Alation

Alation is a pioneering data catalog and governance platform that has helped define the modern data intelligence category since its founding in 2012. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Alation was one of the first vendors to apply machine learning to the challenge of enterprise data cataloging, and it continues to be recognized as a leader in the space by analysts including Gartner and Forrester. The platform is designed to help organizations find, understand, trust, and govern their data, making it easier for data teams, analysts, and business users to collaborate around a shared understanding of enterprise data assets. Alation's data catalog uses behavioral analysis and machine learning to automatically curate metadata, suggest descriptions, and surface the most relevant data assets based on actual usage patterns. This approach dramatically reduces the manual effort traditionally required to maintain a data catalog and ensures that the catalog stays current and useful over time. The platform also provides a collaborative environment where users can annotate data, ask questions, share knowledge, and document tribal expertise, creating a living repository of institutional data knowledge. On the governance side, Alation offers data governance capabilities including policy management, data stewardship workflows, and compliance monitoring. Its governance features are tightly integrated with the catalog, allowing organizations to define policies that reference specific data assets and track adherence across the enterprise. Alation also provides data quality indicators, trust flags, and lineage visualization to help users assess the reliability and provenance of any data set before using it for analysis or reporting. Alation has established strong partnerships in the cloud data ecosystem, most notably with Snowflake, and integrates with a wide range of databases, data warehouses, BI tools, and cloud platforms. The platform is SOC 2 certified and supports GDPR compliance workflows. While Alation excels as a data catalog and collaboration platform, some users note that its governance and policy management features are less mature compared to dedicated governance platforms like Collibra. Pricing is enterprise-tier, and the platform is best suited for organizations with significant data estate complexity that need to empower a broad base of data consumers.