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Alation Data Catalog vs Cyera comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

Alation Data Catalog
Ranking in Data Governance
6th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
19
Ranking in other categories
Metadata Management (3rd)
Cyera
Ranking in Data Governance
24th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) (12th), Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) (9th), AI Data Analysis (20th), AI Security (12th), Data Security Platforms (DSP) (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2026, in the Data Governance category, the mindshare of Alation Data Catalog is 3.1%, down from 5.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cyera is 2.3%, down from 4.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Governance Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Alation Data Catalog3.1%
Cyera2.3%
Other94.6%
Data Governance
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2776527 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data and Analytics Consultant at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Increases data discoverability and boosts self-service analytics through enriched metadata and intuitive search
The best features that Alation Data Catalog offers are its search capabilities and the fact that it works with many different data platforms; it is essentially platform agnostic. The other piece that I really think is important is how easy it is to use as well as to manage. What makes the search capabilities of Alation Data Catalog stand out for me is the fact that every item within the catalog is indexed and searchable, as well as the filtering features that allow you to narrow down to just the types of assets that you need. Wildcard searches are also very helpful. It is a very intuitive tool, as long as you are using the filters. Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert. This has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration. It has allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog. We have been measuring the curation of content within the catalog that has gone up over time, and we have also seen the number of users in the catalog increase, as well as the amount of activity within the catalog increase. We were seeing about an average of about 20% increase month over month for the last few months.
reviewer2795301 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Compliance at a manufacturing company with 1-10 employees
Data discovery has accelerated and now drives faster classification and compliance mapping
The best features Cyera offers include agentless discovery and sampling as well as AI ML-based classifications. I find myself relying on the sampling the most, which makes everything really fast, but also the auto-classification and ML-based functionalities. The main thing that stands out to me and my team about the features is the speed of integration and how fast it does the discovery on the data. Once it discovers the data, it also maps it back to a ton of compliance frameworks and best practices that I can use to operationalize. Cyera has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to identify the highest risk areas but also provide better classification of data, which then leads to better data pillar maturity. Cyera has accomplished all three outcomes: saving time, reducing risk, and improving compliance scores, as the speed at which it discovers data was significantly faster.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing analysts to be onboarded much quicker and easier as a lot of their questions are answered within Alation Data Catalog."
"The tool's metadata cataloging is the most valuable feature."
"Alation Data Catalog provides a nice interface for connecting to the database, querying the data, and working on it."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization by allowing users to answer questions that they had without trying to track down an expert, which has saved them quite a bit of time and frustration, and allowed them to solve problems they probably would not have been able to solve had they not had the catalog."
"The most valuable feature is cloud integration."
"We can customize templates based on our use cases."
"We do see a return on investment, though I cannot share exact numbers."
"Alation Data Catalog has positively impacted my organization as collaboration has definitely improved at my company, allowing us to reach out and know who owns data, which has been especially helpful with turnover and in building out the analytics side of our bank."
"Cyera has positively impacted my organization because we have become more compliant."
"Cyera has an inbuilt set of policies implemented towards data security, especially cohering with Data Security Posture Management (DSPM)."
"I like how they model the data. They find data in different places that we didn't know, and they can give us a good idea if it's sensitive or not. They understand whether or not something is in the right region because, with the cloud posture management tool, we could see certain things in the infrastructure, but the way they dig into the data is what we like."
"The data discovery, data classification, and CSPM features are most valuable."
"Cyera has positively impacted my organization by allowing me to identify the highest risk areas but also provide better classification of data, which then leads to better data pillar maturity."
 

Cons

"Although the solution performs far better in terms of data cataloging, its data governance capabilities need improvement."
"We have had issues setting up the connectors and getting Alation's support team to resolve issues."
"Alation Data Catalog does not provide end-to-end data lineage."
"It would be good if the tool could show the output from the records while querying."
"Sometimes the search function in Alation Data Catalog isn't as effective as it could be."
"Alation Data Catalog needs to develop a lot in terms of data governance and would be improved with a built-in interactive data quality solution."
"The current search functionality in Alation Data Catalog is not necessarily great. It mostly searches titles, and we would prefer it to search the description and some of the source comments to find answers that we need."
"Alation Data Catalog can be improved by enhancing their lineage capabilities to make it easier for us as users to search the lineage without having to use the Alation Data Catalog user interface."
"They need to add a few things in the UI from an enterprise perspective. It's more along the lines of being able to self-service, have integrations, build alerts, and things like that. Outside of that, they work with us on the API and getting alerts into our SIEM and things like that. There's always a way to do something, and they're always available, which is nice."
"I would advise others looking into using Cyera to not do so."
"The licensing initially was tricky because it is based on storage as well as user count."
"There is room for improvement in making Cyera more user-friendly. Some parts were difficult to navigate, especially for those new to the IT industry."
"As a startup company, there is a long way for them to go in terms of scalability."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"A three-year agreement is better than a one-year rolling 12-month agreement from a price point of view. I'd recommend looking at a three-year deal because you can't stand up a catalog and produce value in 12 months."
"The solution is a little expensive."
"I don't have all the details on the pricing side, but the solution was more expensive than originally expected."
"The platform is moderately expensive compared to the other competitors in the market."
"Compared to the competitors, they are very reasonable."
"I don't know how much exactly it costs, but I know that it's a yearly thing. It's something that will cost money for any company because they're storing all this information. They're doing all this machine learning, and there are a lot of services on their backend that they got to pay for. I'm sure it gets translated back to the customers unless you have everything completely on-prem. If you're not doing much in the cloud, then I could see how it'd be cheaper, but if you have anything that's cloud-hosted and does all the work for you, there's going to be a cost associated with it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
6%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise15
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alation Data Catalog?
I haven't had any experience with pricing, setup costs, or licensing, as I have been strictly an end user and haven't had any administrative or management responsibilities.
What needs improvement with Alation Data Catalog?
Some of the downsides about the lineage is that some of the code is quite difficult to read as the formatting is a bit ugly sometimes. Alation Data Catalog can be improved with the lineage formatti...
What is your primary use case for Alation Data Catalog?
I have been using Alation Data Catalog for the past year now. My main use case for Alation Data Catalog is updating data descriptions and making sure analysts have what they need to do their job. W...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cyera ?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Cyera was that the licensing initially was tricky because it is based on storage as well as user count. I use Cyera to actually identify ho...
What needs improvement with Cyera ?
I think Cyera can improve by expanding beyond Israel.
What is your primary use case for Cyera ?
My main use case for Cyera is security. A quick specific example of how I use Cyera for security is scanning drives for secure information that shouldn't be there. Cyera helps with scanning drives ...
 

Also Known As

Alation
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Salesforce, Snowflake, Citrix, eBay, TripAdvisor, Albertsons, Nasdaq, Pfizer, LinkedIn, Finnair.
Cyera's customers include the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (Cboe), Granicus, Takeda, LifeLabs, United Talent Agency, ACV Auctions, and Armis
Find out what your peers are saying about Alation Data Catalog vs. Cyera and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
917,403 professionals have used our research since 2012.