Atlan vs Secoda : Full Product Comparison
Compare Atlan vs Secoda to choose the best Data Catalog for your business. Learn about their unique features in our full product comparison.
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Perhaps you're here because you're actively searching for a data catalog, embarking on your documentation and governance journey, or simply a passionate enthusiast of data and technology.
Whatever the reason, we’re happy you’re here!
With the increasing need for companies to access and utilize their data on various platforms and software systems, the demand for machine learning data catalog software has surged in recent years. Check out our data catalog landscape if you want to see just how vast the market looks.
In this blog, we will review two popular machine learning data catalogs - Atlan and Secoda, and see how they stack up to each other across six key categories:
We looked at third-party reviews to rate both products across all categories to make the process as unbiased as possible.
Atlan vs Secoda - which one is better?
Let’s find out.
Atlan was founded in Singapore in 2018 by Varun Banka and Prukalpa Sankar, the duo behind SocialCops and India’s gas subsidy program, Ujjwala.
It is a modern data catalog that aims to empower “the next generation of data teams”. Atlan is known for providing customized experiences for each user, including homepage and metadata, which are curated based on each user’s workflows.
Its purpose is to allow companies to establish policies and provide access to data assets based on business domains or projects. Its metadata builder features a no-code interface that enables users to easily share with others. It allows for collaboration and communication through popular communication and workflow tools and plugins, all within the Atlan platform.
Atlan is built by a data team and was designed to be used by data teams. It provides a modern approach to data management with a solid discovery system, quality data profiling, and reliable data lineage.
It aims to simplify metadata management and improve the efficiency of collaborative efforts in various industries such as data management, analytics, and research.
Secoda was founded in 2021 by Andrew McEwen and Etai Mizrahi. It enables organizations to centralize and manage their data assets, making it easier for users to discover, understand, and access the data they need.
The platform uses machine learning algorithms to automatically index and categorize data assets, allowing users to search for and find relevant data. It also offers data governance capabilities, ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements and company policies.
Data teams can benefit from using it to enhance domain knowledge, streamline documentation, and optimize their technology stack by integrating various tools.
For everyone else, it offers increased accessibility to data by simplifying the process of searching for all company data.
Users of Secoda appreciate its user-friendly interface, collaborative features, natural language search capabilities, and ease of use for all team members.
The goal of Secoda is to be the sole place to search for any company data, add context to that data, and track the relationships between people in the organization and the data they are responsible for.
Atlan vs. Secoda Comparison
Now that you have all the context, let's dive into our evaluation of Secoda vs Atlan along our six key dimensions:
Target Audience
Atlan was built by data people for data people, to address problems that data teams face. It is used by Data Engineers, Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and Heads of Data. While it provides support for business roles as well, data team members are its sweet spot.
Secoda’s target audience is also the data team, including everyone from the Head of Data to Data Analysts. It also broadens its reach to include data consumers and anyone who can leverage the data resources in an organization. It was built due to the creator's previous frustration in sharing information between technical and non-technical teams, and the inefficiencies that this created. Therefore, their platform is built as a way for all teams within a company to collaborate and democratize data.
While both solutions are primarily built for technical users, Secoda offers features like natural language search and visualization tools to simplify the search and understanding of data. When you look at Atlan compared to Secoda, Secoda casts a wider net in its target audience. For that reason, we will give them more points in this category. Ultimately, the choice between these two tools primarily depends on who you want to use the catalog.
Technology Integration
Both Atlan and Secoda have a wide range of integrations – from data warehouses and business intelligence to data quality and communication. Here are their current integrations, but please note that as these technologies are developing, more connections are frequently becoming available. For the most up-to-date resources, check out the live pages for Atlan Integrations and Secoda integrations.
Atlan Integrations:
- Data Sources: Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, AWS Glue (including S3), Databricks, Google BigQuery, Hive, Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Presto, Salesforce, SAP HANA, Snowflake, Trino
- Data Visualization/Business Intelligence Tools: Looker, Metabase, Mode, Microsoft Power BI, Sigma, Tableau
- Auto-Ingestion/Data Movement: dbt Cloud, dbt Core, Fivetran
Secoda Integrations:
- Data Sources: Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Postgres, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle
- Data Visualization/Business Intelligence Tools: Tableau, Looker, Mode, Sigma, Redash, Power BI, Metabase, Google Data Studio,
- Auto-Ingestion/Data Movement: dbt, Airflow, AWS Glue
- SSO: Azure ADSAML, Google OAuth, G Suite SAML, Okta SAML
Atlan offers deeper support on data warehouses. Secoda has several integrations coming soon according to their website, including Sigma. This shows that they are ambitious in their integration potential, but if you are looking for something specific that they don’t yet have, you may need to wait a while.
Pricing
Atlan pricing is not transparently listed on their website, but you can contact them for more information and a customized proposal.
Secoda offers three plans - a free plan, a Business plan, and an Enterprise plan.
- The free plan includes 1 admin, 1 integration, unlimited tables, and access to features like the data lineage tool, data dictionary, and Live Queries in Docs.
- The Business plan is $800 per month or $9,600 per year. It includes 10 admins, unlimited viewers, 3 integrations, exporting/importing, Slack integration, and API access.
- The Enterprise plan does not list pricing online, as it is custom. It includes a self-hosted environment, a dedicated Slack channel, unlimited integrations, unlimited viewers, Git integration, and a dedicated Account Manager.
You can compare all of the features of each plan, and get the pricing for their Enterprise plan on their website.
Given the lack of transparency on Atlan’s pricing plans, it is difficult to make any comparisons to Secoda’s pricing information, which is clearly stated online.
Ease of Use
Both platforms are designed to be user-friendly.
G2.com rates Atlan as 8.7/10 and Secoda as 8.0/10 for Ease of Use. Atlan stands out for its user interface, dashboard, and collaboration features.
Atlan is built for data teams and does require a higher data literacy level to understand. For example, one of the ways to query data in Atlan requires SQL, which business users may not be familiar with. Therefore, non-data users may need to work through data teams to get the information they need.
Secoda touts a clean and simple-to-use interface as well. However, they are still experiencing some early growing pains and bumps in the road, according to user reviews. In addition, they are missing some key functionality that affects the user experience, such as Auto Doc and Column Describers.
We are giving more points to Atlan based on the users’ higher rating on Ease of Use on G2.com.
Review and Ratings
In writing this article, we consulted both Atlan and Secoda reviews from sites like G2.com. You can review the Atlan ratings here, and the Secoda ratings here. These links also include product reviews. Overall, both companies rated well and had positive reviews, with Atlan scoring 4.6/5 and Secoda scoring 4.4/5 as of the publication of this article. Now, let’s take a look at the subscores.
For Meets Requirements, both companies scored an 8.3/10.
For Quality of Support, Atlan ranks 9.1/10, with the average in this category as 8.6/10. G2 needs more information on Secoda to provide a ranking in this category.
For Ease of Setup, Atlan ranks 9.3/10, with the average score in this category 8.1/10. G2 needs more information on Secoda to provide a ranking in this category.
According to G2’s side-by-side comparison, the most helpful favorable reviews are below.
Atlan:
“Atlan is constantly making sure how they would be able to generate value with our metadata. In other words, they listen to their users.”
- Juan Sebastian G., Verified User in Retail
Secoda:
“Besides having a world-class support team + environment, Secoda is a powerful-and-getting-powerfuller-by-the-day tool to standardize and galvanize data documentation across your data teams + broader company. It's easy to connect a multitude of sources and spin up data docs and guides.”
- Morgan W., Verified User in Financial Services
It is difficult to pick a winner in this category because G2.com does not yet have enough information on Secoda to provide a score. However, Atlan provides scores that are higher than the industry average in both Quality of Support and Ease of Setup. For that reason, we have given them a slightly higher score.
Service and Support
Atlan offers 24/7 support, with several tiers of escalation. You can start by emailing Atlan at ask@atlanhq.com. They also offer a help desk portal where you can create and log a ticket. Finally, they have a dedicated Customer Happiness Team, which you can contact for ongoing requests.
Atlan ranked 9.1/10 on G2.com for Quality of Support and received many positive reviews for customer support.
“When working with Atlan, I really liked how easy it was to set up, integrating seamlessly with our modern data stack. Their support has been great - it was very easy to get in contact with relevant people and they even helped us set us to shape our thinking around governance.”
- Hendrik B., Enterprise(> 1000 emp.)
For Secoda, you need to be on the 2nd tier plan - the $800/month Business Plan, for live chat support. The Enterprise Plan also includes a dedicated Slack channel and a dedicated Account Manager. While G2.com did not yet have enough information to rank Secoda in Quality of Support, the company does have many positive reviews related to customer support:
“Secoda provides tools for documenting database schemas that help us to streamline communication between engineering and data science teams. The Secoda team is iterating quickly to add features and has frequently already been building features we requested. The Secoda team is a joy to work with and is driven to support their customers.”
- Gabe T., Director of Engineering
The Best Data Catalog for Your Business
Time for a drumroll…the winner is Atlan! In some categories, Atlan was ranked higher due to a lack of information on Secoda on G2.com. This may change in the near future, as more verified reviews come in about Secoda.
We have another popular and highly-rated suggestion for you if you are in search of a data catalog to discover and organize your data.
CastorDoc rates very highly on G2.com, with an overall rating of 4.8/5. It also won the ‘Winter 2023 G2 Leader’ award in the Machine Learning Data Catalog category. Users love the sleek and easy-to-use interface, its ability to be used by an entire organization and not just technical users, and its highly-rated customer support.
While Atlan beat out Secoda in today’s comparison, check out our CastorDoc vs Atlan page, where we do a deep dive into these two data catalogs.
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“[I like] The easy to use interface and the speed of finding the relevant assets that you're looking for in your database. I also really enjoy the score given to each table, [which] lets you prioritize the results of your queries by how often certain data is used.” - Michal P., Head of Data
