Data governance is one of the most popular and in-demand jobs among the data domain. Data governance leaders help to manage, govern, and monitor data to help organizations improve their business outcomes.

In this post, we’ll highlight the 10 most commonly used data governance tools at tech companies based on research with data governance leaders. We’ll also briefly dive into some trends we noticed during our conversations, further exploring how different data governance teams are thinking about their roles in the future. By the end of this post, we should’ve shed some light on the following questions:

• What data access governance software are teams really using?
• What tools can data governance teams not stop talking about?
• Which data access governance tools tools tools are here to stay?

What is a Data Governance Tool?

A data governance tool is a software solution that manages and oversees an organization's data assets, ensuring their quality, security, and compliance with regulations. These tools organize and store data efficiently, facilitating easy discovery and access. They track data lineage to understand data's journey from source to use, helping to identify and correct issues. By enforcing compliance with internal policies and external regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, these tools automate checks to maintain adherence.

These tools also maintain data quality through cleansing and validation, ensuring accuracy and reliability. They implement access controls to keep sensitive data secure and prevent breaches. Seamlessly integrating with existing infrastructure, including cloud environments, they offer scalability to grow with data needs. Continuous monitoring and reporting provide insights for improving governance practices and informed decision-making.

Top Data Governance Tools

1. Secoda

Secoda is a universal data discovery and documentation tool that makes finding metadata, queries, charts and documentation as easy as a google search.

Today, data teams are collecting tons of data, but most employees don't know what data exists, how to use it, and what data to trust. This confusion happens because different components of company data get collected in fragmented tools. Teams use dbt and Snowflake for data cataloging, Google Sheets for events, Confluence for general knowledge, Slack to manage data requests, Mode for reports, Github, Looker, the list goes on and on.

Secoda lets teams manage their queries, charts, data catalog, data dictionary, and documentation in one place.

After teams switch to Secoda, data governance is centralized in one place. Instead of having to switch between Snowflake, dbt, Confluence Google Sheets, BI tool, and your query editor, Secoda keeps all your data knowledge in one place for everyone who needs it.

Key data governance features of Secoda

• Automated Metadata Management: AI-driven metadata enrichment ensures all data assets are properly documented and up to date.
• Integrated Data Discovery: A centralized platform that allows teams to quickly find, understand, and trust their data.
• Role-Based Access Control: Enables administrators to restrict data access based on user roles, ensuring sensitive information is only accessible to authorized individuals.‍
• Audit Trails & Compliance Tracking: Maintains a historical record of data usage, changes, and access to meet regulatory requirements.

2. Alation

Alation is an enterprise data cataloging platform. Alation automatically builds a catalog of data documentation, covering all the data sources within your organization. Users can then collaborate and work on the same data together. Alation processes enterprise unstructured content by centralizing knowledge into one place using machine learning and manual analysis. Search can be done using keywords in plain English, and results can be filtered by relevance.

Alation enables you to access relevant information (such as experts, lineage, keys, and indexes), and documentation on all tables across your organization’s data source. Clients include PepsiCo, Dow Chemical, Fox Networks Group, BMW, and others.

Alation - Key data governance features

• AI-Powered Data Catalog: Uses machine learning to suggest metadata tags, improving searchability and organization.
• Policy-Centric Governance: Automates the enforcement of governance policies, ensuring compliance with internal and external regulations.
• Active Data Stewardship: Encourages collaboration by assigning ownership and accountability for data quality and governance.
• Impact Analysis & Lineage Tracking: Provides a visual representation of data flow and dependencies, helping teams understand how changes impact downstream systems.

3. Immuta

Immuta is a leading data security and access control platform built for highly regulated industries, including healthcare, finance, and government. They provide a cloud-native data management platform designed to help organizations manage sensitive data. 

Immuta’s goal is to provide an easy-to-use toolset that enables users to easily create, share, and consume data while complying with regulations like HIPAA, PCI DSS, GDPR, etc. By implementing dynamic access controls, data masking, and automated policy enforcement, it enables organizations to securely manage their data while reducing governance complexity.

Immuta - Key data governance features

• Dynamic Data Access Control: Uses attribute-based access control (ABAC) to grant or restrict data access dynamically, based on policies and user attributes.
• Automated Compliance Enforcement: Implements and enforces compliance rules without manual intervention, reducing governance complexity.
• Data Masking & Anonymization: Protects sensitive data by automatically masking or anonymizing it based on user roles and regulations.‍
• Audit Logging & Monitoring: Captures detailed logs of all data access and policy changes, ensuring full transparency and accountability.

4. Collibra

Collibra is a widely recognized enterprise data governance and management platform that helps organizations streamline data stewardship, enforce policies, and maintain compliance. It provides an end-to-end solution for cataloging, lineage tracking, and policy enforcement at scale.

Collibra’s governance framework is designed to help enterprises build trust in their data. With automated policy management, business glossary tools, and data lineage tracking, it enables organizations to make better data-driven decisions while ensuring regulatory compliance.

Collibra - Key data governance features

• End-to-End Data Lineage: Tracks data flow across systems, allowing organizations to trace data origins, transformations, and usage.
• Automated Policy Management: Standardizes and enforces governance policies across all data sources, ensuring consistent compliance.
• Data Stewardship Framework: Assigns specific responsibilities to data stewards, ensuring that data is managed and maintained effectively.‍
• Business Glossary & Metadata Hub: Provides a centralized, shared vocabulary for data terms and definitions, improving clarity and alignment across teams.

5. Avo

Avo is the self-serve analytics governance that saves teams like Patreon and Rappi hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, by making every analytics release better, faster, and easier. Avo is a better alternative to the "tracking plan spreadsheet", keeping your data quality high and your schema sync'd with all downstream tools. Import your tracking plan for an instant audit, then design more scalable data for every feature release, even before you're an expert. 

Avo is ongoing observability of actual tracking compared with tracking plan. One-time install the Avo Inspector SDK to see what's wrong with your tracking today so you can start making it better. Avo is the self-serve analytics governance, changing how PMs, devs and data scientists collaborate to plan, implement and verify their product analytics. What used to take Patreon 1-4 days for every feature release, now takes 30-60 minutes.

Avo - Key data governance features

• Automated Schema Management: Detects and prevents inconsistencies in data schemas, reducing tracking errors and broken analytics.
• Version Control for Tracking Plans: Maintains structured tracking plans with version history, ensuring data consistency across multiple teams and platforms.
• Real-Time Data Validation: Automatically verifies event tracking and data collection in real time, identifying and correcting issues before they impact analytics.‍
• Cross-Team Collaboration Tools: Enables product, engineering, and analytics teams to collaborate on data governance through a shared platform.

6. Precisely

Precisely is a data integrity and governance leader, providing solutions that enhance data quality, governance, and enrichment. With robust data profiling, metadata management, and compliance frameworks, Precisely helps organizations build a trusted data foundation. Its governance solutions enable businesses to maintain high-quality data while aligning with industry regulations.

The Precisely Data Integrity suite is built on proven technologies that 12,000 global companies rely on for their data driven initiatives. It includes 7 interoperable modules that bring you trusted data that is accurate and consistent across all your systems. It also gives you the ability to integrate your data with other sources to create a complete picture of your customers and prospects.

Precisely - Key data governance features

• Data Quality & Integrity Management: Uses automated data profiling and cleansing to ensure data accuracy, consistency, and completeness.
• Regulatory Compliance Frameworks: Supports compliance with industry regulations like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA, reducing legal risks.
• Geospatial & Data Enrichment Capabilities: Enhances datasets with geospatial and third-party data to improve decision-making and insights.‍
• End-to-End Metadata Management: Provides a structured approach to organizing and governing metadata, ensuring reliable and trustworthy data.

7. Atlan

Atlan provides a data catalog that helps teams keep track of their data assets. It allows users to search across large volumes of documents, files, images, spreadsheets, and databases, though its breadth can sometimes feel like more than most teams actually need. Built on the cloud, it scales with your data, which is convenient for growing organizations, provided you're comfortable with the additional complexity.

The platform includes AI-powered features like metadata tagging, lineage tracking, and impact analysis to support governance workflows, though these capabilities may require fine-tuning to deliver consistent value. Its compatibility with tools like Snowflake, dbt, and BigQuery helps it slot into modern data stacks.

Atlan - Key data governance features

• Centralized Data Discovery: Central data catalog to surface relevant data assets, making it easier for teams to find and trust the right data.
• Automated Lineage & Impact Analysis: Provides a detailed view of how data flows through the organization, helping teams assess dependencies and risks.
• Self-Service Data Governance: Empowers non-technical users with intuitive tools to manage data policies and access without IT bottlenecks.‍
• Seamless Integrations with Modern Data Stacks: Connects with Snowflake, dbt, Redshift, and other modern data platforms to streamline governance across environments.

8. OvalEdge

Ovaledge is an enterprise data governance platform that helps companies manage their data across all its forms. It allows users to search through different types of data sources including databases, file systems, cloud services, and big data repositories. OvalEdge also offers a suite of analytics tools that help users analyze their data. These tools allow users to discover insights about their data and gain valuable knowledge about their customers.

With a focus on access controls, threat detection, and compliance automation, OverEdge provides a comprehensive solution for safeguarding sensitive data while maintaining governance standards.

OverEdge - Key data governance features

• Granular Data Access Controls: Enables organizations to define precise access policies, ensuring only authorized personnel can view or edit data.
• Continuous Compliance Monitoring: Automatically scans data environments to ensure ongoing compliance with regulations and internal policies.
• Threat Detection & Risk Analysis: Identifies potential security vulnerabilities and unauthorized access attempts, providing real-time alerts.‍
• Hybrid Cloud & On-Prem Governance: Supports governance across cloud-based and on-premises data environments, ensuring consistency in security and access policies.

9. Data.world

Data.World is an open source data catalog designed to help organizations discover, govern, and analyze their data through the use of knowledge graphs. Its cloud-native platform supports data teams by enhancing productivity and enabling smarter decision-making.

Data.world - Key data governance features

• Knowledge Graph-Powered Data Catalog: Uses graph-based relationships to enhance metadata organization, making it easier to connect related data assets.
• Built-in Governance & Compliance Tools: Capable of providing a paper trail to ensure alignment with regulatory requirements.
• Collaboration-Driven Metadata Management: Allows teams to work together on metadata enrichment and governance policies, improving data quality and accessibility.‍
• Extensive API & BI Tool Integrations: Seamlessly integrates with BI tools like Tableau, Looker, and Power BI, ensuring data governance is embedded in analytics workflows.

Key features of a Data Governance tool

1. Data Catalog: The tool should provide functionality for creating a centralized data catalog, allowing organizations to document and understand their data assets
2. Data Quality Management: It should offer capabilities for defining, monitoring, and improving data quality, covering aspects such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, and validity
3. Data Security: The tool must enforce stringent security protocols to protect data from unauthorized access, supporting data masking, anonymization, and encryption techniques
4. Data Lineage and Metadata Management: It should include features for automated data lineage, metadata management, and data mapping, allowing organizations to track the flow of data and maintain policy adherence.
5. Regulatory Compliance Support: The tool should incorporate frameworks and workflows to ensure organizations comply with regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA
6. Collaboration and Workflow Management: It should facilitate collaborative discovery, reporting, and auditing activities, along with workflow management and process documentation to drive compliance and governance
7. Scalability and Integration: The tool should be scalable and able to integrate with existing data management and analytics solutions within the organization

These features are essential for ensuring the quality, security, availability, and usability of data across an organization, and for supporting data governance efforts in a complex and dynamic data environment.

What data access governance software are teams most excited about?

It’s easy to get excited about data governance software and the endless possibilities it brings for teams to manage and secure their data. However, with so many options available, it can feel like being a kid in a candy store—choosing the right solution can be overwhelming.

Organizations are increasingly stringent about the technologies employees use, from software down to hardware choices, so it’s no surprise they’re equally concerned about how their data is accessed. The good news is that with the right data access governance software, teams can ensure their data is accessed safely and in line with company policies. Recently, we’ve seen strong momentum in the data discovery and cataloging space, led by innovators like Alation and Collibra, who continue to shape the landscape of data governance with their robust solutions.

What’s next in data access governance software?

With data access governance software, you have visibility into who has access to what data and where it is located. Data access governance helps organizations find where sensitive data might be stored and then decide whether to move it or modify permissions to restrict access. You need to know where data is – and who can see it – so you can understand the risk your organization faces in order to protect sensitive information.

Data Governance (DG) is a structured approach to managing data, focusing on policies and processes. Automating data governance allows companies to ensure that each step of the DG process is executed accurately and consistently.

Try Secoda for free

Secoda encompasses all of the above features in a single platform.

Tools that allow employees outside the data team to make confident decisions must continue to adapt to the needs of modern businesses and data privacy concerns. If you’re interested in talking about the future of the data stack and how we can help your team, you can create a free account here

Data governance is critical for ensuring the accuracy, security, and compliance of an organization's data. Secoda offers a range of features and tools that can help data teams improve their data governance practices in several ways:

1. Automated data lineage: Secoda's automated data lineage capabilities provide a complete view of data flows across your organization, allowing data teams to better understand data dependencies and ensure data accuracy. This can help teams to identify potential issues and mitigate risks related to data quality, compliance, and security.
2. Data cataloging: With Secoda's data cataloging features, data teams can easily track and manage data assets across the organization, including data sources, data models, and data transformations. This can help teams to ensure that data assets are being used appropriately and are compliant with relevant regulations.
3. Collaboration and documentation: Secoda provides a platform for data teams to collaborate and document their data governance policies, standards, and procedures. This can help to ensure that everyone on the team has a shared understanding of data governance practices and can contribute to the ongoing improvement of those practices.
4. Auditing and compliance: Secoda's auditing and compliance features help to ensure that data governance policies and procedures are being followed, and provide a clear audit trail for any changes or updates made to data assets. This can help teams to meet regulatory requirements and ensure that data is secure and compliant.
5. Data privacy and security: With Secoda's data privacy and security features, data teams can ensure that sensitive data is being handled appropriately, and that access to data is limited to authorized individuals. This can help teams to protect against data breaches and other security threats.

Overall, by using Secoda for data governance, data teams can improve their data quality, ensure compliance with regulations, and reduce the risk of data-related issues. The platform provides a range of features and tools that can help data teams to collaborate, document, and enforce data governance policies, making it a valuable tool for any organization that takes data governance seriously.