CastorDoc vs Secoda : Full Product Comparison
Compare CastorDoc 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 respect and share your interest!
CastorDoc and Secoda are two popular data catalogs in the market, so you may be wondering, “How do these two solutions compare? Which one is better?”. In this CastorDoc vs Secoda article, we’ll give a detailed comparison of the two platforms by looking at their key features, target audience, technology integrations, pricing, ratings, and ease of use.
Whether you're on the data team or you’re a business user, you'll gain a comprehensive understanding of how CastorDoc compares to Secoda, enabling you to make an informed decision on which one is best for your organization.
Let’s start with the basics. If you’re wondering what a data catalog IS, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a brief explanation according to Gartner:
A data catalog creates and maintains an inventory of data assets through the discovery, description, and organization of distributed datasets. The data catalog provides context to enable data stewards, data/business analysts, data engineers, data scientists and other data consumers to find and understand relevant datasets for the purpose of extracting business value.
Gartner, Augmented Data Catalogs 2019.
The management and organization of extensive datasets are crucial for organizations, and data catalogs serve a pivotal role in this regard. With the increasing need for companies to access, comprehend, 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.
We have kept our process as unbiased as possible and have focused solely on the facts available. We have analyzed each company’s offerings paired with reputable customer and third-party review websites such as G2 and Gartner. We evaluated six key factors to help you make an informed decision:
CastorDoc was established by former data scientists, engineers, and heads of data to help companies improve the data experience. It is a plug-and-play data catalog that unifies your data stack by simplifying data discovery, community, and health.
CastorDoc is fit for full company adoption, including use by business teams and analysts. It provides a sleek, easy-to-understand user interface that helps companies understand the data they already have, without having to request reports from the data engineering team. This saves time for both data teams and non-technical teams by harnessing everyone’s collective intelligence so you can work smarter by default.
Business users are empowered by the accessibility of the system, which streamlines data workflows and unblocks data team bottlenecks. In turn, companies can drive efficiency and ROI by improving data health, deprecating unused data, and making higher-quality business decisions. Ultimately, CastorDoc allows companies to optimize their data stack by unifying all of their preferred tools into one cohesive system - without the chaos.
CastorDoc can be integrated with a company’s data stack in less than an hour. They have deep integrations and can connect to metadata across data warehouses, data transformation, and data visualization tools. This provides end users with immediate value and full stack visibility.
Some of the favorite features of CastorDoc, per user reviews, are the elegant interface, the locking of documentation between tools, the query history functionality, and the Autodoc functionality. Other key benefits include the data lineage tool, the automation of data generation, and the overall ease of use.
Secoda was founded in 2021 by Andrew McEwen and Etai Mizrahi. The Secoda platform 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.
Secoda allows for collaboration across teams, making it easy for users to share knowledge and insights about data. It also offers a messaging system and comment threads to facilitate communication and collaboration. The platform also offers AI-driven insights to help users identify relationships and patterns in their data. It provides personalized recommendations and alerts based on user behavior.
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.
CastorDoc vs Secoda Comparison
Now that you have all the context, let's dive into our evaluation of Secoda vs CastorDoc along our six key dimensions:
Target Audience
CastorDoc 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.
Secoda is also built for both technical and non-technical users. Users include Data Leads, Data Engineers, Data Analysts, Governance Managers, Product Managers, and Business Operations teams. 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 built for technical and non-technical users, Secoda is still experiencing some early-maturity growing pains that affect the user experience. We will get into this more in a later section! When you look at CastorDoc compared to Secoda, CastorDoc is a better choice for company-wide adoption.
Technology Integration
Both CastorDoc and Secoda have external integrations as well as APIs. 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 CastorDoc Integrations and Secoda integrations.
CastorDoc Integrations:
- Data Sources: Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Azure Synapse, PostgreSQL, MySQL
- Data Visualization/Business Intelligence Tools: Looker, Tableau, Metabase, PowerBI, Superset, Sisense, Domo, Qlik Sense, Redash, Mode, Sigma
- Auto-Ingestion/Data Movement: dbt, Fivetran, Stitch
- Security: Okta, Google
- Notifications: Slack, Gmail
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
It is worth noting that CastorDoc offers much more in terms of Data Visualization and Business Intelligence integrations. They integrate with Superset, Sisense, Domo, and Qlik Sense - Secoda does not. CastorDoc is farther along in the relationship and partnership process with 3rd party integrations.
Pricing
CastorDoc 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.
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 variation across the offerings, we’ll give both CastorDoc and Secoda equal scores. If you’re a small business looking for a free offering, the free Secoda plan may meet your needs.
Ease of Use
CastorDoc was created as a result of the founder's experiences with traditional data catalogs, which are clunky, outdated, and difficult to manage. One of CastorDoc’s true differentiators in the world of data catalog systems is its phenomenal user experience and ease of use.
CastorDoc is built for anyone, regardless of their data literacy level, department, or technical prowess, to use. It has a “Google-like” search engine, allowing users to quickly find what they need, with no technical expertise required. It can be set up very quickly and provides value from the very first day of use.
CastorDoc’s goal is to make working with data easy - even fun! (Yes, we said that!)
Secoda touts a clean and simple-to-use interface as well. However, their onboarding process can be a bit challenging, and the consistency of the site is unstable according to user reviews. In addition, they are missing some key functionality that affects the user experience, such as Auto Doc and Column Describers.
CastorDoc offers greater ease of use and is rated higher in this category by independent sites like G2. We’ll detail this more in the section below.
Review and Ratings
In writing this article, we consulted both CastorDoc and Secoda reviews from sites like G2. You can review the CastorDoc ratings here, and the Secoda ratings here. These links also include product reviews. Overall, both companies rated well and had positive reviews. However, CastorDoc was rated higher in both Ease of Use and Meets Requirements. Due to the newness of Secoda, G2 does not yet have enough information in order to provide rankings for key categories like 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 CastorDoc as a 10/10 for ease of use, and Secoda as an 8.0/10.
In the “Meets Requirements” category, CastorDoc ranks 9.5/10 and Secoda ranks 8.3/10.
For Quality of Support, CastorDoc ranks 9.7/10, with the average in this category as 8.6/10. G2 does not have enough information on Secoda to provide a ranking in this category.
For Ease of Setup, CastorDoc ranks 9.2/10, with the average score in this category 8.1/10. G2 does not have enough information on Secoda to provide a ranking in this category.
According to G2’s side-by-side comparison, the most helpful reviews are below.
CastorDoc:
“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.
“As a CastorDoc user, I love being able to instantly find my assets and understand exactly how the data is organized within my company. We wouldn't be able to survive without it nowadays. With a click, I can understand the complete lineage of tables and views - even at the column level. On top of that, CastorDoc provides lots of useful features to quickly understand the data, such as a powerful search engine, or the ability to request documentation and access. The best part is that it's all automated, CastorDoc works behind the scenes and spares us a lot of documentation effort.”
- Florian G.
Secoda:
“The shared documenting in line with queries really allows our team to share compartmentalized knowledge of data structures.”
- Daniel L.
“Live queries in the Documents feature were not good enough. Tried different characteristics in different scenarios. But Live queries couldn't meet the expectations.”
- Abhimanyu P.
When you compare CastorDoc to Secoda, CastorDoc is rated higher in all available categories by G2. Some categories are not available because G2 does not have enough information on Secoda to provide a score. However, CastorDoc’s scores in these categories are all significantly higher than the industry average.
Service and Support
CastorDoc includes 24/7 Email & LiveChat support for all three plans, including Starter. All clients will be set up with a dedicated Slack channel, and a Solutions Engineer who connects their data and is available to answer any technical questions that may arise. Premium and Enterprise clients also get a dedicated Customer Success Manager for the white glove experience and point of contact. A full list of features can be found alongside their pricing plans.
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.
CastorDoc offers greater service and support in each plan, including the Starter plan.
The Best Data Catalog for Your Business
When looking at all of the factors discussed, including the target audience, integrations, pricing, ease of use, reviews and ratings, and service and support, the clear winner is CastorDoc.
CastorDoc offers more integrations, more support across the pricing plans, and is ranked higher by G2 in Ease of Use and Meets Requirements. In addition, Secoda seems to struggle with the onboarding process, consistency, extraction delays, lineage features, and lack of Autodoc functionality.
Secoda has some great features, but CastorDoc is the #1 tried and true platform for data lineage and ease of use for the whole organization.
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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
