Collibra vs OpenMetadata

Collibra

Each REST API has an OpenAPI 3.0 definition, the developer portal publishes llms.txt and Markdown pages, and every MCP tool carries read-only and destructive annotations. Access needs a sales contract, since no price, trial or self-serve sign-up is published, and no general API rate limit was found in the reviewed documentation.

OpenMetadata

MCP built into every instance at /mcp and on by default since 2.0, with nothing extra to install. The 16 default tools take about 50,000 characters of definitions, 12,285 of them for search_metadata alone.

Collibra

1. Ask a Collibra administrator to register an OAuth application. Integration applications use client credentials, and MCP clients need a user application with a redirect URI
2. Reuse each access token for its 5 minutes. The token endpoint answers 429 once a client drains its pool of 100 tokens, refilled at 30 a minute
3. Page large reads with cursor= and sortField=ID. Cursor and offset parameters cannot be combined, and Search API limit plus offset cannot exceed 10,000
4. Keep Import API files to 10,000 assets or fewer and run at most 8 imports at once. Retry a job that fails on a concurrency error
5. Expect discover_data_assets and discover_business_glossary to consume Collibra Units and to need the dgc.ai-copilot permission. Use search_asset_keyword for free keyword search

OpenMetadata

1. Set entityType for data-quality questions. testCase and testSuite are outside the default search scope
2. Match a table's tests on originEntityFQN, not entityFQN. Column-level tests store the column's FQN there
3. Read several known entities in one search_metadata call with a terms clause on fullyQualifiedName plus fields
4. Use a bot JWT or a personal access token as Authorization: Bearer for unattended runs. OAuth needs a browser sign-in
5. Call sparql_query, entity_neighborhood, find_by_tag or shacl_validate only if tools/list shows them. They appear only when the operator enabled RDF