# Apache Ranger Reviews **Vendor:** The Apache Software Foundation **Category:** [Data Governance Tools](https://www.g2.com/categories/data-governance-tools) **Average Rating:** 4.2/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 26 ## About Apache Ranger Apache Ranger is a framework designed to enable, monitor and manage comprehensive data security across the Hadoop platform. ## Apache Ranger Reviews ### 1. Granular authorization and centralized access for most of the hadoop components **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ramesh B. | Vice President, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Easy to integrate with any authorization interface and centralized audit board. It's easy to implement and write our own access control within week from start to production. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Installation on secured environment is difficult. Apache Ranger documents are outdated and it;s only possible for people who are mostly involved in development can easily set it up. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Centralized access to manage all of hadoop ecosystem access control, Hive, Presto and HDFS is plugins are easily managed through Ranger today. Our story with Hive: We have used hive extensively in our ecosystem and we used to manage the user access from SQL based hive access control, Over the period of time when more and more users are on boarded to the system it was impossible to manage the access control and very difficult to manage it, That's when Apache Ranger came as rescue and we could manage 600+ policies. Our story with Presto: In a federated environment we wanted to access control multiple connectors within one roof, That's where presto-ranger-plugin saves you. In a presto world there is no other access control is as powerful as Apache Ranger. ### 2. Apache Ranger: A centralised authorization framework for Hadoop and related components. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhishek S. | Senior Software Engineer, Computer Software, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** - Consistent user experience for managing authorization across all the services present in your Data lake/Workload clusters. - Audit Support helps admins/users to track access. - Column Masking/Row Filtering features help in sensitive data masking. [PII, HIPPA, GDPR] - Supports various authentication systems (LDAP, AD, Kerberos, etc) - Ranger Admin UI helps the admins to manage the authorization in a simplified manner. - Supports Attribute/Tag-based access control along with conventional Role-based access control. - Can be easily integrated with any new service/component. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** - CLI support is not present for using Apache Ranger. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Helps in achieving fine-grained access control in your Big Data workload clusters. - Apache Ranger supports a vast number of plugins support already available [HDFS, HBase, Yarn, Atlas, Knox, Solr, Kafka, NiFi, etc] - Very easy to use and manage authorization in your production clusters and track audits to avoid any unwanted access. ### 3. How Apache Ranger is beneficial to secure our Bigdata Environment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zeba A. | Bigdata & Cloud Senior Admin, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 12, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** I like it the most because Apache Ranger provides a user-friendly UI and its integration with Apache Ambari in the Hortonworks platform. We can centrally manage the security of the Hadoop Components. By using this tool we can easily manage the service-based access to a specific user, to which user we wanted to give which kind of access, and that we can easily manage from the Ranger UI. I found it a very interesting and useful service provided by apache. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** During my hands-on experience with this tool, I could not find anything in it to dislike. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** I personally found it a very useful tool, So I will recommend going for it without thinking twice **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** In our project we had the cluster in on-prem servers, We had individual users. But managing authorization for individual users is quite difficult. Apache Ranger helped to overcome this problem. Like using this service we managed who can access what. Using Ranger we limited the users and its quite easy to do so with the help of Ranger UI ### 4. Apache Ranger is a great service which can be used in order to manage data across the users. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kumar C. | Azure Big Data Senior Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Apache Ranger is a great service which can be used in order to manage data across the users in a secure way. It is east to integrate & use with any hadoop platforms where you can create users group and give access to users on a snapshot of data, rather then giving access to whole database. Also, It easily integrates with Active directory. You can customize it as per you requirement. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Features like getting consolidated error logged which can be investigated from the UI itself. This would be really helpful while investigating any issues. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** We should work on improving the documentation that what all features are available and how we can implement these features. Their were number of occasion were we got stuck as we were totally unaware that how we can debug issues related to ranger or implement some of it's features and had to wait for an expert. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use to integrate Ranger with Hive and control the access to AD users on the Hive databases. ### 5. Apache Ranger in Big Data (Hadoop) federation reference model **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dr. Feras M. A. | Researcher, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Orchestration, compatibility, open-source **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** more integration with containers and more performance analysis **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** centralized policy management for in production Hadoop ecosystem Ranger provides dynamic data masking (in movement) for several frameworks of the Hadoop stack (e.g., HBase, Storm, Knox, Solr, Kafka, and YARN). Our recently published paper in the FGCS (Q1 journal) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X19315948 used the Ranger admin console to set/modify policies (policy enforcement). In that research, we defined a reference architecture for big data systems that utilize Apache Ranger and the ACL to manage repository policies. Ranger will verify the fine-grain client access control, i.e., which HBase/Hive DB and table columns they have access to, Kafka queues, and HDFS level of access. Meanwhile, the ACL will verify the access control of the remaining entities. However, Ranger policies will take priority over those of ACL. If a Ranger policy does not exist, then local ACL will take effect. Hadoop daemon authentications and internal communication (such as task status) will primarily rely on using the Kerberos principal and keytab file locations and are enforced using Hadoop core access control, i.e., ACL. Another case was employing the Ranger Audit Server in the Hadoop federation configuration. Our proposed big data federation access broker will aggregate all access logs into a centralized repository (RDBMS, HDFS, or Log4j). We demonstrate how to use Ranger and other frameworks for Audit Management and Analysis. In sum, Apache Ranger provides centralized Hadoop security administration and management, while Knox streamlines security for services and external users who access the cluster's data and execute jobs. ### 6. Apache Ranger **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 06, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Authorization on Hive and HDFS are done very easily using Ranger policies and also I like the Ranger Audits option. There is an option of masking as well which is really useful with security perspective. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Ranger will not support Impala. Audit files for Ranger plugin components do not appear immediately in S3 after cluster creation **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** Ranger is a very handy tool to manage Hadoop permissions and many more things. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** access control policies can be managed by security administrators consistently across Hadoop environment. Ranger also enables the community to add new systems for authorisation even outside Hadoop ecosystem, with a robust plugin architecture, that can extend with minimal effort. ### 7. It is very user friendly, easy to understand even by non technical people. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** mustajab a. | Assistant Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** I really loved the security zone feature, it really helps in assigning temporary policy to certain users. Masking feature is also really a plus point for me as this comes real handy during PCI-DSS audits. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** I haven't quite figured out exporting the audit report to an external dashboard, I found some blogs using rest APIs but don't think this would be helpful in exporting large data. If this feature might be included it will help quiet a lot. Also Data profiling or security tagging is missing in Ranger, visibility in audit logs will really help as including a risk rating on the type of information being accessed. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mostly Access control and Governance. ### 8. Take control of you data **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Himanshu R. | Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 20, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Real time data masking . Data access controls for not very conventional Databases and query engine like Presto . Ease of set up . A perfect governing layer . **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** You should be familiar with big data technologies and complication for data access and governance control which comes with them at first place to appreciate apache ranger . **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** You have lot of analyst making use of PII data , and you are facing problems controlling access anf monitoring data lineage do check out apache ranger **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data masking of customer related data at query time . ### 9. Excellent tool for centralised security and fine grained authorisation management **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arpan R. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 22, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** I like the concept that all the security management is done via single tool. Ranger provides standardised authorisation method across most of the Hadoop components. Policy management from a single UI, REST APIs and also A/D integration. Audit and reporting mechanism are good. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Sometimes configuration is tricky and sometimes errors don't explain the root cause. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have implemented solutions using Apache Ranger at various client locations to solve the concerns about centralised policy and authorisation management for the Hadoop components. We can generate the audit reports, who accessed what and when. ### 10. A better security,audit and governance for sensitive, non sensitive data **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lakshmi Narayana J. | Senior Hadoop Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 23, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Easy policy,tag based security. Encryption and decryption of data at-rest and in-transit. Better audit controls **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** None. I like it better than Sentry. Better to included manual ldap sync button to pull latest users, groups from ldap so that we don't have to wait for next sync interval or restarting ranger server. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** Expecting a better way of secured environment? Apache Ranger is the one to select, which can be installed and configure in minutes. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** User access provisioning. Auditing. DEK of encrypted zones ### 11. Excellent fine graned auth based, much better than Sentry. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sebastian R. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 30, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Easy to use interface, intuivite, abaility to have plugins. Fast. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** UI/UX a bit old, could use some more modern desing. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** Use it! **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Granting access, ACLs, and audit control. Being able to manage all the data governance. ### 12. Likely **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Samar Z. | Business intelligence Data Engineer (specialist), Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** user rights roles management , and the GUI view makes every thing simpler. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** need to cron the jobs for the modification of user rights . **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** we has enabled security and mange logs or ours production cluster we easily manage the rules and to manage the users . ### 13. Excellent work in apache ranger **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nitesh C. | Technical Architect / Technical Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 18, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Its very helpful to give permission to hdfs, knox, hive. Its very easy to use **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Nothing dislike point. Its very easy steps to setup ranger **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** When i give permission to hdfs storage ### 14. Pretty good security for Hadoop environments **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marcel-Jan K. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 14, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** The ability to secure HDFS and Hive. Also the ability to connect policies to Active Directory groups. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** The GUI might have been a little better in places, but nothing comes to mind. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've been using Ranger to protect sensitive data in the datalake of my employer (a year ago) ### 15. Best tool to handle data security at a finr grained level **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Market Research | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 11, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Fine grained access to the services and role based management **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Not so muvh about this but UI can be improved a bit **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Centralized security administration to manage all security related tasks in a central UI or using REST APIs. ### 16. Apache Ranger is best for Security and User acces control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Umesh Z. | Software Engineer - Big Data, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 01, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** It has best look and feel of WebUI and very easy to use. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Apache Ranger work very well with hive only. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Giving access of Particular database tables to specific user from tableue ### 17. Better Governance Tool in Big data **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 12, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** It has the feature of controlling access at column level and tagg based policy. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Audit log should be more clear while getting denial for any request **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** If you are looking for Access control tool in Big Data, i would suggest you ranger **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** To control user access to specific table and rows and columns. Better user access management ### 18. Easy to manage and use **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Features and UI is the main thing, i like most **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** When we are defining Masking for Hive table's column, we have create one policy per column that's very annoying and there should be some functionality to make it work on hive **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are keeping business user to stop access restricted data ### 19. Apache Ranger gives us a strong data governance thru Authorization. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 23, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Tag based policies are pretty good to use **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Need to have more plug-in for other stack services **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** Must use this product **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Authorization are getting in easy way. ### 20. My review of Apache ranger **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 19, 2021 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** About the security and the ACL's it provides **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** not having the encryption and decryption facilities **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Giving access to some people , restricting access to some files ### 21. Apache ranger is great tool to easily fine grain your level of security in Big data and Hadoop. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Very simple to fine grain security in Hadoop **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Not integrated to Cloudera or Hortonworks, you have to install as 3rd party. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** I recommend to use apache ranger **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Require some level of expertise to install. ### 22. Data Architect **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 27, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Convenience of centralized access control on Hadoop **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Enhanced security model beyond native ones popular with components; delegation model preferred **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Hadoop technologies access control ### 23. Apache ranger for authentication **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** We mainly use apache nifi for data transformation and Ranger for authentication **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Felt like if the user interface should be somewhat seamless **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Authentication access for different AD groups across our organization ### 24. Ranger makes things easier **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 24, 2020 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Ease of use and compatibility. Audits and logging **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** There can be little improvement for the GUI **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Cluster audit , creating policies ### 25. Does as advertised, but lacks broad support **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2019 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** Convenient to setup granular functional policies for access controls for Hive **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** Lack of functionality to support across multiple engines like Spark or Presto. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** Good option to consider for granular data access control with Hive. Needs further investment in the developer community to port functionality for Spark and Presto. **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** Granular data access controls for data privacy ### 26. Securing Data **Rating:** 1.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Writing and Editing | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 13, 2018 **What do you like best about Apache Ranger?** I love that I can easily monitor and control administrative and visitors usage. **What do you dislike about Apache Ranger?** As someone with a limited technical background, I wish the user steps were broken down in a clearer way. **Recommendations to others considering Apache Ranger:** Consider other Apache models **What problems is Apache Ranger solving and how is that benefiting you?** security issues and data dispersed among administrators - [View Apache Ranger pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/apache-ranger/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-06-15+21%3A21%3A18+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=e421b04b-197f-4be4-8263-362015572f75&secure%5Btoken%5D=7e96609a5713c73f84ae957a3ce236a938f51076b94c58a5c707ba196827e2a5&format=llm_user) ## Apache Ranger Features **Administration** - Data Modelling - Recommendations - Workflow Management - Dashboards and Visualizations **Management** - Business Glossary - Data Discovery - Data Profililng - Reporting and Visualization - Data Lineage **Compliance** - Sensitive Data Compliance - Training and Guidelines - Policy Enforcement - Compliance Monitoring **Security** - Access Control - Roles Management - Compliance Management **Data Quality** - Data Preparation - Data Distribution - Data Unification **Maintainence** - Data Quality Management - Policy Management **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 ## Top Apache Ranger Alternatives - [Egnyte](https://www.g2.com/products/egnyte/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (1,136 reviews) - [Twilio Segment](https://www.g2.com/products/twilio-segment/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (555 reviews) - [Teradata Autonomous Knowledge Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/teradata-autonomous-knowledge-platform/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (355 reviews)