Looking for Informatica Data Catalog Alternatives? 6 Reasons Why Top Data Teams Prefer Atlan

Updated September 23rd, 2024

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A data catalog makes data easier to find, use, and manage no matter where it lives in your organization. Using a data catalog, your organization can minimize dark data and improve data quality, as well as establish global security and compliance rules for all organizational data.

Informatica was an early leader in the data catalog space, primarily serving IT and technical users. However, as the platform shows its age, customers with evolving use cases are turning to alternatives. They’re seeking data catalogs with advanced features like no-code integrations, automation, and strong collaboration capabilities.
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83% of data teams choose Atlan over traditional data catalog solutions like Informatica. Below are six common reasons why teams prefer Atlan over Informatica Data Catalog:

  1. A partner approach
  2. One-stop design
  3. Best-in-class lineage experience
  4. Automation capabilities
  5. Integration with collaboration tools
  6. Customizability

Table of contents #

  1. A partner approach
  2. One-stop design
  3. Usable and actionable data lineage
  4. Automated metadata and lineage
  5. Embedded collaboration
  6. Customizability
  7. Why is Atlan the best Informatica alternative?
  8. Related Reads

A partner approach #

A data catalog is a critical part of your data infrastructure that requires connecting with dozens — even hundreds — of data sources and tools in your existing data stack. Doing this effectively requires that customers and vendors work together in a partner approach.

At Atlan, we create custom strategies and implementation plans for all our customers. We help them identify their specific use cases and map out their data estates. Atlan users report achieving widespread adoption of their first use case within their first 90 days of ownership, instead of Informatica’s typical six months to one year timeframe.

In contrast, systems like Informatica Data Catalog can be difficult to install and configure. Originally designed for traditional data environments, Informatica’s architecture often requires cumbersome, manual effort to connect with modern platforms and emerging data ecosystems.

We’ve heard from Informatica users that the more rigid and closed nature of the platform makes integration with popular tools — e.g., data quality frameworks like Great Expectations — difficult and frustrating. These customers are choosing Atlan because they need a data catalog that will help them flexibly adopt new technologies and rapidly respond to changing market trends.

One-stop design #

For years, many data catalog vendors have built their products primarily for technical users like data engineers, IT support engineers, etc.

That’s a costly mistake. For a data catalog to deliver real value, all users who need data access — from business users and IT professionals to data stewards, engineers, compliance officers, and analysts — must be able to find what they need quickly and easily.

Atlan is a single unified platform with an intuitive User Experience (UX) so that any user can find what they need. Features such as natural language query enable every user to identify and use data without learning specialized query languages.

Informatica Data Catalog (and similar alternatives) are mostly geared toward technical users. As a result, they often have a confusing and hard-to-use interface. Many of these systems also spread features across separate tools: A common complaint from technical administrators is that they have to use several different tools to manage their Informatica installations!

Informatica’s lack of integration forces users to navigate multiple tools and UIs to perform a single business task — and the lack of usability makes it harder for users to integrate a data catalog into their daily workflows, which in turn inhibits adoption.

Usable and actionable data lineage #

Data lineage shows the journey that your data takes through your data estate: where it comes from, who owns it, and how it changes as it moves. Column-level lineage gives an even more detailed view of this movement, not just at the table level but down to each individual field.

Column-level data lineage is critical for:

  • Building trust in data
  • Performing root-cause analysis on data issues
  • Performing impact analysis for planned data changes

Atlan provides first-class support for column-level lineage through a single pane of glass. Using Atlan, you can gather both data and its corresponding metadata easily using our out-of-the-box data connectors and data lineage miners. Support for impact analysis in GitHub and GitLab will alert your data engineers when a proposed change might break downstream data consumers, such as BI reports and data-driven apps.

Column-level lineage is a table stakes feature for data catalogs these days. Informatica Data Catalog, like Atlan, supports it. However, customers have told us that Informatica’s general lack of usability results in problems, like overwhelmingly dense presentation of information at the column level, that make it hard (especially for non-technical users) to trace the data flow at a granular column level.

Automated metadata and lineage #

Metadata — the data about your data — is critical for putting your data in context. Metadata describes the context of your data (who owns it, what it’s for, who has updated it, etc.), metadata helps you make data discoverable, accessible, trustworthy, and valuable.

With data growing exponentially year over year, no company can keep its metadata and data lineage updated with strictly manual features. Informatica’s more traditional approach can slow down the process of discovering and classifying large volumes of data assets compared to Atlan’s wide variety of tools for automated metadata management, including:

  • Automated and continuous ingestion of metadata via pre-provided connectors
  • AI-generated suggestions for enriching metadata and adding additional context
  • Rule-based enrichment and tagging of data use playbook automation
  • An open API architecture for custom metadata ingestion and enrichment

Embedded collaboration #

When a data catalog like Informatica forces users to switch between tools—such as moving from a data catalog to an issue reporting system or a messaging platform—it complicates collaboration. A modern data catalog, on the other hand, offers built-in collaboration features that allow users to address data-related issues directly within the business tools they use every day

Collaboration in Informatica Data Catalog is often a sore spot for customers. Some who’ve tried Informatica have even told us that it became a blocker in their data catalog adoption.

Atlan, by contrast, has long been a leader in embedded collaboration. You can easily start Slack discussions or log Jira tickets directly from the Atlan data catalog. Business users can use our Chrome extension to look up key metadata (e.g., ownership) for a table or field directly from their cloud BI tools.

Customizability #

With a data catalog, there’s no such thing as “one size fits all.” Each company needs the flexibility to tailor their data catalog implementations to their specific technical and business needs, which means their data catalog must offer personalization capabilities. This includes customizing its UI and workflows to its user base as well as the ability to integrate deeply into the organization’s existing technology stack.

Teams can customize Atlan through features like Personas and Purposes, which can adjust the data that users see based on their job roles. For example, technical users might see technical metadata (e.g., a link to a table’s corresponding dbt model) that enables them to debug data-related issues. Meanwhile, this data can be hidden from business users so they are free to focus solely on the information related to their data domain.

Once again, many Informatica Data Catalog customers find customizability to be yet another sore point. Some customers say that the platform’s closed nature and rigid architecture, coupled with its hard-to-use UX and lack of responsive customer support, make it challenging to fit Informatica to their workflows and data.

Why is Atlan the best Informatica alternative? #

Collaboration, accessibility, automation, and customizability: This broad array of features explains why Atlan is the top-rated Informatica alternative. The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Data Catalog for DataOps, Q3 2024 report gave Atlan the highest score across all data catalog vendors (including the highest possible scores in 15 criteria such as governance, risk, and compliance, data lineage, adoption, and deployment time-to-value. Forrester described Atlan as ‘an unparalleled partner’ for organizations focused on data democratization.

Gartner Peer Insights ratings from data catalog enterprise customers further illustrate the success that organizations are achieving when choosing Atlan over traditional solutions like Informatica Data Catalog. Verified reviews from users in the Active Metadata Management sector awarded Atlan an overall rating of 4.5/5, in comparison to Informatica’s 3.9/5.

Verified reviews from users in the Active Metadata Management sector

Users particularly praise Atlan’s integration and its “extremely handy” search capabilities, as well as its data lineage tool: “We now get rich context on what upstream and downstream dependencies related to our assets, and make better informed decisions on our developments.” (Meanwhile, one Informatica user sums up their experience as simply, “Bugs performance bad AI.”)

Our customers who’ve used both Informatica and Atlan seem to agree. When Porto, a Brazil-based insurance and banking leader with 13 million clients, needed a more modern data catalog solution, the company went looking for Informatica alternatives.

“The motivation to look for a different solution came from some difficulties in implementing certain features like lineage, a business glossary,” says Danriel Alves, Senior Data Governance Analyst for Porto. “It was frustrating, and eventually came to a point where we felt like the technology (Informatica EDC) was kind of blocking us from reaching where we wanted to go.”

The company chose Atlan to implement its autonomous data mesh network with federated data governance. Major platform changes like this can be daunting, but Porto’s migration took a mere six weeks from initial login to production rollout.

While Informatica remains a long-established data cataloging solution, newer tools have arrived to modernize user experience and enhance functionality for technical and business users. Atlan is a modern data catalog that’s easy to install, configure, use, and maintain. Features such as a cross-persona UI, automation, and embedded collaboration empower you to realize value from your data catalog in weeks, not months.

Looking for the best Informatica Data Catalog alternative?Try Atlan. Contact us today to book a demo and start a conversation.

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