Alation Pros and Cons

I appreciate Alation's user-friendly interface, which simplifies the process of finding and accessing data. Its intuitive design enhances productivity and efficiency in navigating through various datasets and reports. Additionally, the platform's robust search capabilities empower users to quickly locate relevant information, supporting informed decision-making. The collaborative features within Alation foster effective communication and knowledge sharing among team members, contributing to a more collaborative and cohesive working environment, which we'd love to take advantage of soon. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

While Alation offers many valuable features, there are a few areas where improvements could be made. One aspect that I find challenging is the complexity of setting up and configuring certain functionalities, such as customizing data governance policies or integrating with external tools. Streamlining these processes and providing clearer guidance would enhance the user experience and reduce the learning curve for new users. Additionally, although the platform offers extensive documentation and support resources, navigating through them can sometimes be overwhelming, leading to difficulties in finding specific information or troubleshooting issues. Simplifying the documentation structure and improving search functionality would greatly benefit users in efficiently accessing the help they need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alation is extremely flexible and able to fit small to large organizations. They tread the perfect line between analytics and governance. Their vision perfectly aligns with our organization's data management vision of universally understood and trusted data available across the company. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

There is definitely some room for growth with lineage capabilities. Alation has been upfront with their plans to rapidly enhance lineage functionality. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alation strives for the best industrial business solultions and offers wide range of collections in their ecosystems be it across different categories like Finance, healthcare, etc., Alation delivers the best product which is ease of use and provide number of features across their deliverables. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Alation has great examples of showcasing business usecases to the clients by addressing and fostering their problems that they want to leverage. Highly recommended platform and there's no dislike takeaway since they provide ease of integration and ease of implementation in their own catalog. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What is most helpful about it is how simple it is to add policies and terms to the catalog. Combining this with easy data dictionary upload helps data stewards and SMEs effectively memorialize metadata to the data marketplace. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The cost per data steward is a bit high is one thing. Another thing is having to pay to enable column level data linieage. Sure you can get by with just table level, but column level lineage is key for impact analysis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

My favorite feature of Alation is the lineage graph. We actively reference the lineage graph during our routine discussions in our organization.

Currently exploring the API and getting more familiar with the Health API Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I'm looking forward to being able to catalog our ML models in the near future. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Integrations ability and automated lineage Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Current install of Alation is on prem and only a few years old. Already being pushed to cloud which is good but costs more money and several new features that make Alarion a much more complete tool are only available in new cloud tool and those features are still relatively new and unproven. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It's just stunning how easy it's been to stand up Alation, get it customized, get data sources connected and get people interested in using it. I love the interface and the intuitiveness of it and our programmers have been working with the APIs, working from Alation recipes that get us most of the way there out of the box. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

We've found no down sides of Alation - the experience has been positive for us in every aspect, from implementation to curation. Some features that we would like are still in development, but we knew that going in and Alation has been open about what's coming and when we can expect it. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I very much enjoy Alations data cataloging tools and ability to create a data community within my organization that exists in a central location. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

It is sometimes difficult to get some users to participate, though that is not really a.fault of the software itself. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Firstly, the Alation team are very customer centric. Regular, consistently useful comms, on point, every time. The product is very easy to deploy in AWS, and connecting to our DW and reporting systems has been mostly a doddle. We've had a few issues in connecting to Kafka, but that has been because of our setup.

The product is really intuitive to use, and quickly highlights gaps in current processes around documenting data sources within a DW environment. The fact that it can pull lineage from warehouses is really useful for impact analysis. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think there is a gap within the specific Power BI connector, in that I'm sure there is more metadata behind the scenes that Alation can tap into, but doesnt. For example, where people are creating reports in Power BI, making use of calculations and functions, it'd be super handy to be able to identify these, and compare for duplications across the org. Otherwise, there isnt much to complain about! Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Governance across the company is critical and we're slowly getting there. It's simple as a google search. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Not as user friendly on the backend. Some things require research. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.