Head to head · Company knowledge search · October 2026 research run
Alation vs Dust
Dust scores 62.8 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on reliability and transparency & trust. Both do company knowledge search.
Which one, for what
Alation C
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
- Reliability, 61 against 53
- Transparency & trust, 76 against 68
Also in its favour
- Runs on your own machine
Watch for
No published price, trial or self-serve sign-up. The pricing address redirects to a sales form
Dust B
Good for A team that already works in Dust and wants an outside agent to search its spaces, read documents and call its agents with a user's own access.
Ahead on
- Security & auth, 75 against 63
- Payments & pricing, 20 against 0
- Maintenance & community, 86 against 71
Also in its favour
- A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install
- Open source
Watch for
Programmatic usage has no free credits. It draws only on the workspace credit pool, which Free seats cannot use
Score by category
| Category | Weight this run | Alation | Dust | Edge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reliability | 16%20 | 61 | 53 | Alation +8 |
| Performance | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13%16.2 | 78 | 75 | Alation +3 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13%16.2 | 71 | 67 | Alation +4 |
| Security & auth | 14%17.5 | 63 | 75 | Dust +12 |
| Payments & pricing | 10%12.5 | 0 | 20 | Dust +20 |
| Task success | 10%pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7%8.8 | 71 | 86 | Dust +15 |
| Transparency & trust | 7%8.8 | 76 | 68 | Alation +8 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| Total | 60.3 · C | 62.8 · B |
Facts side by side
| Fact | Alation | Dust |
|---|---|---|
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | Alation, Inc. | Permutation Labs |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | https://dust.tt/mcp |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Auth | OAuth or key | OAuth or key |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| 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 | MIT for the platform's source at github.com/dust-tt/dust. The hosted service is sold under Dust's own terms. The npm page gives ISC for @dust-tt/client and MIT for @dust-tt/dust-cli |
| Tools exposed | 16 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-03 | 2026-10-08 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | no document linked |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | no date given |
| 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 | 1.5k stars, 17k npm/wk |
Verdicts
Alation
Each API has an OpenAPI 3.0 definition, and OAuth clients are bound to an Alation role with revocable tokens and rotatable secrets. Access needs a sales contract, since no price, trial or self-serve sign-up is published. The agent SDK and local MCP server have stayed at a release candidate since 14 January 2026.
Dust
The whole platform is MIT on GitHub, with a public OpenAPI document of 68 operations, llms.txt and a remote MCP server that acts with the signed-in user's access. API calls that run agents draw only on a paid workspace credit pool, and the terms of service could not be read.
Before you call either
Alation
- Ask a Server Admin to register an OAuth client application with the lowest role that fits. Only admins can create one, and the secret is shown once
- Pin
alation-ai-agent-mcp==1.0.0rc3. An unpinned install resolves to 0.12.0, which predates the catalogue search agent - Call
catalog_context_search_agentfor catalogue questions.alation_contextis deprecated and its description tells models not to call it directly - Watch
X-Entitlement-Usageon Aggregated Context API responses. The 2,000 free calls never reset, and a quota 429 is not retryable - Page with
limitandskipand followX-Next-Page. The BI Source API usesoffset, and one call returns at most 1,000 objects
Dust
- Use
https://eu.dust.ttfor a workspace in the EU region andhttps://dust.ttotherwise, for both the API and the MCP server - Connect an MCP client by OAuth and send the
resourceparameter in authorisation and token requests. API keys do not work on the MCP server - Expect HTTP 429 with type
rate_limit_errorwhen the credit pool, the programmatic monthly cap or the key's spend cap is exhausted. Retrying will not help - Call
GET /api/v1/w/{wId}/searchwithlimit(1 to 100, default 25) andcursor, or a data source view's search withtop_k - Keep document upserts under 120 a minute per workspace
Questions
Which is better for AI agents, Alation or Dust?
Dust scores 62.8 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 3 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on reliability and transparency & trust.
Do Alation and Dust need an API key?
Both take an API key or an OAuth sign-in.
Can an agent call Alation and Dust without installing anything?
Alation runs on your own machine, with no hosted endpoint listed. Dust has a hosted endpoint at https://dust.tt/mcp.
Are Alation and Dust open source?
No open-source release is listed for Alation. Dust is open source (MIT for the platform's source at github.com/dust-tt/dust. The hosted service is sold under Dust's own terms. The npm page gives ISC for `@dust-tt/client` and MIT for `@dust-tt/dust-cli`).
Other comparisons with Alation or Dust
Machine-readable
- This page as Markdown
/compare/alation-vs-dust.md· slim.min.md· JSON.json(or sendAccept: text/markdown) - Each listing in full
/api/v1/tools/alation.json·/api/v1/tools/dust.json - From a terminal
anchor compare alation dust(the CLI) - Over MCP
compare_tools {"a": "alation", "b": "dust"}at/mcp, no key