Castor vs Select Star : Full Product Comparison
Read our Castor vs Select Star product comparison to learn about the unique features each have to offer and decide which Data Catalog might suit your business best.
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It’s too easy to get lost among all the different data points within a company. Every team may be using different tools to organize data, and without a centralized platform, you’re wasting time (and money) digging through multiple tools and processes from different teams. How about sticking to one data catalog platform that everyone in your company can use?
A data catalog allows everyone to find and understand the data they need. For the data team, it serves as a single source of reference for all the company metadata. For everyone else, it’s all about simplifying the process of understanding essential customer and business data.
Looking for your new favorite data catalog tool? We’ve got you covered.
In this blog, we are doing a full product comparison between Castor vs Select Star, two great options for data discovery, data cataloging, and data lineage.
This is an unbiased comparison based on six key factors to help you make an informed decision based on the different functionalities and their ratings:
Castor is a collaborative data discovery and catalog platform that is designed for everyone in the company. Its modern interface simplifies the process of finding, understanding, and using data.
As a data analyst or engineer, for example, you can improve the process of finding the most up-to-date data in your warehouse and understanding how it connects to BI Tools to make collaboration easier across the business. And if you’re not a data expert, you can also use Castor to improve your understanding of dashboards and downstream analytics.
Castor serves as the single source of reference for all your data and it also helps you have more context about all the information you are reviewing. Think of it as a plug-and-play data catalog that brings together all your data sources to help your business be more efficient. Setup takes as little as 30 minutes.
Castor is a popular option for organizations looking for a comprehensive solution for data management. Its ease of use along with the range of tools for data discovery, secure data management, and data analysis make it a reliable solution not only for a Head of Data, but also for the whole company.
Select Star is a data discovery platform that helps you understand your data. It automatically analyzes and documents data to help data analysts be more efficient. It’s the single source of truth to capture, find, and organize your data.
It promises to set up your automated data catalog quickly and many customers find it very easy to use.
Select Star offers a range of tools to improve your data management and you can also use it as the go-to portal to govern your data and share the knowledge base within the company.
For many data teams, it helps them improve their visibility on the company’s use of data and how they can build more effective dashboards based on the business KPIs.
You can use Select Star for data discovery, data catalog, data lineage, data analysis, and data governance.
Castor vs Select Star Comparison
Let’s dive deeper into the product comparison. We are looking at six key categories to review how Castor and Select Star rank on each one of them to help you find the perfect product for your business.
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Target Audience
Both products have the data team in a company as their primary audience. Whether you are the Head of Data or a Data Analyst, you can benefit from using either one of the tools to capture, manage, and understand your data.
A closer look at each product’s website and social channels can provide additional insights into each company’s broader target audience.
Select Star is targeting the data teams while Castor serves data people – such as Data Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Stewards, Data Engineers, and Heads of Data – as well as Business, Operations, Support, Finance, and Management teams who are looking to make decisions based on real-time data. This can be an advantage if you want to make data accessible to everyone.
Technology Integration
Both Castor and Select Star offer a wide range of integrations to help you power-up your existing tech stack.
For example, both of them integrate with major cloud data warehouses such as Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, and PostgreSQL. They also integrate with popular data visualization tools such as Looker, Tableau, PowerBI, and Metabase. If you are using Looker, several customers report that Castor has a more robust integration that makes metadata exploration easier.
When it comes to Transformation and ETL tools, both Castor and Select Star integrate with dbt, while Castor also integrates with Fivetran and Stitch.
You can also connect them with additional apps such as Google and Slack.
As of the time of this article, here are their current integrations. Please note that as these technologies are developing, more connections are becoming available by the day. You can see the most up-to-date Castor Integrations and Select Star Integrations on their websites.
Castor 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
Select Star Integrations:
- Data Sources: Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, PostgreSQL
- Data Visualization/Business Intelligence Tools: Tableau, PowerBI, Looker, Mode, Sigma, Sisense/Periscope, Metabase, Data Studio
- Auto-Ingestion/Data Movement: dbt
- Notifications: Slack
Pricing
First things first, you can try both products with a 14-day free trial to find what works best for you and your team.
When it comes to their pricing models, Castor and Select Star are both offering various options for businesses of all sizes.
Select Star offers a limited free plan with 1 data source for up to 100 tables and 10 users. The Pro plan is at $300 per month with 2 data sources for up to 250 tables and 50 users. The Growth plan is the most popular option at $900 per month with 3 data sources for up to 1000 tables and 100 users. It also offers SAML SSO login and API access. Finally, there is the Enterprise plan that is customized for larger companies. Check out Select Star’s pricing page for full details
Castor offers three plans: Starter, Premium, and Enterprise. The Starter plan costs $10,000 per year and it is ideal for smaller data teams that want automated data documentation. This plan includes two integrations and 15 users, but also up to 2500 data assets (tables and dashboards). The pricing may be higher than the starting plan for Select Star but it offers more features, getting it to a similar price range with the Growth plan.
In addition to the Starter plan, Castor offers a Premium plan to add governance and team features and it’s ideal for mid-market companies. It also offers a customizable Enterprise plan for larger-scale companies with more complex needs. Check out Castor’s pricing page for full details.
While Select Star has the lower priced starting plan Castor can be customized more easily to suit specific business requirements. Therefore we have scored them both evenly.
Ease of Use
Castor provides a simple and polished UI and its automated documentation experience helps everyone in the company trust data. The automated process of data cataloging makes it easier to gather relevant metadata and build context while it also makes it easy for the team to collaborate in real-time straight through the dashboard.
As a plug-and-play data catalog, it appeals both to data experts and non-technical team members. We looked to G2.com, the popular website for product reviews, for insight in this category. G2 users gave Castor 10/10 for ease of use.
“Castor is an excellent source for schema/table/column definitions to live and is a necessary tool for any company looking to have self-service data for those outside the data team. It saves constant pings to Sr Data members about columns since users can understand the data on their own.”
- Sr Business Intelligence Manager
Select Star is also focusing on providing a data catalog that is easy to use to help you quickly find the data you’re looking for.
“UI is super intuitive - easy to search for tables or columns and find the data you need. Can also find commonly used queries and how to join tables together.”
- Small Business User in IT
Despite receiving mostly positive feedback, there have been comments labelling the user experience as insatiable, with some cases of slow search and load times.
Reviews and Ratings
We looked at G2 to find out what customers think about Castor compared to Select Star.
Both products received very positive feedback among their key areas of focus. In fact, they both rank above average in G2’s three key factors that impact user satisfaction: ease of use, quality of support, and ease of setup.
According to G2, ‘ease of use’ is the top factor that impacts user satisfaction for Machine Learning Data Catalog products. In this category, Castor was rated 10/10 and Select Star 9/10. The overall rating for Castor was 4.7/5 and 4.5/5 for Select Star.
Let’s see what customers like about Castor:
“Castor takes much of the manual work out of data documentation, from automatically generating data lineage to intelligently cascading field definitions to downstream objects. This automated approach allowed us to quickly get value out of the tool and it continues to stay up to date as we grow.”
- Mid Market User in IT
“Castor has been instrumental in our migration, deprecation and documentation efforts. The data lineage feature is beloved by our data scientists, analysts and data engineers, and is used practically every day. We love being able to choose common definitions to define fields and assign owners to tables.”
- Mid Market User in Retail
Here is what customers like about Select Star:
“I really love SelectStar's popular joins feature. With many fields named differently and tribal knowledge being a large storage space for the best way to join different tables, it makes it easier for me to figure out how to join two different tables without having to interrupt other folks.”
- Enterprise Decision Scientist
“The most helpful feature for my team has been the column-level lineage that gives us end-to-end visibility into our pipeline all the way from source to dashboards.”
-Mid Market User in Computer Software
All in all, both products had solid reviews, but Castor had the slight edge, winning the Winter 2023 G2 Leader award for the Machine Learning Data Catalog category. This report measured higher scores for Castor on both satisfaction and market presence.
Service & Support
Both products receive good feedback about the support they offer, especially when it comes to troubleshooting and responding to queries. You can find a live chat and resources on both sites to help customers answer their questions.
In terms of Quality of Support, Castor received an overall rating of 9.7/10 in G2 and Select Star followed very closely with 9.6/10.
Castor mentions on its pricing page that the Starter plan includes email and chat support while the Premium plan also offers access to the customer success team and additional help from an onboarding specialist. In addition, once any client signs on, Castor sets them 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.
Select Star does not promise dedicated customer support, although users find their team helpful.
The Best Data Catalog for Your Business
The numbers have spoken. We reviewed Select Star vs Castor based on six key factors. We also reviewed what customers had to say about each product to keep the process as unbiased and transparent as possible.
In the end, Castor came out on top. Both products are comprehensive and effective solutions for data management and they add a lot of value for data teams. Castor ultimately won in the ease of use, targeting everyone in the company, and placing more focus on customer success.
Castor was also rated consistently higher than Select Star across all categories by G2, making it the ideal data catalog for everyone in your team. Don’t just take our word for it, you can try Castor today with a free 14-day trial to see how it works for your company’s needs.
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