# Alation vs Atlan (slim)

> Atlan scores 62.5 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on schema & documentation. Both do data catalogues. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-atlan.md (~2,200 tokens) · this version ~780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-atlan.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-atlan
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Atlan scores 62.5 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on schema & documentation. Both do data catalogues.

- Alation: C 60.3, rank #472 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/alation.min.md
- Atlan: B 62.5, rank #385 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/atlan.min.md
- Alation, good for A company already on Alation Cloud Service that wants agents to find governed tables, columns, queries, BI reports and lineage, and to run read-only SQL against data products, under an Alation role. Ahead on Schema & documentation, 78 against 65. Also Runs on your own machine.
- Atlan, good for A company already on Atlan that wants agents to find governed tables, owners, lineage, glossary terms and data quality rules, and to run read-only SQL, under the same permissions people have. Ahead on Reliability, 67 against 61; Security & auth, 75 against 63; Maintenance & community, 80 against 71. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.

| Category | Alation | Atlan |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 61 | 67 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 78 | 65 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 74 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 63 | 75 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 0 | 0 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 71 | 80 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 76 | 73 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Alation | Atlan |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Alation, Inc. | Atlan |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://mcp.atlan.com/mcp` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Licence | Proprietary service under Alation's Master Cloud Software Licence and Services Agreement. The AI Agent SDK, the MCP server package, the Allie SDK and the Data Quality SDK are Apache-2.0 | proprietary (hosted service under the Atlan SaaS agreement). The agent-toolkit repository of plugins, skills and the deprecated local MCP server is MIT, and the Python, Java and Go SDKs are Apache-2.0 |
| Tools exposed | 16 | 39 |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-03 | 2026-09-30 |
| Terms last updated | no date given |  |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | couldn't be read |
| Customer content may train models | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict automated access | not found in the text |  |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | yes |  |
| Terms or service can change without notice | not found in the text |  |
| Arbitration or class-action waiver | not found in the text |  |
| Popularity | 19 stars, 2.1k PyPI/wk | 40 stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (2) |