# Alation vs Dust (slim)

> 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. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-dust.md (~2,250 tokens) · this version ~780 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-dust.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-dust
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

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.

- Alation: C 60.3, rank #472 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/alation.min.md
- Dust: B 62.8, rank #378 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/dust.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 Reliability, 61 against 53; Transparency & trust, 76 against 68. Also Runs on your own machine.
- Dust, 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 A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install; Open source.

| Category | Alation | Dust |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 61 | 53 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 78 | 75 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 67 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 63 | 75 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 0 | 20 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 71 | 86 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 76 | 68 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Alation | Dust |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Alation, Inc. | Permutation Labs |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://dust.tt/mcp` |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP |
| Pricing | Paid | Freemium |
| 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 |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| Last release | 2026-10-03 | 2026-10-08 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | no document linked |
| 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 |