# Alation vs Marmot (slim)

> Marmot scores 64.4 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on transparency & trust. Both do data catalogues. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-marmot.md (~2,200 tokens) · this version ~680 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-marmot.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/alation-vs-marmot
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · Updated: 2026-10-09

Marmot scores 64.4 (B) on agent readiness against Alation's 60.3 (C), and leads in 5 of 7 scored categories. Alation leads on transparency & trust. Both do data catalogues.

- Alation: C 60.3, rank #472 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/alation.min.md
- Marmot: B 64.4, rank #315 of 842 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/marmot.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 Transparency & trust, 76 against 70. Also Runs on your own machine.
- Marmot, good for Teams that want agents to find which table or topic holds something, who owns it, what feeds it and what a business term means, from a catalogue they host. Ahead on Agent ergonomics, 84 against 71; Payments & pricing, 20 against 0; Maintenance & community, 88 against 71. Also Open source.

| Category | Alation | Marmot |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 61 | 62 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 78 | 82 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 71 | 84 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 63 | 61 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 0 | 20 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 71 | 88 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 76 | 70 |

| Fact (where they differ) | Alation | Marmot |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | Model platform |
| Vendor | Alation, Inc. | Marmot Data |
| Transports | HTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdio | HTTP, Streamable 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 (server, CLI, plugins and Helm chart). The Python and TypeScript SDKs are Apache-2.0, and Marmot Cloud's per-asset access control, secret stores and workload identity aren't in the public repository |
| Tools exposed | 16 | 9 |
| llms.txt | no | yes |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.github.marmotdata/marmot` |
| Last release | 2026-10-03 | 2026-09-23 |
| Terms last updated | no date given | 2026-08-23 |
| Privacy policy last updated | no date given | 2026-04-07 |
| Popularity | 19 stars, 2.1k PyPI/wk | 619 stars |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.5/5 (2) |