State of Play 2026: Data Governance

Where the market stands

• June 12, 2024. Databricks released Unity Catalog as open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
• May 2, 2025. IBM Knowledge Catalog took the name IBM watsonx.data intelligence.
• June 5, 2025. Collibra announced the acquisition of Raito, a data access governance company.
• July 2025. ServiceNow closed its acquisition of data.world, a data catalog and data governance platform.
• November 18, 2025. Salesforce completed its acquisition of Informatica, bringing Informatica's catalog, integration, governance, quality, privacy, metadata management and master data management services to the Salesforce platform.
• February 19, 2026. Apache Polaris, an open-source catalog for Apache Iceberg tables that Snowflake first open-sourced in mid-2024, graduated to a top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation.
• September 17, 2026. Alation announced six components for its AIOS platform. One expands its AI Governance product, which brings AI agents and models from six platforms, including Amazon Bedrock, Databricks MLflow and Snowflake Cortex, into one registry.

Google's Dataplex Universal Catalog is now Knowledge Catalog. Its billing items keep the Dataplex name.

Four kinds of product

• Governance platforms sold on their own. Collibra lists AI governance, data governance, a catalog of catalogs, lineage, privacy, a marketplace and data quality in its platform. Alation calls its platform AIOS, an intelligence operating system that governs data, context and AI agents.
• Data management suites. The catalog sits beside quality and master data. Informatica Cloud Data Governance and Catalog is part of Informatica's Intelligent Data Management Cloud (IDMC). Ataccama ONE combines data quality, catalog, observability, lineage, reference data and master data, in the cloud or on premises. IBM watsonx.data intelligence covers catalog, governance, data quality, lineage and data products.
• Catalogs inside a data or cloud platform. Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog, Databricks Unity Catalog, Snowflake Horizon Catalog, Google Knowledge Catalog and Amazon SageMaker Catalog come with a cloud or data platform. Databricks says Unity Catalog works across any cloud or platform. Horizon Catalog also covers assets in external catalogs. ServiceNow's Data Catalog runs on the data.world platform, which is built on a knowledge graph.
• Open-source catalogs. Unity Catalog's open-source version is a Linux Foundation AI & Data sandbox project and implements the Iceberg REST Catalog APIs. Apache Polaris is a vendor-neutral implementation of the same specification. Snowflake builds Horizon Catalog on Polaris.

If your data sits mainly on one platform, start by pricing the catalog that platform already includes. If it spans several, compare that against a product that covers every source.

What the platforms now govern

Some catalogs now register AI models and agents as well as tables.

Databricks says Unity Catalog manages data and AI assets, including models, agents and MCPs. Collibra AI Governance keeps AI use cases, models and agents in one register. Collibra's product documentation lists assessment templates for the EU AI Act and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, shown when an administrator enables the out-of-the-box templates. Alation says its AI Governance connects an agent's compliance posture to the live quality and policy status of its underlying data.

Purview Unified Catalog organizes data into governance domains. Each domain holds glossary terms, critical data elements, data products, access policies and data quality rules, with quality scores at asset, data product and domain level.

What each costs where prices are public

• Microsoft Purview Unified Catalog. Prices in USD, the same in every Azure region Microsoft lists. Billed per governed asset, at $0.0165 per asset per day, prorated by the days governed. An asset counts only when it is linked to a governance concept, such as a data product, critical data element or glossary term. A table in five data products counts once. Microsoft's example: 200 governed assets for 30 days cost $100 without discounts. Data quality and health controls are billed in data governance processing units (DGPUs). One DGPU is 60 minutes of managed compute, at $15 on the Basic tier, $60 on Standard and $240 on Advanced. Basic is the default. Microsoft's examples show 0.02 to 0.04 DGPU per rule per run.
• Databricks Unity Catalog. Included with the Databricks Premium and Enterprise tiers. No separate license is required.
• Google Knowledge Catalog. Billed in data compute unit (DCU) hours, in USD at the pay-as-you-go rate. In the us-central1 (Iowa) region, standard processing for metadata discovery costs $0.06 per DCU-hour, with 100 DCU-hours free each month. Premium processing for lineage, data quality and profiling costs $0.089 per DCU-hour. Metadata storage costs $0.002739726 per GiB-hour in any region. Metadata ingested automatically from Google Cloud services such as BigQuery is stored free, and catalog API calls are free.
• Amazon SageMaker Catalog. In USD, one global rate in AWS's price list. $10 per 100,000 requests after 4,000 free each month per account, $0.40 per GB of metadata storage after 20 MB free, and $1.776 per compute unit after 0.2 free. Core APIs such as Search are free.
• Collibra. On AWS Marketplace, a 12-month subscription to the Collibra cloud platform is listed at $170,000 (list price as published), with private offers available. The 24- and 36-month terms show no price.
• Alation. On AWS Marketplace, a 12-month subscription to the Alation Data Catalog is listed as starting at $60,000 (list price as published), with private offers available. Alation's own pricing page lists no prices.
• Informatica. IDMC is priced by consumption in Informatica Processing Units (IPUs), which buy access to the eligible cloud services. Informatica lists no IPU price.
• Atlan. The pricing page lists no prices and routes buyers to sales.

Count the people as well as the software. The owners' and stewards' time, connector and lineage setup, and the data cleanup that quality rules uncover are costs no price list shows.

What a deployment requires

Whichever product you choose, plan for connections to the source systems, a metadata harvest, lineage, a glossary and named stewards. Some setup choices change the bill and the coverage.

• Where the work runs. Google bills some Knowledge Catalog jobs, including discovery scans and scheduled data quality tasks, under BigQuery, Dataflow, Cloud Storage and other services, not under Dataplex.
• What counts. Purview charges only for governed assets. Assets collected in its Data Map but not linked to a governance concept are not counted. Data Map and scan charges stop once a customer consents to pay-as-you-go billing or upgrades to the enterprise tier.
• Where policy is enforced. Snowflake enforces masking and row-access policies defined in Snowflake on data queried by external engines through the Iceberg REST catalog.
• How lineage arrives. IBM watsonx.data intelligence supports OpenLineage, an open standard for collecting lineage data.

Run the proof of concept on a messy domain from your own estate. Measure how much catalog, classification and column-level lineage each product produces before anyone curates it by hand.

What the acquisitions change

Informatica's product pages now read "Informatica from Salesforce". ServiceNow documents its Data Catalog as part of Workflow Data Fabric. IBM provides an upgrade path from Knowledge Catalog to watsonx.data intelligence.

If you run Informatica or data.world today, ask for the product roadmap and the renewal terms in writing. Ask whether the product will still be sold to customers who do not use the new owner's platform.

Questions to settle first

Settle these before shortlisting.

• Which business problem and which critical data elements will the first phase cover?
• How much of the data sits in one platform whose catalog you already pay for?
• Which pricing unit fits your growth: governed assets, compute, users or a platform subscription?
• Do you need to govern AI models and agents now, or only data?
• Who will steward the catalog after launch, and how many hours each week?
• If the vendor changes hands, what do your contract terms allow?