Used For

• +**Analysts spend half their time hunting for the right customer table** → Type 'Q4 customer revenue' in plain English and get the actual dataset with lineage and access rules
• +**Your GDPR audit failed because you couldn't track personal data flow** → Automatic lineage mapping shows exactly where EU customer data flows from Salesforce to Snowflake to Tableau
• +**Data engineers break pipelines because they used deprecated tables** → Built-in warnings flag outdated data sources before they wreck your ETL jobs
• +Natural language queries that generate SQL behind the scenes — ask questions like a human, get database answers
• +Policy enforcement that actually blocks access instead of relying on honor system compliance

Best For

• >Your data team is burning 20 hours a week hunting for datasets and you're drowning in spreadsheet documentation
• >Failed a compliance audit because nobody could prove where sensitive data came from or who accessed it
• >You're a 1,000+ person company where 'just ask Steve' stopped working as a data discovery strategy

Not For

• -Teams under 500 people — you're paying for governance complexity you don't have yet
• -Companies wanting plug-and-play simplicity — this requires dedicated data stewards who know what they're doing
• -Anyone hoping for a quick weekend setup — plan for 2-4 weeks of configuration before you see real value

Pairs With

• *Snowflake (where your actual data lives and Alation monitors quality metrics)
• *Tableau (for dashboards that now show data lineage and compliance status instead of just pretty charts)
• *AWS (to enforce access controls on your cloud storage instead of hoping people follow guidelines)
• *dbt (handles data transformations while Alation tracks where everything goes)
• *Acceldata (monitors your pipelines for anomalies that Alation maps back to governance policies)
• *Slack (where your team gets alerts about policy violations and celebrates zero compliance findings)

The Catch

• !No public pricing means custom enterprise quotes that'll make your CFO wince — budget 6 figures minimum
• !Requires clean metadata to work well — garbage in, garbage search results out
• !Your data team needs to become policy enforcers, not just data movers — expect some pushback on the new rules

Bottom Line

Enterprise data governance that costs enterprise money but actually works — your compliance team will finally sleep at night.