Alation Data Catalog vs. IBM watsonx.data intelligence

Alation is pretty easy to implement. We were able to do it ourselves with Alation's help, no 3rd party needed. We are currently migrating to Snowflake, and it has been helpful with prioritizing what gets migrated. It's great for searching for tables and views. I even use it when I'm trying to find fields in a large table. If I'm not sure if the field is called first_name, firstname, or fname, I can use Alation's table page, filter for fields with "name", and easily find it.

Incentivized

It's great for data discovery and analyzing the quality of that data, and it's great for managing that catalog with strong rules and policies. It has an easy policy management and data governance rules and has a very good graphic tool to show the integration between business terms and physical data not good for managing data privacy and mapping personal data handling processes

Incentivized

• Ability to link objects using the @ symbol. It allows us to easily provide a way to get more information or context. So if the business concept is part of a hierarchy, we can link to the other terms in that hierarchy.
• The customization is really helpful. Most object types have robust customization options. Others are less so, but it is improving. We've created multiple custom fields to support our data governance framework.
• The search feature with filtering is helpful in narrowing down what you're looking for.

Incentivized

• Data
• Storage
• Collection

Incentivized

• The lineage UI is not ready for primetime. I would not recommend this feature for my users at this time because it's too complex to understand and is visually difficult to track down specific paths.
• The underlying infrastructure of the on-premise version of the software is fragile and unnecessarily complicated, using too many modules and technologies.
• The license model of the on-premise version contains too many add-ons. I would like to pay one price and get all of the features.

Incentivized

• Data discovery performance.
• Discovery of unstructured data.
• Integration with Privacy Management API.

Incentivized

Mostly because the search feature is case sensitive. This causes issues when users are searching for an industry standard acronym. These acronyms exist as attributes in thousands of places across our data ecosystem. Alation allows stewards to endorse attributes so that these endorsed items rise to the top of search results. The problem is no one types acronyms in caps in a search field. Alation returns results matching the case (lower-case) and in several instances the endorsed attributes don't even appear on the first page of results

From the RightStart Program to the Customer Success team to technical support, Alation has it all covered. They respond quickly and expertly to answer my questions and fix my problems.

Incentivized

Alation might not have the same level of technical capabilities and features as these others (though it's very close) but what Alation offers is a neat and easy to learn UI. The new UI is even better, bringing more content onto the same space like Informatica while maintaining the friendly interface of the old UI

The IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog is a great amount of storage for the price. It is easily accessed by all users in the company. It provides great search features and clear pathways to locate documents. This is great for the team and our client when needing access to a specific document.

Incentivized

• We've had limited but very positive impact for 3 data subject matter experts. In the past they were fielding very similar questions from users stumbling on their data. Now, rather than responding to each email or chat message, they not only direct users to the catalog but they also reach out to me to do a walk-through of Alation's other features.
• Another positive impact is having the data dictionary live in one location. This has been tremendous in making the dictionaries accessible and consistent.

• Too early to determine ROI.
• I have had cases where IBM Watson has been offered with a suite of services
• With strengths in enterprise asset management, it has a lot of potential to be the platform of choice.

Incentivized