Your evaluation guide to navigating
the top data catalogs
Data teams are more than familiar with the increasing complexities of managing data in modern data stacks. The multitude of diverse data sources makes it challenging to maintain accurate records of data lineage, metadata, and other important details. Fortunately, implementing a modern data catalog with embedded AI capabilities can help solve these issues.
A data catalog acts as an automated and centralized repository, serving as the definitive source for data discovery, documentation, and governance. By using Secoda, you can streamline data management and navigate your data infrastructure more effectively.
We’ll compare Secoda to Castor against six key criteria that modern data teams should be considering during their data catalog evaluation process:
Reducing the time spent on data discovery and documentation is crucial for a data catalog.
With Secoda, you have the ability to use the AI assistant which is embedded right in your workflow. Because Secoda automatically ingests all metadata across all of your data sources, you have the ability to automate 90% of your documentation efforts by automatically generating SQL, table and column descriptions, user guides, and more.
Secoda offers automatic visualization of lineage across all data sources in your data stack. Additionally, it provides the convenience of adding manual lineage nodes through an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. Secoda's lineage feature covers both column and table levels and sends notifications via Slack for downstream owner changes
Secoda is the entry point for anyone, regardless of technical ability, to search for data knowledge. Any team member can ask any question to your data and return a relevant, contextual answer with the ease of ChatGPT.
Data catalogs should cater to both technical and non-technical users to provide value. Ensuring ease of use is crucial, and Secoda accomplishes this through its powerful and user-friendly search function, powered by LLM. This search function improves the accuracy and speed of finding information. By considering not only the meaning but also the context of search terms, Secoda lets users efficiently obtain comprehensive results.
Secoda is designed to empower everyone in the organization, not just data practitioners, with the ability to find the data they need. It offers personalized user journeys and views based on specific roles like data analysts or heads of sales, making data access easier.
Secoda prioritizes a delightful user experience, allowing multiple collaborators at once, similar to Google Docs or Miro Boards. It also supports nested folder structures for establishing document hierarchies and relationships.
Once an account is created, data teams can go-live with Secoda in minutes. You can implement on your own or with guidance from our customer success team, either way, you will be live by the end of the day.
Enterprise data catalogs must have robust support for data governance workflows, including version control, version history, publishing workflows, role-based permissions, assignments, and access controls. With Secoda, non-data team users can be provided with tailored experiences based on their organizational roles. For instance, the head of marketing will have access to different reports than the director of analytics.
Secoda ensures the security and protection of client data by being SOC 2 Type 1 and 2 compliant, adhering to the standards set by the AICPA. It provides flexibility in hosting options, allowing you to host Secoda in a self-hosted environment behind your own VPN and within your own VPC. Deployment can be done conveniently through Terraform or Docker.
Secoda offers seamless integration with various authentication services, including Google and Microsoft SSO, Okta, MFA, and SAML, enabling users to sign in using their existing credentials.
When transferring data from private databases to Secoda, SSH tunnelling ensures a secure process. Users have granular control over their datasets, with the ability to remove or exclude sensitive data during synchronization or mark it automatically within Secoda.
Data managed with Secoda remains fully encrypted both during transit and at rest, ensuring the privacy and confidentiality of the data. Secoda does not access or view the data being moved, prioritizing data security.
Secoda is the first AI powered catalog with embedded search capabilities. Secoda AI is currently a full-production feature that spans across search, lineage, and documentation. Rather than still being in beta, our customers are using Secoda AI to automate 90% of their documentation.
Secoda is built on modern infrastructure and seamlessly integrates with both modern and legacy data stacks. New features are shipped on a weekly basis and on-demand training is available for any users who may require assistance.
The ability to customize is crucial for the successful adoption of a data catalog and other data products. If a data catalog doesn't align with existing workflows, it is likely to be rejected. It is essential for a data catalog to seamlessly integrate with workflows without causing disruptions. Secoda excels in customization, offering features such as granular user permissions and API integration for creating custom integrations. With Secoda, data teams have the flexibility to create personalized alerts, notifying stakeholders when changes affect downstream assets. Furthermore, Secoda provides the option to use Terraform, which is not available in Castor.
Data catalogs should be customizable to meet the specific needs of an organization, while also offering a reasonable price that can scale with the organization's needs. Having the ability for price to scale in a reasonable way with no concern of number of assets, viewers or integrations is a key differentiator between point-solution data catalogs and all-in-one solutions.
Secoda offers transparent pricing with four different tiers to fit your needs: Free, Growth, Business, and Enterprise. Reach out and we’ll be happy to set you up with a trial so you can see how easy Secoda will fit and enhance your workflow
When businesses are choosing a data catalog tool, they want to make sure the tool will have all the features they need. Secoda provides this and more. When compared to Castordoc, Secoda offers more features such as:
Secoda’s charting and querying abilities are second to none. You can easily access our advanced charting and querying tools and anyone on your team can understand how to use them. Your users will always be able to request the data they need and create charts, graphs, and more.
Unlike Castordoc, Secoda doesn’t charge you more for viewers. You can have unlimited viewers and guests, so you can collaborate with the right people and your teams have no obstacles to sharing the data they need to share. This also makes it easy to scale Secoda with your business.
Secoda is incredibly simple to set up and requires no coding. You can get Secoda set up and integrated with your current software stack in just minutes, so your team can get back to work.
If you’re needing to share data and analytics with your customers, just use Secoda’s features for customer links and invitations.
Secoda provides tools for workspace analytics, so your team can get in-depth information about your company data.
Easily integrate Secoda with Git and use version control to merge or roll back changes as necessary.
Any team member with access can Q&A data and make data requests. This saves time for your data team and helps the rest of your company be less reliant on data teams to move projects forward. No more bottlenecks and no more requests that pile up or slip through the cracks.
Secoda provides intuitive and flexible Notion-like docs that help your team collaborate, document data requests, and much more. Everyone will see the same information and updates.
Secoda allows you to integrate all of the tools you already use. Unlike Castordoc, you can integrate tools like Jira and Confluence, so workflows remain uninterrupted.
Secoda is built with business users and data teams in mind. Our name literally stands for “searchable company data,” because we believe your users should be able to discover, search, and understand all of your data in one place. With data democracy, your team can make more data-driven decisions and have the access they need to find the right data.
Data discovery has never been easier. You don’t have to have advanced data knowledge to use Secoda. Everyone is empowered to utilize company data, update information, and collaborate with other teams.
Secoda provides a holistic platform for your team to collaborate, document changes, and access in-depth data knowledge. While other platforms are focused on technical data, our platform is designed for ease of use and accessibility.
With our data catalog tool, your teams can connect their data and share data easier than ever before. Your team can also easily share data and analytics with customers and outside as necessary, making external collaboration simpler too.
Secoda consolidates all of your company data in one single source of truth. This means anyone can search data and find the right answers, without duplicates, errors, and missing data.
Our platform is your all-in-one solution for your data catalog, data documentation, data dictionary, and data management.When your data is easily searchable, you can reduce the number of data requests, increase insights collected by your data team, and increase overall data literacy in your company.
Here are some of the key advantages of Secoda: Secoda makes your company data searchable; anyone at your company can discover and understand data, making data democratization possible; Secoda is a holistic platform. Everyone on your team can collaborate and access in-depth data knowledge, increasing data literacy and empowering employees to utilize data; Secoda makes it easy to integrate the tools you use most; and Secoda is easy to set up, allowing you to sign up, connect your integrations, and get started in minutes.
Secoda offers an array of benefits over Castordoc. When you choose Secoda, you’ll get advanced charting and querying abilities, unlimited viewers, simple setup, data Q&A and requests, and more.
Here are some of the other ways Secoda is different:
Customer links and invitations - Share data with customers and collaborate with external teams
Workspace analytics - Get in-depth analytics about your data
Version control with Git - Get version control for changes in Git
Flexible, Notion-like docs - Make documentation and collaboration easy with Notion-like docs
API access - Get access to the Secoda API
Secoda is a better alternative to Castordoc in numerous areas. Secoda is a business-user-first platform, making it easy to search company data, collaborate with teams, save your data team time, and much more.
Secoda does not pull in your data. Instead, Secoda pulls in metadata about your data. For a majority of the integrations connected to Secoda, this means Secoda pulls in resource names, popularity, lineage, queries, descriptions and frequent usage. For more information about our integration, you can visit our integration docs.
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