What is Collibra?

Collibra is a data catalog platform and tool that helps organizations better understand and manage their data assets.  Collibra helps create an inventory of data assets, capture information (metadata) about them, and govern these assets.  At its core,  the Collibra tool is used for helping stakeholders understand what data assets exist, what they are made of, how they are being used, and if they are in regulatory compliance.

Collibra has four major functional areas:

• Data catalog – This module provides an inventory of data assets and allows users to find and discover the right assets to use for different purposes.  Users can search across several different facets of the data assets.
• Data governance – The governance capabilities help create a common understanding of and sharing information about data assets.  This includes both technical metadata and user-added information.
• Data lineage – Allows users to see how data assets are created and molded as they move from system to system.  Lineage helps data owners track what makes up a data asset for compliance and users to see where an asset comes from and how it is shaped.
• Data privacy – The privacy module allows privacy and security teams to create, manage and run policies to ensure data privacy and compliance.  Policy workflows can be initiated and compliance data and reports are captured.

Organizations typically use Collibra as a tool for IT, data owners, and officers in charge of data protection and compliance to inventory and track how data is used.  Their primary objectives are to protect data, ensure it is properly governed and used, and eliminate potential fines and risk from a lack of general regulatory compliance ( GDPR , CCPA , etc.) and industry-specific ones ( HIPAA , AML , etc.).

Although Collibra maintains an inventory of data assets, this inventory’s primary focus is to help these teams automate processes around this data to ensure it is protected and tracked for regulatory compliance.  The primary ROI customers get from Collibra is eliminating the cost of potential fines and ensuring data is protected.

Where Collibra is often NOT used is for analytics data management and analyst discovery.  This is because Collibra is not integrated into their analyst workflows and forces analysts to jump around between multiple tools and data platforms to work with data.

Datameer is a powerful SaaS data transformation platform that runs in Snowflake – your modern, scalable cloud data warehouse – that combines to provide a highly scalable and flexible environment to transform your data into meaningful analytics.  With Datameer, you can:

• Allow your non-technical analytics team members to work with your complex data without the need to write code using Datameer’s no-code and low-code data transformation interfaces,
• Easily combine large volumes of captured data with master and other data to create context-rich, meaningful datasets for analysis,
• Fully enrich analytics datasets to add even more flavor to your analysis using the diverse array of graphical formulas and functions,
• Generate rich documentation and add user-supplied attributes, comments, tags, and more to share searchable knowledge about your data across the entire analytics community,
• Use the catalog-like documentation features to crowd-source your data governance processes for greater data democratization and data literacy,
• Maintain full audit trails of how data is transformed and used by the community to further enable your governance and compliance processes,
• Deploy and execute data transformation models directly in Snowflake to gain the scalability your need over your large volumes of data while keeping compute and storage costs low.

Datameer provides a number of key benefits for your modern data stack and cloud analytics, including:

• Creating a highly efficient data stack that reduces your data and analytics engineering costs,
• Allowing you to share the data transformation workload across your broader data and analytics team,
• Fostering collaboration among the data and analytics team to produce faster, error-free projects,
• Efficiently using your Snowflake analytics engine for cost-effective data transformation processing,
• Enabling you to crowdsource your data governance for more effective and efficient governance processes, and
• Improving data literacy to expand knowledge and effective use of your data.

Collibra keeps its’ pricing information close to the vest, with very limited publically available information, much like Alation, its’ chief competitor.  Collibra has two packages – their platform and a data quality add-on module.  For the platform, pricing has a very confusing array of parameters including:

• Number of users,
• Number of metadata catalogs,
• Amount of lineage tracking,
• Number of BI tools integrated, and
• Number of instances (production and non-production)

You can certainly see how the pricing can be confusing and the product can quickly become very costly.

You can purchase a 12-month baseline Collibra package on AWS, which includes the platform, 10 users, 2 metadata catalogs, 1 lineage tracking, 1 BI tool integration, and 1 non-production license for $150,000.  One can also purchase the add-on Data Quality offering on AWS at $100,000 for a 12-month annual license.

There are a good number of Collibra product reviews available for reading, with the majority on Gartner Peer Insights and G2 Crowd.  On Gartner, Collibra has an average review rating of 4.3 out of 5 and on G2 Crowd, the average rating is the same: 4.3 out of 5.

Many of the reviewers like the completeness (broad range of functionality) of the Collibra, the strong back-end cataloging features and data governance processes, and the easy customization.  The chief complaints are the poor user-friendliness of the user interface and the cost (high price).

Want to learn more about how Datameer can make your data modeling and transformation faster and easier?  Visit our Datameer home page to learn more about our innovative new data transformation solution.  Or, schedule a personalized private preview with our team today .