Secoda

“promising metadata and ai direction”

Pros

We've been relying on it to connect metadata and lineage across our data stack and documentation tools and it's brought a lot more structure to our assets. Discovery has become much simpler for the data team and it's also beginning to support other business units through the Data Champions we have in each BU. The AI capabilities look very promising too. It gives you a way to link company metadata across multiple tools back to the underlying data, then use AI to surface insights or help diagnose issues. It's still early but it definitely feels like it's moving in a very promising direction.

Cons

Snowflake lineage detection doesn't always get picked up or refreshed correctly although it usually fixes itself after some time. It would also be helpful to have more detailed and flexible access controls for both users and groups.

“helpful questions & lineage”

Pros

The IT questions feature and the data lineage feature have been the most useful parts for us. Questions makes it easier for teams to share knowledge with each other while also keeping a record of the conversation. One detail I especially appreciate is that the person who asked the question can mark an answer as "accepted."

Cons

At the moment, I'm having a hard time understanding the settings for integrations that were already configured.

“flexible catalog and promising ai”

Pros

Using it feels very simple and it gives users a lot of freedom when setting up the product. You can build a data catalog that fits your needs really well. It also includes useful capabilities like automation and documentation templates which help a lot with day-to-day work and team collaboration around the data catalog. The AI side is especially interesting and they have continued to improve it with things like AI personas, the option to choose which LLM to use, visibility into the actions the LLM takes when generating answers and even an AI assistant in Slack. That progress has been exciting to follow and I'm curious to see where they take it next. One area that still deserves more attention is guidance on creating effective pre-prompts for AI personas.

Cons

A couple of issues have stood out during my use. The first is the number of bugs which can sometimes affect some of the product's most valuable features, especially automation and that becomes pretty frustrating. To their credit, the support team is responsive and bugs are usually resolved within 2 to 3 business days but the platform would benefit a lot from being more reliable overall. The second issue is that the team structure is somewhat difficult to understand, particularly for non-technical users. Many of them have trouble grasping how resources are meant to be shared across teams so the "General" team workspace often ends up turning into the default shared space for everyone.