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Atlan vs. Collibra: Which to Choose for Data Governance?

Date: 9/22/2024

Written by: Chris Sheng

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In this data-driven world, every organization is definitely in need of the best tools that can help them manage, govern, and put to good use their data assets. Among the top platforms for data governance, Atlan and Collibra have emerged as very strong contenders. Both offer a lot of features that help make the process of data management less cumbersome, enhance collaboration, and ensure better quality data.In this article, we are going to compare Atlan with Collibra, starting from their features and benefits to pricing and more.

What is Atlan?

Atlan: A modern, collaborative data workspace that serves as a single source of truth for data assets across an organization. This empowers teams to discover, understand, and collaborate on projects through data assets. Atlan brings together data cataloging, lineage tracking, and data quality monitoring into an intuitive platform and is built for data teams looking for a more collaborative and agile method of managing data.

Key Features of Atlan

1. Data Cataloging: Atlan hosts a very strong data catalog in its functionality, which allows end-users to discover and tag data assets in a simple manner that is seamless.

2. Data Lineage: Atlan provides end-to-end data lineage, hence the path of any piece of data can be traced from where it originates to its last usage. 

3. Collaboration Tools: Atlan has great ways of fostering collaboration among the data teams. Inline commenting, custom workflows, and integrations with Slack or Jira provide a bedrock for a culture of collaboration and openness.

4. Integration Capability: Besides, Atlan easily integrates with a variety of data sources, BI tools, and data warehouses such as Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift to provide single-point access to all the data assets of an organization.

5. Configurable Workspaces: Atlan allows teams to create workspaces that they can configure to their needs. 

What is Collibra?

Collibra is the leader in data governance solutions. It offers a full-service kit for managing data governance policies, ensuring data quality, and facilitating collaboration among data stewards, analysts, and business users. Collibra is designed for organizations especially in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and insurance.

Core Features of Collibra

1. Data Governance Framework: Collibra features a complete data governance framework that helps an organization define and enforce policies, standards, and controls related to data. 

2. Data Catalog: Similar to Atlan, Collibra provides a data catalog where users can expose, manage, and govern data assets. The catalog comes with metadata management, data lineage, and automated data classification.

3. Data Stewardship: Collibra is an organization-focused company on data stewardship, where roles and responsibilities can be assigned to the data stewards in order to ensure accuracy in the data and maintenance of data quality across all levels of the organization.

4. Advanced Data Lineage: Collibra provides organizations with broad data lineage capabilities that trace data from source to consumption. This way, it enables impact analysis, data auditing, and compliance reporting.

5. Workflow Automation: Collibra supports workflow automation for ease of data management tasks. Via workflows, users can set up the operation of particular requests to handle data, approvals, and certifications. This reduces manual effort and enables efficiency.

6. Compliance and Risk Management: Compliance-oriented design forms the basis of Collibra, and the platform natively supports GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy regulations. The platform lets organizations remain compliant with regulatory requirements through data mapping, policy enforcement, and auditing.

Atlan vs. Collibra: Key Differences

While comparing Atlan with Collibra, a few important differences are found in the following ways:

1. Focus Area: While Atlan is designed with much focus on data democratization and collaboration, being ideal for data-driven teams looking for a more agile approach to data management, Collibra is heavily geared toward data governance, compliance, and stewardship. These make Collibra a better fit for organizations in regulated industries.

2. User Experience: Atlan has a more modern, intuitive interface compared to Collibra. It fosters greater interaction among data teams. As feature-rich as Collibra is, the learning curve for its use is steep and preferred by organizations which have a full-time data governance support team.

3. Integration Capabilities: Both offer good integrations, but Atlan offers a wider range of native integrations with the newer data stack tools such as Snowflake, Databricks, and Apache Airflow. Collibra integrates well too, often more towards legacy systems and enterprise data solutions.

4. Data Lineage and Cataloging: Both provide data lineage and cataloging, but in Atlan, it would be more agile, collaborative, while in Collibra, one can find more granular control, suitable for compliance-heavy environments.

5. Pricing: Atlan is more flexible with regard to pricing based on usage, thus more available for small teams or a startup, while the Collibra solution seems to have more of an enterprise pricing model that might fit bigger organizations’ needs better regarding data governance.

Conclusion

Both Atlan and Collibra are forceful data governance platforms that suit different types of organizations. While Atlan excels in collaboration, agility, and ease of use, Collibra is the undisputed leader when it comes to governance, compliance, and data stewardship. Knowing your organization’s needs and understanding the key features of each platform will allow you to make an informed decision to best support your organization’s data strategy and business objectives.