10 Top Data Governance Tools in 2023: Software Compared
Discover the top data governance tools that can help you drive data consistency, trustworthiness, and availability, as well as ensure privacy and regulatory compliance.
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A data governance program is necessary to keep your data organized, accurate, and compliant with data privacy laws. Below, we compiled a list of some of the best data governance tools on the market.
Alation Data Governance App
Alation was founded in 2012 with the goal of improving the accessibility of enterprise data. Nine years later, the company launched its Data Governance App, which allows organizations to easily provide access to high-quality data, automate data governance processes, and improve data security. It’s designed for multi-cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
The company emphasizes four features of its data governance app: a centralized policy center, a governance workflow center, a tracking dashboard for governance progress, and a stewardship workbench. The workbench is powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning, which automatically identify stewards based on data usage.
Ataccama ONE
Ataccama is a Toronto-based data management company founded in 2007 that serves companies in a variety of industries, from financial services to government organizations. The Ataccama ONE platform is a single product for master data management, data governance, and data quality. The company offers several deployment options – Platform-as-a-Service, on-premises, and hybrid cloud infrastructure.
As a data governance solution, Ataccama ONE analyzes data quality and provides insights into which domains have the most issues. The platform includes a business glossary where you can define important terminology and organize them in a hierarchical order. Ataccama also features a centralized reference data management solution to eliminate silos and ensure everyone has access to the same data.
Atlan
Atlan is one of the leading active metadata management platforms which allow metadata to move in two directions: from the data source into the platform for analysis and from the platform to the source. Founded in 2018, the company recently announced a new AI feature – a “copilot” that allows data stewards to automatically draft terminology documentation, update data catalogs, and more.
The platform’s standout data governance features include automations for identifying and classifying sensitive data and the ability to personalize the user experience based on role, project, or business domain. Users may also suggest data changes. You can also set unique role-based permissions to control data access.
Collibra
Collibra’s Data Intelligence Cloud is a comprehensive tool for data governance and other aspects of data management. Founded in 2008, the company was spun out of the Semantic Technology and Applications Research Laboratory (STARLab) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
The Collibra Data Governance product allows for easy management of data stewards’ responsibilities. When a user spots issues with data, they can flag them for the right people directly from the platform. Collibra also includes customizable automated workflows for the usual data governance tasks. A business glossary, reference data management, and a centralized policy database are included as well.
erwin
erwin is a provider of enterprise data modeling and intelligence software that became part of Quest Software following a 2021 acquisition. Its data governance product, erwin Data Intelligence, combines the company’s data catalog, data literacy, data quality, and data connectors solutions in one.
erwin gathers and transforms metadata from all of your sources and compiles it into an easily accessible centralized hub. You can personalize the user view based on individual roles to provide stakeholders with the most relevant information. The dashboard also provides a data quality score and an indicator of data sensitivity to flag potential issues and ensure compliance.
User reviews:
PeerSpot: 4.4/5
Pricing: Not available
Free trial: No
IBM Cloud Pak for Data
IBM’s Cloud Pak for Data is part of its extensive suite of analytics products. It’s built on data fabric architecture, which retrieves and unifies data assets from the cloud and data pipelines. In addition to data governance, Cloud Pak for Data is designed for data integration, AI governance, data science, and machine learning operations.
For effective governance, IBM provides data quality insights with the ability to implement custom evaluation criteria. It can automatically conceal sensitive data and provide recommendations to lower potential privacy risks. Cloud Pak for Data also enables self-service, so users don’t need to rely on the IT team to access the information they need.
Informatica Axon
Axon, Informatica’s data governance product, became a part of the company after its acquisition of Diaku in 2017. It enables data democratization, data quality monitoring, and automation of manual data stewardship tasks, among other features.
With Informatica Axon, you can connect metadata with its business context so all data users can easily find and understand the needed assets. The data marketplace feature allows you to publish data collections, such as product codes or churn prediction models, for other users to access. The customizable data governance dashboard also includes widgets for easy monitoring of data assets, data quality scores and issues, and more.
SAP Master Data Governance
The SAP Master Data Governance solution is part of the SAP Business Technology Platform, which also includes tools for AI, application development, business process integration, data and analytics, and enterprise planning and analysis.
Key features of the SAP data governance software include data consolidation, master data quality monitoring, and the ability to assign ownership of data attributes. It also supports cloud-based deployment.
User reviews:
Pricing: From $56 per 5,000 master data objects per month
Free trial: Yes
Talend Data Fabric
Talend is a provider of data integration and management tools. Founded in 2005, the company was acquired by the business analytics platform Qlik in 2023. Talend Data Fabric is its data governance platform that also supports other data management processes, such as integration.
The platform offers self-service tools for data preparation and has reusable rules that you can apply to data sets of all sizes. It also includes guardrails that set access controls based on roles. The extensive data stewardship features simplify the prioritization and monitoring of various data projects and incorporate machine learning in fixing errors.
User reviews:
G2: 4.4/5
Pricing: Not available
Free trial: Yes
Segment Protocols: The ultimate data governance tool
Twilio Segment is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that serves product, marketing, and engineering teams at both startup and enterprise companies. Segment helps organizations collect, manage, and activate their data, create unified customer profiles with real-time identity resolution, and design highly personalized marketing campaigns.
Teams can leverage Segment Protocols to guarantee data quality at scale by implementing a universal tracking plan, which creates internal alignment on what data is being tracked (and from where) while standardizing naming conventions. With Protocols, you can also automate QA checks to automatically block data that does not adhere to your pre-planned tracking plan before it reaches its target destinations.
Segment also offers several features to protect customers’ data and privacy, like automatically detecting and classifying personally identifiable information. Additionally, you can implement rules that block the collection of certain data, such as credit card numbers.
To simplify regulatory compliance with the CCPA and GDPR, Segment’s Privacy Portal allows you to automatically manage data subject rights and fulfill user requests (like data deletion).
With Segment, businesses are also able to automatically sync their unified customer profiles with their data warehouse for further enrichment. And with reverse ETL, these customer profiles can then be activated in downstream tools and apps.
User reviews:
G2: 4.6/5
Pricing: Three pricing tiers: free, $120 per month, and custom
Free trial: No
How to select the right data governance tool
Keep the following questions in mind when evaluating data governance tools.
How will it help you achieve your goals and priorities? If one of your priorities is to implement processes to comply with data privacy laws, then the data governance tool needs features to support that goal.
How will it work with your data governance framework? Your data governance framework defines the roles of data stewards and other stakeholders. With the introduction of a new data governance tool, you might need to adjust their responsibilities.
What kind of deployment does it support? Your choice of data governance tool is also influenced by whether you need on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployment.
Who needs access to the data? Depending on the data users at your organization, the tool might need to support self-service and allow employees from different departments to use it with little to no IT support.
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Frequently asked questions
A data governance tool is a software product that helps organizations manage the collection, storage, usage, and sharing of data assets in accordance with their data governance policy.
Data governance tools and processes play an important role during the ETL (extract, transform, load) process, ensuring good data quality, protecting data from cybersecurity threats, and preventing the loss of data integrity.
Segment Protocols is a tool that supports data governance by helping organizations follow data quality best practices and automatically validate data.
In the simplest terms, data governance is a set of rules and responsibilities related to your organization’s data assets, while data management refers to the tools you use to enact your data governance policy.
A data warehouse supports good data governance by compiling data from multiple sources to make it available in a single system.
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