The 13 Best Data Catalogs for Azure to Consider in 2023

Solutions Review’s listing of the best data catalogs for Azure is an annual mashup of products that best represent current market conditions, according to the crowd. Vendors are assessed if they have a use case-focused offering designed for professionals in this industry.

The editors at Solutions Review have developed this resource to assist buyers in search of the best data catalogs for Azure to fit the needs of their organization and use case. Choosing the right vendor and solution can be a complicated process — one that requires in-depth research and often comes down to more than just the solution and its technical capabilities. To make your search a little easier, we’ve profiled the best data catalogs for Azure providers all in one place. We’ve also included links to each company’s use case-specific product page so you can learn more.

Note: The best data catalogs for Azure are listed in alphabetical order.

The Best Data Data Catalogs for Azure

Aginity

Aginity offers an active analytics catalog that lets users and organizations write, save and organize their analytic code. When saving code to a catalog, developers can put a title, description and other metadata around their code so it’s easy to understand the intent and context of what the code is trying to do. All of the analytic code can then be shared with others by providing either view or edit access. Every object saves in the catalog is an object that can be referenced in the code editor for execution with simple syntax.

Alation

Alation Data Catalog helps you find, understand, and govern all enterprise data through a single pane of glass. The product uses machine learning to index and make discoverable a wide variety of data sources including relational databases, cloud data lakes, and file systems. Alation democratizes data to deliver quick access alongside metadata to guide compliant, intelligent data usage with vital context. Conversations and wiki-like articles capture knowledge and guide newcomers to the appropriate subject-matter expert. The intelligent SQL editor empowers users to query in natural language, surfacing recommendations, compliance flags, and relevant policies as users query.

Alex Solutions

Alex Solutions is a technology agnostic unified enterprise data catalog. It features a business glossary that enables users to define and maintain key business terms and link them to physical data assets, processes, and outputs. Policy-driven data quality combines data lineage with data profiling and machine learning-based intelligent tagging. Alex also offers intelligent tagging that helps users add business context to physical data assets. Deployment and integration are simple, and the product’s user interface is friendly to business users.

Alteryx

Alteryx data cataloging is available through Alteryx Connect. The product centralizes business terms and definitions, metrics, and information assets for discoverability and collaboration. Connect lets users discover the types of information their data contains, where the information comes from, who is using it, and how it is used. The tool features powerful search to find and reuse information in analytic apps, workflows, macros, visualizations, dashboards, and data science models as well.

Collibra

Collibra’s Data Dictionary documents an organization’s technical metadata and how it is used. It describes the structure of a piece of data, its relationship to other data, and its origin, format, and use. The solution serves as a searchable repository for users who need to understand how and where data is stored and how it can be used. Users can also document roles and responsibilities and utilize workflows to define and map data. Collibra is unique because the product was built with business end-users in mind.

data.world

data.world offers a cloud-native enterprise data catalog that provides complete context so users can understand their data, regardless of where it resides. This includes metadata, dashboards, analysis, code, docs, project management, and social media collaboration capabilities. The product automatically builds a connected web of data and insights so users can explore relationships as well, and provides recommendations on related assets to improve analysis. data.world is unique due to its continuous release cycle.

Denodo

Denodo is a major player in the data management software market. The award-winning Denodo Platform offers a robust capabilities package for data integration, data management, and data delivery using a logical approach to enable self-service business intelligence, data science, hybrid/multi-cloud integration, and enterprise data services. Denodo touts customers across large enterprises and mid-market companies in over 30 industries. A pioneering company in the data virtualization space, Denodo was founded in Palo Alto, California, in 1999.

erwin

erwin offers a unified software platform for combining data governance, enterprise architecture, business process, and data modeling. The product is delivered as a managed service that allows users to discover and harvest data, as well as structure and deploy data sources by connecting physical metadata to specific business terms and definitions. erwin imports metadata from data integration tools, as well as cloud-based platforms, and can evaluate complex lineages across systems and use cases.

Informatica

Informatica Enterprise Data Catalog is a machine learning-based data catalog that lets you classify and organize data assets across any environment. The product also provides a metadata system of record for the enterprise. Enterprise Data Catalog automatically scans and catalogs data, indexing it for organization-wide discovery via a Google-like search engine. Key features include data provisioning, end-to-end data lineage, integrated data quality, data relationships and recommendations, and even a Tableau extension.

Qlik

Qlik Catalog builds a secure, enterprise catalog of all the data your organization has available for analytics, regardless of its physical location. The product features automated data preparation and metadata tools to streamline the transformation of raw data as well. The tool includes a self-service data marketplace that lets users “shop” for the data they need and export, share or automatically publish data sets to Qlik Sense and other analytic tools and applications.

Tableau Software

Tableau Catalog provides a complete picture of the data and how it is connected to the analytics in the Tableau environment. The product automatically ingests all of these assets into one central list so users can quickly see all the tables, files and databases in one place. Metadata and context is made available when data is connected so users can ensure they are using the correct data for analysis. Metadata and REST APIs bring the metadata to Tableau for analysis.

Talend

Talend Data Catalog automatically crawls, profiles, organizes, links, and enriches metadata. Up to 80 percent of information associated with the data is documented automatically and kept up-to-date through smart relationships and machine learning. Data Catalog key features include faceted search, data sampling, semantic discovery. categorization, and auto-profiling. The tool also includes social curation and data relationship discovery and certification, as well as a suite of design and productivity tools.

Zaloni

Zaloni Arena operationalizes data along the entire pipeline, from data source to consumer. The product automates repeatable data management tasks and processes and provides central management of all enterprise data sources whether on-prem, cloud, multi-cloud, or hybrid. Zaloni is compatible with all major Hadoop distributions, most data processing engines, and applicable deployment models.