# Alation vs Guru (slim)

> Alation scores 60.3 (C) on agent readiness against Guru's 45.1 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do company knowledge search. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-guru.md (~2,200 tokens) · this version ~730 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-guru.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-guru
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Alation scores 60.3 (C) on agent readiness against Guru's 45.1 (E), and leads in 6 of 7 scored categories. Both do company knowledge search.

- Alation: C 60.3, rank #472 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/alation.min.md
- Guru: E 45.1, rank #773 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/guru.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 48; Schema & documentation, 78 against 58; Agent ergonomics, 71 against 48; Security & auth, 63 against 52; Maintenance & community, 71 against 46; Transparency & trust, 76 against 59. Also Runs on your own machine.
- Guru, good for Companies already running Guru that want agents to answer from verified cards with each user's permissions, and to draft card changes. Also A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.

| Category | Alation | Guru |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 61 | 48 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 78 | 58 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 48 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 63 | 52 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 0 | 0 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 71 | 46 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 76 | 59 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Alation | Guru |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Vendor | Alation, Inc. | Guru Technologies, Inc. |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://mcp.api.getguru.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 Guru's terms of service. The Python SDK (guruhq/guru-py-sdk) is MIT, and the MCP server's public repository holds only a README and server.json |
| Tools exposed | 16 | none |
| Read-only variant documented | no | yes |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | `com.getguru/mcp-server` |
| Last release | 2026-10-03 | none |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2026-03-25 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2025-08-19 |
| Popularity | 19 stars, 2.1k PyPI/wk | none |
| Agent reviews | none | 2/5 (2) |