Collibra

Collibra is a commercial data governance and data intelligence vendor founded in 2008 and positioned for large enterprises that require formalized metadata control. The product is delivered as Collibra Data Intelligence Cloud—a multi-module platform that unifies cataloging, governance, lineage, and policy management. Collibra’s core value proposition is enabling organizations to create a single source of truth for metadata: business glossaries linked to technical assets, role-based stewardship, and certification processes that support compliance, auditability, and trusted analytics across disparate data systems.

Key features span several practical capabilities. The Collibra Data Catalog provides searchable metadata plus automated discovery and ML-suggested classifications to speed dataset onboarding. The platform’s lineage capability captures end-to-end lineage across SQL, Spark, and ETL pipelines and supports column-level lineage for many connectors, helping teams trace data transformations and impact. Stewardship and workflow tooling allow assignment of data owners, SLAs, and approval flows; forms and tasks are configurable so stewards can certify datasets and log incidents. Collibra also exposes REST APIs and a set of prebuilt connectors for Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Microsoft Power BI, and cloud object stores to integrate with modern analytics stacks.

Pricing for Collibra is not published as fixed per-seat tiers; instead the company offers custom enterprise pricing and modular licensing for Data Catalog, Data Lineage, Data Privacy, and Data Quality modules. A free evaluation or trial is commonly available for prospective customers (often 14–30 days, depending on the sales engagement). Paid contracts typically include implementation services, SSO/SCIM, SLAs, and additional governance modules; costs scale with modules, connectors, and seat counts, so expect enterprise-level licensing rather than simple per-user monthly rates. Collibra targets mid-market to global enterprise budgets rather than small-team subscriptions.

Collibra is used by data governance managers to implement organization-wide policies, by data stewards to certify datasets and manage data quality incidents, and by analytics engineering teams to discover lineage and reduce production incidents. Example workflows: a Data Governance Manager uses Collibra to enforce GDPR retention policies and reduce compliance risk, while an Analytics Engineer uses lineage to cut incident resolution time by tracing faulty ETL to its source. For organizations focused on catalog-first analytics, Collibra competes most directly with Alation and Informatica, with Collibra skewing toward governance controls and steward workflows versus pure discovery platforms.