Modern Data Discovery Platforms: Your 2025 Guide

Published on January 23, 2025

Key Takeaways

Data discovery platforms are essential for harnessing data, enabling teams to find, trust, and use the right data, and power AI investments.
The best of today’s data discovery platforms offer features like universal search, AI-enhanced queries, pre-built connectors to common data sources, and robust collaboration tools.
Alation stands out as a leader in data discovery with AI-driven search capabilities, data marketplace options, and data catalog features that help organizations realize the full value locked within their data.

Introduction

Data drives businesses today. Forrester Research says companies that make it easy for teams to find and use data are eight times more likely to grow than their less advanced peers. Gartner research shows that CEOs' top priority is growth. Considering these findings together, it’s no surprise that investments in data analytics increased by 54% in 2024.

Yet using data effectively begins with enabling teams to find the data they need. And the ability to find the right data demands much more than just having access to databases and business intelligence tools. Wringing value from data requires that teams can find, understand, trust, and ask questions about data before they even put it to use. That’s also increasingly important for AI initiatives, where access to trusted data is crucial for generating returns on AI investments.

What is data discovery?

Data discovery is the act of sifting through vast amounts of corporate data to find, understand, and use the right data to create meaningful insights. From there, teams quickly and easily spot trends, create accurate forecasts, find ways around risks, prepare for the unexpected, and more. However, before data is used, it has to be discovered—whether it’s in a database or locked in a “shadow IT” application silo.

What are the benefits of effective data discovery for organizations?

Deeper customer insights from finding and analyzing data for customer behaviors, preferences, and needs – which can drive more effective marketing and improved customer satisfaction.
More efficient operations by identifying inefficiencies and opportunities for improvement that drive cost savings, cycle time reduction, and more effective processes.
Less risk by identifying potential areas of risk and finding proactive solutions to mitigate those risks.
Increased security from analyzing data and systems access, network disruptions and anomalies, and transaction variances that can signal potential security gaps and attacks.
Faster innovation by identifying and capitalizing on new opportunities, market trends, competitive moves, and other incoming information.
More time for strategic thinking by eliminating and automating manual data search and discovery processes and giving teams more time to focus on cognitive work.
Easier regulatory compliance through faster access to necessary information and enabling guardrails to better manage data access.
Improved decision-making by identifying key trends and patterns in data to make better decisions in less time and with more confidence.

What are data discovery platforms?

Data discovery platforms enable workers to find and understand organizational data, no matter where it resides. Data discovery forms the foundation of every data-driven initiative, from governance and compliance to digital transformation and data literacy. If teams can’t find the data they need, data initiatives are impossible.

Modern data discovery platforms go further by helping people connect with those who know the data better. These solutions also enable data governance efforts, access controls, data privacy and security for personally identifiable information (PII) and other data, collaboration tools, and more.

While data discovery platforms help people find data, they also offer tools for data teams to define data objectives; consolidate, cleanse, and transform data; enforce data rules; architect data infrastructures; and more.

As data becomes even more critical to competitiveness and growth in 2025, its value in powering AI is clear. Since AI needs vast amounts of data to generate accurate, trusted insights, organizations must find and understand data before AI can leverage it.

What to look for in a modern data discovery platform

The best data discovery tools enable organizations to democratize access to enterprise data in pursuit of a robust data culture.

What are the key components of a modern data discovery platform?

Universal search makes searching vast and disparate data sources and systems as easy as searching the web for non-technical people and highly skilled data scientists.
AI-enhanced data discovery capabilities that understand natural language queries to provide results that match the meaning of the search query rather than just the specific keywords.
Data descriptions, terms, definitions, policies, documentation, and more to help users better understand data and use it appropriately.
Collaboration and trust tools to view data lineage, evaluate data quality, and allow subject matter experts to use trust flags, endorsements, and comments for increased confidence in the data.
Pre-built connectors that integrate with popular data sources like relational databases, flat files, business intelligence tools, common applications, and AI models, and more, and open connectors and APIs for more unique and homegrown data sources.
Automation tools to automatically discover (and categorize and catalog) new data sources as they are deployed and to automate typically manual data-related processes.
Data governance capabilities to capture objectives, empower data stewards, store organizational knowledge, and define processes that adhere to data governance best practices.
Ease of use, flexibility, and scalability so non-technical workers, skilled developers, busy executives, and focused data scientists can all gain increased value from data as the organization grows.

Comparing top data discovery platforms

Alation

Alation is the data intelligence company, helping organizations realize value from data and AI initiatives by delivering trustworthy data for everyone to accelerate data initiatives and strengthen a data culture with a unified view of metadata across your data, BI, and AI assets.

Alation benefits include:

AI-driven universal search bar to easily search all sources simultaneously, browse and discover the most relevant, trusted data, and query data in natural language.
Intelligent Search that redefines traditional keyword-focused search by combining behavioral, semantic, and keyword ranking capabilities for a more intuitive search experience.
Alation Marketplaces to connect with high-value, third-party datasets to uncover new insights, including Snowflake Data Exchange, Datarade, and public sources like data.gov.

Potential concerns with Alation include its extensive business user capabilities and broad solution suite that can increase the total cost of ownership.

Looker

Now a part of Google, Looker is a business intelligence solution that combines foundational AI, cloud-first infrastructure, industry-leading APIs, and a flexible semantic layer.

Looker benefits include:

Ability to build custom data experiences.
Semantic modeling for sourcing data for AI and human analysis.
Visualizations, self-service analytics, and a built-in AI assistant.

Potential concerns with Looker include its technical interface and reliance on the Google Cloud ecosystem.

Secoda

Secoda offers a data discovery and metadata management platform using AI, automation, and data catalog capabilities to enable data governance efforts.

Secoda benefits include:

AI-powered data search across a single source of truth for all data assets.
Features to combine data quality, catalog, and governance processes onto a single platform.
Automation tools to perform bulk updates, data tagging, data asset identification, and more.

Potential concerns with Secoda include higher pricing for more advanced features and complex, technical integration requirements.

Select Star

Select Star provides a data governance platform consisting of a data catalog, lineage, and usage features.

Select Star benefits include:

Data catalog tools to find, describe, and document data for easier discovery.
Data lineage captured at the granular level to understand where data originated.
Usage insights to better understand how and how often data is used.

Potential concerns with Select Star include limitations on data quality, scalability, and data observability, plus manual implementation requirements.

Atlan

Atlan offers a platform for data and AI governance that stitches together disparate data by cataloging data and enriching it with business context and security.

Atlan benefits include:

Natural language search using synonyms to broaden keyword searches.
Business context search to find data linked to business metrics.
Search via SQL syntax for data engineers.

Potential concerns with Atlan range from its limited analytics capabilities to its complex interface and lack of AI integrations.

Collibra

Collibra delivers trusted data that accelerates smarter decision-making through its unified platform, which covers governance, quality, lineage, privacy, and more.

Collibra benefits include:

A unified view of data assets for comprehensive visibility across an organization.
The Collibra Data Marketplace, which provides a self-service portal where data consumers can shop for curated, ready-to-use data.
Automation tools to speed manual tasks like automatic classifications and AI-driven asset description drafting.

Potential concerns with Collibra are its high price compared with competitors, complex implementation, and limited AI features.

OneTrust

The OneTrust platform simplifies data collection, automates data governance, and activates the responsible use of data through data policies.

OneTrust benefits include:

Data discovery and classification engine that dives into data to improve classification accuracy.
Wide selection of pre-built connectors for popular data sources and an SDK for custom data connectors.
Automation of consumer rights requests to track and fulfill consumer data requests.

Potential concerns with OneTrust are its steep learning curve, customer support limitations, and integration complexity.

Metaphor

Metaphor describes its offering as a social platform for data, giving teams instant access to data questions.

Metaphor benefits include:

Customized search that’s easy for technical and non-technical users to find and use data with confidence.
Slack and Teams integrations to streamline how data is discovered and shared.
Governance, quality, and collaboration tools to improve trust and knowledge sharing.

Potential concerns with Metaphor range from its lack of an AI chatbot and limited reporting features to its focus on technical users.

Why Alation is the best choice for data discovery

With an ever-increasing flow of data and new AI-powered tools requiring more access to better data, every organization is challenged to streamline how data is discovered, managed, used, and shared. It’s a daunting task, but one that is effectively overcome by democratizing data access with a modern data discovery platform.

Alation eases data discovery so teams can build AI models with confidence, data governance efforts run effectively, and trusted data products are accessible and shared across the organization. The result is empowered teams that can put data to work easily for faster, more accurate decisions made with increased confidence.

Schedule an Alation demo to learn why 40% of the Fortune 100 use Alation for data discovery, data and AI governance, metadata management, and more.