to users ### 14. Alation conference. first time attending. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** data catalog and governance capabilities **What do you dislike about Alation?** nothing. it is an industry leading and enetwrprise grade solution **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** enterprise data governance ### 15. The tool that we've been wanting for a long time. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 18, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** The catalog part, although we are still slowing but steadily building on it, holds a lot of promise. It will save our team and our user base, considerable time and effort. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Delays in the renewal of licenses. The application displays warnings that our license is about to expire which makes it look like we are not taking care of our bills. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Collaboration with user base and user base amongst themselves. Data Governance app should help but there is budgetary constraints at this time **Official Response from Michelle Cloutier:** > Hello! Thanks for sharing your thoughts about Alation. Excited for you and your team as you build out Alation in your organization. I've shared your feedback about the license renewal issue with our team. ### 16. Data Catalog! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 03, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** We can easily integrate it with other applications, and simple to configure. Multiple members can comment. Easy to capture the data lineage. **What do you dislike about Alation?** No significant dislikes after 2-3 months of usage. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We mainly used alation to understand the Data Lineage and for data governance purpose. ### 17. Great Tool **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 08, 2023 **What do you like best about Alation?** It has allowed me to collaborate with coworkers more easily **What do you dislike about Alation?** The user interface needs improvement. It is sometimes difficult to navigate to exactly what I want **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Finding enterprise approved codes and metadata information ### 18. Deserve A Try **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Punit R. | Senior Data Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 24, 2022 **What do you like best about Alation?** Alation Data Catalog is used as a data analytics tool within the part of the organization where I reside in. It serves as a database for all of our data, including third-party data, where we can run queries that are then used in Tableau dashboards, Microsoft Excel pulls and other data analytic tools. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Alation data catalog has some cons which are additional help tools, guided building, debugging etc **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was involved with the selection/purchase process and was involved with the implementation phase. I would not recommend it for anyone with zero SQL or knowledge ### 19. Alation Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Akshat G. | Data Science Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 20, 2022 **What do you like best about Alation?** Alation is one of its kind solution that helps in creating a repository of data sets used in our organization. The platform is easy to use and navigate. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Alation could broaden the services provided on its platforms such as data visualization and analytics. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using Alation to create data catatlog for different projects that could be shared across teams. ### 20. Great digital safety training software **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Victor L. M. V. | Designer II, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 25, 2022 **What do you like best about Alation?** The training emails for spam, scams and phishing are really good and important for people to understand about the importance of digital safety **What do you dislike about Alation?** Lack of easy access to our Hox Hunt profile to see what is our score and the other training courses. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Breach of security by humans fault. Employees are getting more aware of possible fraudulent emails and websites. ### 21. Great tool for analytics **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mayank K. | Senior Risk Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 29, 2022 **What do you like best about Alation?** Tool helps in getting the data processing fast and a great user friendly tool **What do you dislike about Alation?** It has data limitations capacity. Sometimes does not respond when processing large amount of data. **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** Its a great differentiated software as compared to other softwares in the market. Very good software when processing large amount of data for ML algorithms. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Tool is similar to other data processing software but data processing is really faster as compared to other softwares ### 22. No Longer Stuck on an Island **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christine T. | Credit and Collections Analyst (Business Analyst III), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 14, 2021 **What do you like best about Alation?** Once upon a time, when we used to work at the office, I worked at a satellite campus with no peers. I envied the analyst groups that all sat in pods, and they constantly helped each other and trained newbies. Leaning over and asking a question feels very different than phoning or IMing colleagues multiple times a day, but the truth is when you are new, you really need tons of help. I use Alation almost every day, and it answers both simple questions, like "what does AT43 mean?" to more complex questions, "Which table do other analysts go to as "the" source of truth? How would I join that to my data?" Alation puts tons of tribal knowledge at your fingertips and saves you from wild-goose-chases and mistakes. **What do you dislike about Alation?** One of the only downsides I can think of is that long-term analysts don't always have buy-in. They think they know their area and their data. Some don't see the value of adding their queries to Alation to help others. To mitigate this, I often add their queries myself (say if they emailed me something), so others can refer to them, and I can easily search for them again in the future. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I do tons of COVID reporting, and the questions never stop pouring in. Alation helps me to write code faster (because I am not having to ask multiple people for help) , so it has been instrumental in me keeping up with the demands of my job. ### 23. A wiki and Yelp 2-in-1 tool tailor made for data analytics **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Richard L. | Senior Manager, Data Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** Link to database to get the most up-to-date schemas Scan database SQL logs to get the table/column usages Allow crowd-sourcing for metadata input so everyone can provide input (like wiki) Provide advanced tagging to link articles, email conversations to actual tables and columns Allow Yelp-like rating for tables and columns so other users can use the best tables and avoid obsolete and misleading ones. Very rich and well documented API to support expansion, automation, integration with 3rd party tools. So when some features like data profiling, data quality, data lineage are not what you are looking for, you can always code in python to push custom content to Alation. Also they have very-well run training, webinar, online forum team to help grow the community. **What do you dislike about Alation?** depending on the deployment, it could become costly. the Conversation feature could be enhanced to become a more full fledged a forum so that people can ask questions in a traditional way. Also it will be neat to be able to send out daily digests, or of user's choice on frequency. **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** If you don't find a feature you like, don't worry. very likely it can be achieved by its API or 3rd party vendors. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Only static metadata, dynamic technical metadata and people's usage is not readily available Scattered Knowledge Old School Metadata Update ### 24. Awesome tool to search for your company's tables and columns **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jason C. | Senior E-Commerce Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 22, 2021 **What do you like best about Alation?** Can compose SQL queries with intelligence. The site allows you to search up tables and columns and users can submit queries and common joins. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Can sometimes crash the chrome browser when queries are long. **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** Definitely try it as it connects to different connections like traditional, qubole etc **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Solving relational database sql queries in Alation allowing the user the easily write sql and share results. ### 25. A very capable data catalog - and growing **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stefan L. | Enterprise Data Management Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Alation?** -allows for huge database of data objects -easy to use for data stewards, data admins - and end users -continued evolution of capabilities (example: lineage) **What do you dislike about Alation?** -licensing model can be confusing -small desktop software for search/interaction would be helpful **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** -business user understanding of what data means, its purpose, quality and utilization -higher level of business data literacy -better business decisions based on data ### 26. User friendly, intuitive data catalog **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel P. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** User friendliness, very strong data curation capabilities, easy to add rich content and documentation. Business users can get started within minutes. Alation is probably the most efficient data curation tool. On the administrative site, the server is very easy to maintain. Not much work is needed. Upgrading to new versions is very straight forward with few tasks. Being part of the Alation Community, which is a very active one is also valuable. There are many webinars, and online discussions which means opportunities to learn from Alation itself and other customers. Having active client success managers means an efficient channeling of all cases that might need support. Support personnel are very friendly and helpful. Feature requests are handled very professionally, they are eager to improve the product itself. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Although easy to add and manage business glossaries, the function set is not that rich. Some examples of missing functionality. - Visualization of taxonomy, no tree view or even graph view of glossary - Handling of synonymous missing - Import/export for glossaries - Mapping of business glossary terms to data fields is a manual process, no support for mapping documents **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** First and foremost it is used for data curation, search and find, and conversations. We are also using endorsements, warnings etc. It is very well received by business users. They like the interface, and especially the top down approach for data curation. Some well informed people are no longer bottlenecks and can focus on their valuable tasks instead of answering the same questions over and over again. ### 27. An innovative Data Catalog Tool **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** The road map of the potential of the Data Catalog. Always improving the product and getting into areas to make it the one stop shop. Alation is easy to use, like a google search, a smart algorithm to show the right search results to the top using natural language processing. There's data popularity, sampling and lineage that makes the tool more useful. The collaborative feature of being able to start conversation any where in Alation is great. Getting notified by email and having a dedicated inbox in Alation helps as well. Analytics is a useful data base to help show statistics and trends of what users are doing. Overall, the tool is pretty easy to use and can be quite educational. Having all the data in one place in your company and being able to search is very powerful for a company. **What do you dislike about Alation?** There limited testing done on each build, always an issue in each release. Needs more stability. There are performance issues from time to time, we've had to figure out ways to optimize the database and needed to change our disk and ram size a few times in order to accommodate our data sets and performance. No PowerBI connector for visualization reports. No easy way to request access to the data or shop for data. Needs more lineage capabilities for automated lineage. There are still some short comings but I believe they are working on addressing it all in the upcoming releases. **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** Alation is very complete tool and can be used and deployed for most clients. If there aren't to many requirements, what Alation can do well is be the data catalog tool. If you require more from your users, it's probably doable in one fashion or another. If you need automated lineage, or better insights to your users, or being able to stay current with GDPR and other Privacy guidelines. All can be done with Alation with a bit of work. Out of the box you get everything you need to setup a catalog. Just need to ensure the connections are compatible with Alation. If your data is mostly in a SAS environment then do more diligent research. If you want to report use of Dashboards in the company, Tableau works great but PowerBI is not supported out of the box. Advice review your requirements and understand what's needed so you can make the right choice. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** One place for the Data Dictionary for our company. Who the experts are and having a data taxonomy. In addition, being able to show lineage for transformations. ### 28. Data catloging and analytics tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhay S. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** I am the platform admin and Alation SME for more that 2 years. I liked Alation Analytics feature most which are providing so many in-depth knowledge of the system. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Alation is some how lagging from Data Governance front. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I mostly worked with Data Analyst and Data Scientist and there primary goal is to extract relevant information from different kind of sources and create lineages. ### 29. Alation works well for a small shop but still not mature enough for enterprise big time **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** Easy to browse around for schema, tables & metadata about them, see sample queries. Search is fast & straight forward. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Difficult to find the relationships, cardinality, and other metadata about data models & linages between data sources. Often extremely slow to run any query of reasonable complexity. **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** If you are small or midsize shop, go ahead give it a try. For large enterprise, there may be better alternatives offering more features & better performance if you can afford them. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provide a central web portal & repository to store & find metadata about data in the enterprise. ### 30. Alation review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** Popularity and usability of the tool for the enterprise **What do you dislike about Alation?** support and technical change needs of their product **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** Get commitments from your C suite and get them to be proponents of the product **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We did not know how siloed we were till we implemented ### 31. Data Catalog that facilitates collaboration between business users and developers **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** Our team really likes the collaborative features, as well as the tool being tailored to business user's needs **What do you dislike about Alation?** Support and issue resolution times, low transparency on upcoming features **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data transparency, Knowledge retention, Data Governance Creating a common understanding for Data Analytics projects ### 32. Best query catalog **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 08, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** Best catalog and query scheduler available **What do you dislike about Alation?** Option to make specific query private or public **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Query catalog ### 33. Easy to use **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Staffing and Recruiting | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Alation?** Simple to use interface, great customer service **What do you dislike about Alation?** I overall enjoy Alation's software solution. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Time efficiency at work ### 34. Does not replace a local database manager tool **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Megan M. | Reporting & Measurement Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 14, 2019 **What do you like best about Alation?** Collaboration features, when used widely **What do you dislike about Alation?** Slow, buggy, hard to use collaboratively **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** Unless collaboration is greatly required for your business needs and no other software can solve them, Alation is not a better alternative to local database tools. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Alation as our main query editor and executor. I perform most of my query writing and testing in Alation. The collaboration features, such as sharing and publishing queries, defining metadata, displaying most used columns, have great potential to provide leverage, if widely used by people in the organization. However they are difficult to use. For example, when sharing a query, an email is sent to the recipient with an useless subject line ([Colleague] has shared a query with you) with a body section that provides no further information. It would be useful if Alation could at least share the title of the query or a preview of the query. Instead I need to open the query in order to understand what exactly was shared. Then, once I have clicked on the link, it does not bring me to the editor and executor UI. I need to then click on Compose. However, I still cannot run the query because it is in read-only mode and instead have to save it as another query. There are so many steps in order to simply run the query and see some output, that I usually copy and paste my queries into a messaging app. **Official Response from Chitra Rakesh:** > Dear Megan, Thanks for sharing your concerns. Please note that they have been resolved in Alation R6 as our customer success lead, Monoo Prasad, would have communicated. With the new query collaboration features, you can see the title, connect to Compose, and directly run the query. We sincerely hope that you're able to collaborate better with these enhancements. Cheers, Team Alation ### 35. Great data catalog for organizations with lots of data producers and consumers **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 23, 2019 **What do you like best about Alation?** Ability to search for columns and tables. Also like the ability to write SQL queries and see the commonly used join criteria. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Limited data lineage capabilities to show how data moves from one data source to another. **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** Great tool for organizations with many data analysts who are hands on working with the data and writing SQL **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Sharing metadata about our data assets, writing and sharing queries. Benefits are knowledge management and stronger data governance. ### 36. Gets the job done but with quirks **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Iun C. | Business Intelligence Associate, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 13, 2019 **What do you like best about Alation?** Areas of Alation that I like are the simple UI and straightforward organization of the tool. Searching is fairly easy for different tables or schemas and my favorite part is being about to work across different databases (Teradata and Hive). For the most part, no major issues with Alation. It works well for our business. **What do you dislike about Alation?** The description and color-coding feature to describe tables isn’t too helpful and actually makes information confusing. Biggest pet peeve with a Alation is also the runtime errors with querying sometimes. Often enough if I have the page sitting for a few extra minutes, I have to refresh the page in order to run the query again. Not a big deal but could make the experience better. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ease of SQL queries across Teradata and Hive databases. Ability to save frequently used queries to rerun often. I especially like how Alation will auto save queries so if you accidentally click out it’ll still be there when you come back. **Official Response from Chitra Rakesh:** > Iun, thanks for leaving us a review. Our customer success lead, Monoo Prasad, connected with you in March 2019 to address the matter and again recently to provide an update. We sincerely hope that both of your concerns have been resolved. Happy cataloging and querying! Team Alation ### 37. Syncing different systems **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 12, 2019 **What do you like best about Alation?** The ability for it to sync all the different databases into one view. This helps us to have a clear view of all DB's. **What do you dislike about Alation?** completed rules oriented sometimes you have to give in all the details like sematics, metadata frameework details. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** No problems ### 38. Helping the company for the data and the computer **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Goods | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2019 **What do you like best about Alation?** Customer service very helpful and welcoming **What do you dislike about Alation?** Nothing all good and very nice customer service **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** The company cannot use the computer and adding so they did good job ### 39. Very good data discovery and data collaboration features **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex A. | Senior Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2018 **What do you like best about Alation?** The global search is a life saver, commenting on data sources bring data engineers and analysts together. For large corporation it's easy to catalogue their data as long as everybody gets on board. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Product is still at a startup level, setup is still not yet ready for enterprise even though some big players are using it. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data discovery data collaboration Cross-database queries ### 40. Great Cloud Solution **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris N. | Customer Insights Survey Manager / Research Lead, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 30, 2017 **What do you like best about Alation?** I like that it stays connected and doesn't time out when I un-dock from my work station. **What do you dislike about Alation?** The default window sizing is not ideal for my work setup, but it can adjusted. **Recommendations to others considering Alation:** We use this in addition to Teradata SQL assistant. It's a great cloud solution and ease of documentation is a nice feature along with a clean, slick layout that works well. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Pulling data from our data warehouse to run advanced analytics, measure descriptive statistics, and track contact reductions for our call center. ### 41. Makes SQL queries fast and easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 16, 2018 **What do you like best about Alation?** I love that the full query environment exists in the cloud, including session persistence across devices. **What do you dislike about Alation?** Access permissions were tricky to set up, but ultimately sorted out. **What problems is Alation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Fast and easy enablement of users to write and run their own queries. ## Alation Discussions - [Which three are capabilities of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure data catalog service?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/which-three-are-capabilities-of-oracle-cloud-infrastructure-data-catalog-service) - 1 comment - [View Alation pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/alation/reviews?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-30+00%3A13%3A56+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=af32c6a8-14ce-48d3-83f7-9ed3f798da38&secure%5Btoken%5D=6b02103acbb88934e85aa931bfd829abbef9d9dab6d5d48095edbc4c1c9e13d2&format=llm_user) ## Alation Integrations - [Azure Virtual Machines](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-virtual-machines/reviews) - [Databricks](https://www.g2.com/products/databricks/reviews) - [Microsoft Power BI](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-microsoft-power-bi/reviews) - [Monte Carlo](https://www.g2.com/products/monte-carlo/reviews) - [Qlik Sense](https://www.g2.com/products/qlik-sense/reviews) - [Snowflake](https://www.g2.com/products/snowflake/reviews) - [Tableau](https://www.g2.com/products/tableau/reviews) ## Alation Features **Data Governance** - User Access Management - Dynamic Data Masking - Data Lineage **Administration** - Data Modelling - Recommendations - Workflow Management - Dashboards and Visualizations **Management** - Business Glossary - Data Discovery - Data Profililng - Reporting and Visualization - Data Lineage **Data management** - Metadata Management - Automation Features - Collaboration - Data Lineage - Data Discovery **Data Preparation** - Search - Data Quality and Cleansing - Data Transformation - Data Modeling **Compliance** - Sensitive Data Compliance - Training and Guidelines - Policy Enforcement - Compliance Monitoring **Security** - Access Control - Roles Management - Compliance Management **Reporting** - Intelligent Insights - Dashboards **Collaboration** - Commenting - Profiling and Classification - Business and Data Glossary - Metadata Management **Data Quality** - Data Preparation - Data Unification **Maintainence** - Data Quality Management - Policy Management **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Artificial Intelligence** - Machine Learning Recommendations - Natural Language Query - Automatic Data Cleansing **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Generative AI** - AI Text Generation - AI Text Summarization **Agentic AI - Data Governance** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Natural Language Interaction - Decision Making **Agentic AI - Machine Learning Data Catalog** - Autonomous Task Execution - Multi-step Planning - Cross-system Integration - Adaptive Learning - Decision Making ## Top Alation Alternatives - [Atlan](https://www.g2.com/products/atlan/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (132 reviews) - [Collibra](https://www.g2.com/products/collibra/reviews) - 4.2/5.0 (99 reviews) - [Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog](https://www.g2.com/products/informatica-enterprise-data-catalog/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (19 reviews)