12 Top Data Governance Tools & Software for 2024

Is your organization looking to employ new data governance tools in the coming year? Data governance is necessary to ensure the accurate and reliable information your company needs to make the best possible business decisions. When you want robust data governance, here are 10 top-rated software solutions to consider, all of which can help your organization gain more control over its valuable data assets. 

Quick Takeaways

• Data governance affects the availability, quality, usability, and security of your company’s data
• The best data governance tools include data discovery, data classification, metadata management, and real-time data quality management
• The top data governance software today includes Alation, Zeenea, Informatica, Atlan, Cloudera, and Talend
• All the tools lack capabilities to establish trustability of data. Users can connect with tools like DataBuck, which autonomously calculate Data Trust Scores for all data assets everywhere in the pipeline, and sends alerts when the trust score trend is low. Users get an accurate measure of reliability, usability and trustability of all data sets.

What is Data Governance and Why Is It Important?

Data governance is the process of managing the availability, quality, usability, and security of an organization’s data. It employs a variety of policies and standards to determine data owners, control data usage, dictate intended uses for data, and enforce data security rules.

The primary goal of data governance is to ensure the high quality of data throughout the organization and guarantee that data is both easily accessible and secure. 

Data governance is important to ensure:

• Data reliability and quality
• Data consistency across all of an organization’s key systems
• Regulatory compliance

An organization’s data governance program typically includes a steering committee, governance team, and data stewards. These groups work together to create the standards and policies that govern how an organization uses its data. 

What Features Should You Look For in Data Governance Software?

When you’re looking for data governance software for your organization, you look for tools that include the following important features:

• Data discovery
• Data classification
• Metadata management
• Real-time data quality monitoring and management
• Data lineage tracking and observability

Your organization may not need all of these features, but they’re a good place to start your evaluation. You should also consider how easily a given solution integrates with your current systems and other best of breed tools. No tool is good at all the above, they are usually good at one or two capabilities and should have the ability to connect with complementary tools. Some tools like Collibra have closed their ecosystem and do not have many best of breed partners to complement them. Such tools did not make it in this list.

Today’s Top Data Governance Tools and Software 

There are numerous tools available to help with the task of data governance. Organizations use a variety of these tools, working separately and together, to help ensure data standards and data quality across all of an enterprise’s businesses and teams.

The following data governance tools and software are among the most popular today. Put these solutions on your list to evaluate your company’s data governance needs. 

Alation

Alation Data Catalog is a data intelligence solution that uses machine learning to analyze, index, and manage data from a wide variety of disparate sources. It takes data from relational databases, data lakes, and the like and makes it easily discoverable and retrievable. Data can be searched via natural language SQL queries. Alation’s open DQ initiative integrates autonomously calculated Data Trust Scores from FirstEigen’s DataBuck for all data assets, and alerts users when the trust score trend is low. The user gets an accurate measure of the usability of all data sets for their use. Alation is one of the most popular data governance tools today, counting companies such as Cisco, Pfizer, and Salesforce among its customers.

Alteryx

Alteryx Designer is a platform for discovering key data, preparing that data for use, and analyzing that data. It enables collaboration among a broad array of users, from business management and C-level executives to data analysts and IT staff. It enables companies to embed several different models into their business processes. Not designed for establishing Data Trust Scores, best used as a Data Wrangling tool.

Atlan

Atlan offers a modern data workspace platform that includes data governance, data cataloging and discovery, data quality management, and data integration. It includes automatic data profiling, an easy-to-use data search interface, and granular access and data governance controls. It’s an ideal platform for frictionless collaboration across business disciplines. Laborious to manually create individual data validation rules. Its key value is in the catalog and not in automating data validation rules. 

Cloudera

Cloudera offers several data governance and management tools, including Data Warehouse, Enterprise Data Hub, and Cloudera Navigator, which provides Apache Hadoop data governance. Navigator includes a search-based interface for data discovery, lineage, policy enforcement, and metadata management.

Dataddo

Dataddo is a cloud-based extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution that plugs into an organization’s existing data stack. It includes an intuitive interface that both technical and non-technical users can employ to quickly create efficient and powerful data pipelines. It includes a variety of data connectors that minimize the need to attach unnecessary components to an organization’s data architecture.

Immuta

Immuta is an automated data governance and security platform that lets users create no-code data policies. It offers controlled collaborative workspaces for sharing data, along with versatile permission management. It can run on-premises or in the cloud.

Informatica

Informatica’s cloud-based data management platform is an automated data governance solution that helps users discover, access, and analyze curated data. It includes tools for visualizing data lineage, monitoring data quality, and ensuring compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations. Its laborious and manual processes to establish the trustability of data has been a downer for most users, especially in the modern data stack. Informatica users have overcome this limitation by adopting ML-powered intelligent platforms like FirstEigen’s DataBuck to autonomously calculate Data Trust Scores for all data assets, and alert users of suspicious trends in Data Trust Scores. 

Integrate.io

Integrate.io is a cloud-based platform that includes ETL, ELT (extract, load, transform), and data integration for creating visualized data pipelines. It enables scalable data integration, preparation, and processing, as well as robust data analytics.

OvalEdge

OvalEdge is a data governance and discovery platform that uses machine learning and algorithms to create smart catalogs from data in databases, data lakes, and other systems. It includes tools for defining data assets and role-based user access, as well as automated data lineage and workflows.

Precisely

Precisely’s Data360 Govern is a data governance and cataloging solution for enterprises. It includes robust metadata management for improved data quality and decision-making. They have gone through significant mergers with other Data Governance companies and are finding the right foothold in the market. 

Talend

Talend is a scalable, cloud-based platform for end-to-end data governance and integration. It uses machine learning to manage data across a variety of environments by automatically crawling, organizing, and enriching metadata. The company offers both free open-source and paid versions with robust search, semantic discovery, and data sampling capabilities. They also have the same challenge of other tools, i.e., its laborious and manual processes to establish the trustability of data. Talend has also gone through mergers with other Data Governance companies and are finding the right foothold in the market. 

Zeenea

Zeenea is a cloud-native SaaS data discovery platform to find, trust and unlock the value of enterprise data. It automatically collects metadata across all your data sources and documents all assets with ease automatically. Its graph-based search engine makes finding the relevant data assets a breeze. Zeenea picks up autonomous Data Trust Scores directly from DataBuck for all data assets, and alerts users when the trust score trend is low. The user no longer has to guess the usability of a data set for their use. This combination catalog and Data Trustability makes Zeenea a leading Data Governance tool.

Improve Data Quality and Data Governance with DataBuck

Data governance depends on high-quality, reliable data. To ensure the highest quality possible, monitor your data with First Eigen’s DataBuck, an autonomous data quality monitoring solution. DataBuck uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to monitor and clean your system’s data in real time, ensuring the consistent data quality your organization needs for effective data governance. 

Contact FirstEigen today to learn more about data quality for data governance.

Check out these articles on Data Trustability, Observability & Data Quality Management-

• 6 Key Data Quality Metrics You Should Be Tracking
• How to Scale Your Data Quality Operations with AI and ML
• 12 Things You Can Do to Improve Data Quality
• How to Ensure Data Integrity During Cloud Migrations
• Build a Framework for Data Governance