Castor vs Metaphor: Full Product Comparison

Castor was built for viral, company-wide adoption. The main users are data team members like Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Stewards, Data Engineers, and Heads of Data. However, it’s also intentionally designed to be used by the larger company, including Business, Operations, Support, Finance, and Management teams who are looking to make decisions based on accurate and accountable data.

Metaphor was primarily built for Data Scientists, Data Engineers, Subject Matter Experts, and Data Stewards. However, their basic and advanced search options, Slack integration, and social hashtags allow for non-technical use as well. Non-technical users may include Business Analysts, Business Intelligence users, and Product Teams.

While both solutions are built for technical and non-technical users, Metaphor is still very new to the market, and user reviews are not readily available to evaluate the experience of a non-technical user. When you look at Castor compared to Metaphor, Castor is a tried and true choice for company-wide adoption.

Castor offers three pricing plans - Starter, Premium, and Enterprise, as well as a 14-day free trial.

• The Starter Package is $10,000 per year and includes 15 users, 2 integrations, 2,500 data assets, and 1 admin. 

• The Premium package is custom pricing. It includes 30 users, 3 integrations, 5,000 data assets, and 2 admins.

• The Enterprise package is also custom pricing. It includes 50 users, 3 integrations, 10,000 data assets, and 5 admins.

You can compare all of the features of each plan here. For pricing on Premium and Enterprise, please contact sales. 

Metaphor does not include any pricing information on their website. They do offer a free trial and a demo, which you can sign up for online.

Given the less information on Metaphor’s pricing plans, it is difficult to make a comparison to Castor’s pricing information. We’ll score them at average for now.

In writing this article, we consulted both Castor and Metaphor reviews from sites like G2. You can review the Castor ratings here. Because Metaphor is so new to the market, G2 does not yet have enough information to provide rankings for key categories like Ease of Use, Ease of Setup, and Quality of Support. 

G2 highlights Ease of Use as the top factor that impacts user satisfaction for Machine Learning Data Catalog products. It rates Castor as a 10/10 in this category.

For Quality of Support, Castor ranks 9.7/10, with the average in this category as 8.6/10. G2 does not have enough information on Metaphor to provide a ranking in this category. 

For Ease of Setup, Castor ranks 9.2/10, with the average score in this category 8.1/10. G2 does not have enough information on Metaphor to provide a ranking in this category.

Here are some helpful reviews:

Castor:

“Easy to use platform that facilitates self-service for our organization and helps us on our documentation journey. The integrations to our data stack and Data Viz layer have been fantastic. The lineage even assisted in a data recovery effort. Very happy with the solution”
- Carson W.

"Castor is saving me a lot of time and money. It's like adding another team to your company that is responsible for one of the most important tasks when growing your database: documentation. This is a lifesaver, especially for a team with a high turnover, it's very easy to pick up the database knowledge for new joiners and person not familiar with what another team is doing. It increases a lot the efficiency of going over data. I recommend and the Castor team is amazing!"
- Marc A.

It is difficult to make a direct comparison between Castor and Metaphor reviews, due to the lack of 3rd party reviews of Metaphor. Metaphor’s scores are not available because G2 does not have enough information on them to provide a score, so we’ll give it the category average. However, Castor’s scores in ALL categories are significantly higher than the industry average in Machine Learning Data Catalog Software.