What is Hygraph and how does it function as a data catalog tool?
Hygraph is a powerful platform that provides a unified data catalog and product experience via a single orchestration layer. While not a pure-play data catalog software, Hygraph excels in inventory and catalog management by allowing organizations to unify all their services into a single GraphQL API. This enables the delivery of complex applications and digital experiences, making it ideal for composable data stacks and microservices orchestration. Source
What are the key features and capabilities of Hygraph?
Hygraph offers scalable architecture supporting over 10 million entries, headless architecture, flexible read and write APIs, multi-tenancy, granular permissions, omnichannel content distribution, and is GraphQL native. Its schema editor allows teams to make architectural changes independently from the front end, empowering both developers and content teams. Source
How does Hygraph help organizations manage composable data stacks?
Hygraph enables organizations to orchestrate multiple microservices and APIs into a consistent layer, simplifying the management of composable data stacks. Its decoupled architecture allows for unified service integration and flexible content delivery, supporting complex digital experiences and inventory management. Source
Features & Integrations
What integrations does Hygraph support?
Hygraph supports a wide range of integrations, including Netlify and Vercel for hosting and deployment, BigCommerce, commercetools, and Shopify for eCommerce, Lokalise, Crowdin, EasyTranslate, and Smartling for localization, Aprimo, AWS S3, Bynder, Cloudinary, Mux, and Scaleflex Filerobot for digital asset management, Ninetailed for personalization and AB testing, AltText.ai for artificial intelligence, and Adminix and Plasmic for miscellaneous use cases. For a full list, visit Hygraph Integrations.
Does Hygraph provide an API for data access and management?
Yes, Hygraph offers a powerful GraphQL API that enables efficient content fetching and management. This API allows organizations to unify services and deliver complex digital experiences. Learn more at Hygraph API Reference.
Where can I find technical documentation for Hygraph?
Comprehensive technical documentation for Hygraph is available at Hygraph Documentation. It covers everything needed to build and deploy projects, including API usage, integrations, and best practices.
Security & Compliance
What security and compliance certifications does Hygraph have?
Hygraph is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant, ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR compliant. These certifications ensure enterprise-grade security and data protection for users. Hygraph also offers SSO integrations, audit logs, encryption at rest and in transit, and sandbox environments. For more details, visit Hygraph Security Features.
Pricing & Plans
What is Hygraph's pricing model?
Hygraph offers a free forever Hobby plan, a Growth plan starting at $199/month, and custom Enterprise plans. For detailed pricing information, visit the Hygraph Pricing Page.
Use Cases & Industries
What industries use Hygraph?
Hygraph is used across a wide range of industries, including food and beverage (Dr. Oetker), consumer electronics (Samsung), automotive (AutoWeb), healthcare (Vision Healthcare), travel and hospitality (HolidayCheck), media and publishing, eCommerce, SaaS (Bellhop), marketplace, education technology, and wellness and fitness. For more details, see Hygraph Case Studies.
Who are some of Hygraph's customers?
Hygraph's customers include Sennheiser, HolidayCheck, Ancestry, Samsung, Dr. Oetker, Epic Games, Bandai Namco, Gamescom, Leo Vegas, and Clayton Homes. Explore more customer stories at Hygraph Case Studies.
What are some customer success stories with Hygraph?
Komax achieved a 3X faster time to market, Autoweb saw a 20% increase in website monetization, Samsung improved customer engagement with a scalable platform, and Dr. Oetker enhanced their digital experience using MACH architecture. More success stories are available at Hygraph Customer Stories.
Pain Points & Solutions
What problems does Hygraph solve for organizations?
Hygraph addresses operational pains (reducing reliance on developers for content updates, modernizing legacy tech stacks, resolving conflicting needs of global teams, improving user experience for content creation), financial pains (lowering operational costs, speeding up time-to-market, reducing maintenance costs, supporting scalability), and technical pains (simplifying development workflows, streamlining query management, resolving cache and integration challenges). Source
How does Hygraph differentiate itself from other data catalog tools?
Hygraph stands out with its GraphQL-native architecture, content federation, scalability, and flexibility. Unlike pure-play data catalog tools, Hygraph enables both developers and content teams to work independently, supports omnichannel content distribution, and offers granular permissions and multi-tenancy. Its API-first approach and schema editor allow for rapid adaptation to changing requirements. Source
Implementation & Support
How easy is it to get started with Hygraph?
Hygraph is designed for ease of use, even for non-technical users. Customers can sign up for a free account and access resources like documentation, video tutorials, and onboarding guides. For example, Top Villas launched a new project in just 2 months from initial contact. Documentation, Top Villas Case Study
What support and training does Hygraph offer?
Hygraph provides 24/7 support via chat, email, and phone. Enterprise customers receive dedicated onboarding and expert guidance. All users have access to detailed documentation, video tutorials, webinars, and a community Slack channel. Customer Success Managers are available to assist during onboarding. For more details, visit Hygraph Contact Page.
Performance & Metrics
How does Hygraph optimize content delivery performance?
Hygraph emphasizes optimized content delivery performance, which improves user experience, engagement, and search engine rankings. Rapid content distribution and responsiveness help reduce bounce rates and increase conversions. For more details, visit this page.
What KPIs and metrics are associated with Hygraph's solutions?
Key metrics include time saved on content updates, number of updates made without developer intervention, system uptime, speed of deployment, consistency in content across regions, user satisfaction scores, reduction in operational costs, ROI on CMS investment, time to market for new products, maintenance costs, scalability metrics, and performance during peak usage. For more details, see CMS KPIs Blog.
Competition & Comparison
How does Hygraph compare to other data catalog tools?
Hygraph differs from pure-play data catalog tools by offering a GraphQL-native, API-first architecture, content federation, and scalability. While other tools may focus strictly on metadata management, Hygraph enables both developers and content teams to work independently, supports omnichannel content distribution, and provides granular permissions and multi-tenancy. Its flexible schema editor and orchestration capabilities make it suitable for organizations seeking composable architectures and unified data experiences. Source
Top 13 data catalog tools you should watch out for 2025
Here we take a look at the best data catalog tools you can get in 2025.
Last updated by Jing
on Oct 17, 2025
Originally written by Nikola
Organizations are collecting more data than ever, which in turn requires complex data management structures that enable data access, governance, and protection.
Still, having too many barriers to data can slow down business operations. This is why the demand for data catalog tools has increased.
Data catalogs help businesses administrate data, save costs, as well as mitigate fraud and risk. At the same time, they improve operational efficiency and help companies gain a competitive advantage.
Here we take a look at the best data catalog tools you can get in 2025.
A data catalog tool is a software solution that enables data collection, organization, and governance, ultimately helping organizations make more intelligent business decisions.
Access data more easily
Speed up performance
Improve organization
Tighten the security
Save costs
In other words, a data catalog tool helps teams take a deeper dive into business data for more thorough analysis and accurate insights.
Organizations that deal with composable stacks of data often need to work out several microservices and orchestrate several APIs into one consistent layer.
Hygraph can provide a unified data catalog and product experience via one orchestration layer.
Hygraph’s decoupled architecture allows organizations to unify all their services into a single GraphQL API to deliver complex applications and digital experiences.
For example, you can use Hygraph to drive engagement and conversions by connecting rich content experiences with product sliders, previews, promotions, and various CTAs, allowing your users to seamlessly explore the category trees.
Also, being a headless CMS, the Hygraph schema editor allows teams to make architectural changes independently from the frontend.
This way, developers can focus on creating new user features while the content team has more autonomy to create and test new campaigns.
Its architecture is scalable, enabling companies to expand their data operations as their metadata management capabilities grow.
Why should you consider it?
LinkedIn DataHub is created with continuously changing metadata in mind. Its modular design means companies can increase engagement with their growing data and governance needs.
Also, the frontend user interface allows users to look into data in three ways: Search, Browse, and View/Edit Metadata.
Collibra is an enterprise data catalog tool that helps businesses take control of their data by creating standards, enforcing policies, and streamlining processes across their operations.
Collibra has evolved its data catalog into an AI-driven platform, combining automated data discovery with built-in governance and lineage to help organizations find, understand, and trust their data at scale.
Why should you consider it?
Collibra creates an audit trail for every piece of data in your company. This allows teams to see the origin of every piece of information, as well as when it was last accessed or modified.
It also provides a visual representation of how your data is connected across different applications, databases, and systems.
Alation’s data catalog solution provides your organization with a comprehensive overview of metadata, enabling your teams to search and access information from anywhere within the organization quickly.
Alation also provides organizational metadata and technical structure components that your teams can use to organize data across both cloud services and on-premises systems. Recently, it acquired Numbers Station AI and positioned itself as an agentic data intelligence platform.
Why should you consider it?
Alation offers a visualized data representation
Comes with guided navigation when users make queries using the app’s intelligent SQL editor or search using natural language.
Unlike many other vendors on this list, data.world provides a pure-play solution focused strictly on catalog capabilities. A cloud-based enterprise data catalog platform, data.world is created to provide users with a broad context for understanding their data.
data.world includes an enterprise data catalog as part of their metadata management system, which allows customers to develop reusable, scalable data and analysis.
The company was acquired by ServiceNow to help customers better manage data assets in this agentic AI era.
Why should you consider it?
The app’s data discovery automates search and classification. This makes it easier for data stewards to locate and act on sensitive data inside the data catalog.
data.world relies on metadata collectors tools to aggregate and manage the metadata for all of your business data.
The enterprise data catalog solution by Informatica is an integrated, centralized repository of metadata that provides a single point of access to all business intelligence assets. The software helps companies control their data assets and reduce operating costs by automating metadata management.
Informatica data catalog is able to provide comprehensive details about organization-wide information assets such as databases, applications, web services, XML schemas, etc.
Why should you consider it?
Informatica’s metadata intelligence engine is among the best you can get
A highly scalable architecture makes it a great option for organizations creating a cloud-based data lake.
erwin data catalog by Quest is a metadata management platform that helps organizations understand their data at rest and in motion. The product organizes both data and metadata, so teams are able to accelerate data management, analysis, and decision-making.
Apache Atlas is an open-source data governance and metadata management tool that allows businesses to collect, process, and maintain information more easily. The platform is able to track data processes and store data files, and metadata repository upgrades.
Using Apache Atlas, teams can catalog their data assets, classify and manage databases, as well as collaborate on them with data scientists, analysts, and data governance specialists.
Why should you consider it?
Apache Atlas allows users to create and classify files, schemas, and tables, as well as to view data lineage through an intuitive user interface.
By enabling advanced data governance, the platform allows users to create new metadata types and instances and share metadata across teams through centralized analytics.
Alex Solutions is a metadata management tool that has both data catalog and data governance capabilities. Its primary users come from the financial service, telecommunications, retail, and utility sectors.
The software incorporates a data catalog, business glossary, policy-driven data quality, intelligent tagging, technology-agnostic metadata scanners, and workflow capabilities.
Customers find it easy to deploy and use its metadata management capabilities for data inventory enrichment, sensitivity detection, data lineage support, usage analysis, risk management, and many other roles.
IBM used to offer on-premise data catalog software as part of its InfoSphere line. Currently, it’s relying primarily on its cloud-native IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog.
Users can deploy the IBM Watson Knowledge Catalog on the IBM Cloud or in a private cloud via IBM Cloud Pak for Data.
The features that make it stand among competitors include automated data governance, intelligent discovery recommendations, an end-to-end catalog, quality scores, self-service insights, and data lineage.
Why should you consider it?
The platform integrates well with other IBM products and services
The Cloud Pak for Data solution is a good choice for enterprises with elaborate and complex ecosystems.
Qlik Catalog can build a secure enterprise catalog of all the data your organization can collect for analytics, regardless of its physical location. The platform comes with automated data preparation and metadata tools, so it’s able to streamline the transformation of raw data, as well.
Qlik features a self-service data marketplace where customers can shop for the data they need and share, export, or automatically publish it with Qlik Sense or different data analytic tools and applications.
Why should you consider it?
Shareable, centralized reports that can be shared with different groups within the organizations, like HR or Finance.
Formidable out-of-the-box visualizations for powerful storytelling using data.
Cloudera Navigator is a data governance platform that integrates data discovery, continuous optimization, lineage, audit, policy enforcement, and metadata management.
With Cloudera, teams can explore and tag data through a search-based interface. The app consolidates metadata while also supporting custom tags and comments. Cloudera makes it easy for users to track, locate, and classify data to comply with business governance and compliance.
Tableau Catalog gives its customers a complete picture of the data and its connections to the analytics in the Tableau environment. The platform automatically indexes all of these assets into one central list, so teams can see all the files, tables, and databases in one place.
With Tableau, metadata and context are created when data is connected so users can confirm they are using the correct data in their analysis and reports.
Why should you consider it?
Create interactive visuals using drag-and-drop features.
Different types of visualizations with large amounts of data without impacting dashboard performance.
Business teams, data analysts, and stewards often struggle with identifying the meaning of specific data, its origin, and the elements it’s directly related to.
Data catalog tools have been created to solve the problem of time-consuming querying of resources by enabling automated discovery, tagging, cataloging, and organizing data.
Some of the data catalog tools on this list are built as pure-play software, while others are more versatile platforms that make great data catalogs thanks to their flexible APIs.
Whichever solution you choose, make sure it integrates easily with your existing systems and that it has a simple and easy-to-use user interface. Sign up for a free forever Hygraph account to explore how it can build a data catalog for you.
Frequently Asked Questions
The 13 best data catalog tools in 2025 include Hygraph, DataHub, Collibra, Alation, data.world, Informatica, Erwin by Quest, Apache Atlas, Alex Solutions, IBM, Qlik, Cloudera, and Tableau.
Blog Authors
Jing Li
Nikola Gemes
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