Castor vs Secoda : 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.

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 Castor compared to Secoda, Castor is a better 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. 

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 Castor and Secoda equal scores. If you’re a small business looking for a free offering, the free Secoda plan may meet your needs.

In writing this article, we consulted both Castor and Secoda reviews from sites like G2. You can review the Castor ratings here, and the Secoda ratings here. These links also include product reviews. Overall, both companies rated well and had positive reviews. However, Castor 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 Castor as a 10/10 for ease of use, and Secoda as an 8.0/10.

In the “Meets Requirements” category, Castor ranks 9.5/10 and Secoda ranks 8.3/10.

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 Secoda 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 Secoda to provide a ranking in this category.

According to G2’s side-by-side comparison, the most helpful reviews are below.

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.

“As a Castor 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, Castor 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, Castor 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 Castor to Secoda, Castor 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, Castor’s scores in these categories are all significantly higher than the industry average.