A comprehensive Comparison of the best master data management tools in 2022 according to company size.
Businesses implement master data management to access complete, reliable, accurate, and original data. Strict GDPR regulations, web tracking prohibitions, and the audience’s intolerance for poor marketing practices have forced organizations to improve their master data management processes.
The challenge?
Master data management is an expensive process. While large organizations can employ solutions like IBM, Oracle, SAS, smaller organizations are left with no option but to rely on limited resources to implement their data management initiatives. Most smaller to medium size companies end up doing master data management informally. They panic hire data engineers to perform mundane tasks like data cleaning and deduplication instead of focusing on strategic efforts.
But all does not have to be so bleak.
There are dozens of master management software tools that small and mid-level enterprises can use to quickly ingest, operationalize, and distribute the information by transforming the content and the structure of the data, making it more useful for a variety of different business functions.
Master data management is not an impossible dream when you equip your team with the right tools. With the right MDM solution, you can quickly transform your organization’s data and meet your goals. Common transformations by MDM tools include:
Data cleaning (removing errors, typos, inconsistencies in formatting etc)
Data normalization (ensuring all fields and formats are consistent)
Data matching (you’ll need to match multiple data sources to remove duplicates and merge records)
Data merging (joining multiple data sources to create a consolidated record, for example merging customer billing data with customer complaint data)
Data deduplication (removing duplicate entries in one or multiple data sources)
What to Look for in a Master Data Management Solution?
A master data management solution needs to provide a focal point that the company can identify as the correct definition of the customer, product, or whatever subject matter might be. It must enable the business to synchronize data from multiple data sources to operationalize information faster and more accurately.
More importantly, the tool must empower the organization to move from “data as a cost” to a high performance ‘economic asset’.
The choice of an MDM solution however is a tricky one. Over the years, the MDM vendor landscape has matured significantly. In fact, the MDM market size is forecast to reach $26.4 billion by 2025, after growing at a CAGR of 18% during 2020 – 2025.
The plethora of choices often leads to analysis paralysis. When choosing a tool, you must consider factors like budget, time, talent, and C-suite buy-in. Moreover, address aspects like constraints, adoption risks, failure risks, multi-functional requirements, and approach to data transformation when choosing the right tool for your team.
In this guide, we list 9 of the best MDM solutions in the industry categorized into three business sizes and ten common decision-making factors like:
- Product focus
- Key features
- Pros and cons
- Level of expertise
- Level of training
- Ease of deployment
- Ideal for
- Notable Clients
- User ratings
- Why it’s on our list
Related Reading: Our comprehensive master data management guide, to help you define and implement a master data management strategy while addressing key challenges.
1. Business Size < 50M USD
WINPURE
WinPure is a market leader in data match solutions. It’s the go-to product for professionals who want a single platform to transform and create master records with a true no-code tool. WinPure’s MDM solution is built for businesses of all sizes for easy, accurate, and quick master record management and can easily be used by non-tech savvy professionals.
Product Focus: Quick and easy data match for businesses of all sizes
Key Features:
- Alacarte features from all of the Clean & Match Enterprise edition repurposed to further simplify the user experience for non-technical staff
- Facilitates private cloud and on-premise deployments for evolving, on-demand, elastic enterprise requirements,
- Features simple browser-based data preparation for in-office and remote and multinational MDM operations
- Helps create a centralized system for data governance with a simple-to-use technology
- Complete Data prep, data transformation, data matching, and master data management tools
Pros and Cons:
Easily clean, match, merge and create master records in a no-code, point-and-click interface | May require some training and learning |
| One-click deployment on-premise or in your own private cloud environment | Updates may be required for more advanced functions |
One of the most affordable data management tools in the market | Requires external applications and APIs for complete master data management capabilities |
| Award winning training and support | Integrations with other business systems will have some limitations |
| Can work on large amounts of both structured and less-structured data | New license keys required for new users/systems |
Level of expertise required: Basic
Level of training required: Basic
Ideal for: government institutions, education institutions, marketing, and advertising agencies
G2 User Ratings: 4.7/5.0 from 69 reviews
Why it’s on our list?
Designed for all businesses, from small businesses to large enterprises of all industries, to match, clean, standardize, and consolidate data with a true no-code solution requiring no extra talent, skill, or resource.
Product Video:
PROFISEE
Profisee has emerged as a user-friendly, cloud-based MDM platform that makes data management easy and efficient. Profisee’s claim to fame is an incredibly easy-to-use UI that allows users to create matching and survivorship rules and strategies in intuitive ways. Profisee is designed for businesses of all sizes, from small to enterprises companies, with a focus on resolving bad data quickly and efficiently.
Product Focus: No-code solution for quick, easy, and scalable MDM
Key Features
- Simple, easy to use, and designed for the intermediate techie
- Address verification abilities in addition to matching strategies
- Ability to source data with SSIS packages, SSRS backend
- Empowers multi-domain businesses with a solid MDM foundation
- Enables rapid prototyping, development, and deployment cycles
Pros and Cons:
| Advanced matching and merging features with master rules that can be tested and revised as needed | Training is complex making it hard for users to find what they need fast |
| Incorporates data management across multiple departments in an organization | Occasional workflow issues and system glitches |
| Ability to manage data and configure MDS using the Maestro Client, saving time and money | Cannot handle real-time and batch data insertion at the same time |
| A highly flexible product with a well-thought-out architecture | Process limitations when the user needs to review a large number of records |
| Multi-domain support and ability to customize user views | Some integrations may lag with error handling |
Level of expertise required: Intermediate
Level of training required: Intermediate
Ideal for: Manufacturing, healthcare, retail, financial services, and consumer goods.
Notable Clients: American Heart Association, Chesterton, Dominos, EY, Gap, Hancock Bank
Gartner User Ratings: 4.7/50 from 85 reviews
Why it’s on our list?
A modern no-code solution that understands the need for quick and scalable MDM.
Product Video:
PIMCORE
PimCore is an open-source MDM platform that lets you manage master records, set hierarchy structures, validate data, and enrich data attributes among many other abilities. It’s a multi-domain, multi-vector platform geared towards B2B/B2C and digital commerce. It can handle product data, customer data, reference data, third-party data, and location data.
Product focus: Open source MDM for digital businesses
Key Features:
- Open source can fully be used by corporates for MDM/PIM modeling
- Low-code solution
- Single point of contact for multi-layered and structured datasets
- Flexible and simple to use
- Can handle 1 million lines/SKUs of data
Pros and Cons:
| Responsive and user friendly and easy integration with external services | Updates can cause hiccups and cause delays |
| Offers flexibility, scalability, and meets exact business needs | Implementation can be complex and tedious |
| Enterprise grade support and SLA available on subscription | You need to work with a Pimcore partner to navigate the system |
| Ability to help marketing teams with content management, metadata management, and data enrichment | User management gets complex with advanced features |
| Practical tool for B2B and B2C businesses | Speed may be a challenge when dealing with multiple processes |
Level of expertise required: Basic
Level of training required: Minimum
Ideal for: Manufacturing, small businesses, wholesale, retail, B2B/B2C tech, hospitality
Notable Clients: W.E.G, Aagora, Krombache, Stanley Black & Decker, Ludwig Meister
Gartner User Ratings: 4.6/5.0 from 113 reviews
Why it’s on Our List?
Has a free open source master data management community edition that lets small businesses model and tests their data management processes.
Product Video:
Business Size 50M – 1B USD
Ataccama One MDM
A multi-domain, cloud MDM solution, Ataccama has a built-in, AI-powered data quality engine that allows for data cleaning, standardizing, and enrichment allowing for golden record and reference data management. The solution is designed for complex enterprise data governance solutions that allow for smart automated processes to make data management easy.
Product focus: Automated MDM designed for data science professionals
Key Features
- Automated data catalog that allows businesses to build and maintain a knowledge base of their data landscape
- Automated data governance with data profiling, business data lineage, anomaly detection
- Complete built-in data quality functions
- Scheduled system scans without any manual effort
- Self-improving AI that suggests business rules, and detects new relationships
Pros and Cons:
| Point and click intelligent matching engine | Performance of data stewards UI may be slow with updates causing delays |
| Ability to create your own data model | User license model may be limiting for some |
| Little to no coding required for configuration | Requires external applications and APIs for complete master data management capabilities |
| Automation of data modeling, analytics and visualization processes | Collecting data from on-premises applications may be a challenge |
| In-built data governance and stewardship | Occasional bugs that can hamper daily operations |
Level of expertise required: Professionals in IT/Data Science
Level of training required: Intermediate
Ideal for: Financial institutions, enterprise clients, big pharma, asset management, real estate
Notable clients: Argo Group, Avast, Societe Generale, Kaspi Bank
Gartner User Ratings: 4.5/5.0 from 93 reviews
Why it’s on our list?
A low-code MDM solution designed exclusively for technical teams to do their jobs better and quicker.
Product Video
Stibo MDM
Stibo is a popular solution for enterprises that want to implement MDM for product information or for products. It allows companies to handle market standards like ETIM making it a favorite for wholesale manufacturers and dealers. It’s a powerful multi-domain tool that lets you save operational, technical, historical, and strategic data, providing a solid foundation for data synchronization.
Product Focus: Fully integrated MDM with enhanced capabilities for product data
Key Features
- Ability to aggregate product, customer, vendor, and location data in a single cloud-native SaaS
- Built-in data governance, including AI-backed deduplication automated onboarding and syndication, auto-classification, image recognition and business rules
- Integrated compliance with industry classifications
Pros and Cons:
| Ability for asset management and data sharing | Complexities can cause delays during setup |
| Excellent for creating catalogs and direct mails | User interface and front end functionality may not be intuitive enough |
| Customer service team is prompt and efficient | Lack of clarity or documentation on the complete set of add-ons |
| Allows modeling of object types and business logics as required | Product upgrades require assistance from vendor |
| Highly adaptable application and easy to update | Lack of clarity or documentation on the complete set of add-ons |
Level of expertise required: Professionals in IT/Data Science
Level of training required: Intermediate
Ideal for: Retail, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, wholesale distribution
Notable Clients: Elektra, M&S, Adidas, Fujitsu
Gartner User Ratings: 4.5/5.0 from 131 reviews
Why it’s on our list?
Delivers a fully integrated experience in a single platform with a focus on data governance
Product Video
Boomi
Boomi Master Data Hub is a central data management hub many enterprises use to move their integration strategy in the right direction. Boomi is preferred by IT professionals for its strong integration abilities that take cover the whole Data Journey, starting from discovery of your data to preparing the data, integrating the data, enriching and finally enabling the enterprise’s teams to use the data effectively.
Product Focus: Integrated experience as a middleware to talk between systems
Key Features:
- Low-code UI for rapid modeling of master data entities
- A hub repository to hold data models
- Ability to create business rules to resolve erroneous data
- Enable real-time governance rules to tackle data silos
Pros and Cons:
| Build custom ETL solutions with little to no coding | Need to purchase additional connectors that may be expensive |
| Software is easy to use and can quickly create flows for extrapolating data | The effectiveness of data cleaning techniques could be improved |
| Interface is clean and easy to use with flexible features | Technical support may have slower turn around time |
| Integration friendly and remains stable even with huge amounts of data | Technical background required to use the tool at its full potential |
| Monthly updates and fixes to address problems | The tool may require some more maturity to meet enterprise-level demands |
Level of expertise required: Professionals in IT/Data Science
Level of training required: Basic
Ideal for: Public sector organizations, higher education, healthcare and lifestyle businesses
Notable clients: Bioventus, Moderna, Qlik, Quantana
Gartner User Ratings: 4.3/5.0 from 24 reviews
Why it’s on our list: Offers a complete data journey that caters to both business users and professional teams.
Product Video:
Business Size 1B – 10B USD
Semarchy
Semarchy Unified Data Platform is an enterprise-level MDM solution, recognized as a leading multi-vector MDM solution that simplifies data discovery, stewardship, quality, enrichment, workflows, and measurements. Organizations of all sizes and industries benefit from a full set of features to build production-ready operational and analytical applications in a single environment.
Product Focus: Bringing together customer data, vendor data, product data, and business data of enterprise-level businesses in one unified platform.
Key Features:
- Self-service data preparation with sensitive data identification features
- Email, policy, and process management using a data governance framework
- Metadata management abilities
- Capabilities for document management, formula management and complete product data management
Pros and Cons:
| Implementation speed and simplicity is top notch | Learning curve required even for data experts |
| Highly adaptable with a simple user interface | Additional training is required to use the software at its full potential |
| Provides an integrated data and UI framework for complete data management in a single configurable application | It could be challenging to setup workflows because of extensive features |
| Ability to customize the user interface in the application builder | Uses an all-or-nothing matching which can distort actual match rates |
| Allows for developers to deliver robust applications | Lacks collaboration capabilities |
Level of expertise: Advanced
Level of training: Advanced
Ideal for: Non-profits, government, enterprise organizations
Notable Clients: Chantelle Group, Adeo Group, National Student Clearinghouse
Ratings: 4.6/5.0 from 142 reviews
Why it’s on our list: A truly unified data platform designed exclusively for large enterprise organizations.
Product Video
Reltio
Reltio is a cloud-native SaaS master data management platform that deploys customer, organization, employee, assets, location, and product data masters within the same platform, removing siloes that threaten a unified view of your data. Reltio has the typical benefit of a PaaS solution where there is minimal need for the involvement of on-premises IT teams.
Product Focus: Accelerates real-time operations at the enterprise level
Key Features:
- Has data model configurations organized as layers where each layer inherits the features from the layer above
- Auto-scaling and increased speed of development and deployment cycles
- Facilitates business users in analytical capabilities and identifies relationships between people, products, places, and activities.
Pros and Cons:
| User interface is highly intuitive and can be learned/used by business users | Product is relatively new and requires refinement |
| Excellent data security and governance features where user actions are logged | Poor technical support with slow turnaround time |
| Merging of duplicate data with the ability to create complex match rules | Intermittent errors that cause hiccups in processes |
| Does not require technical training to use | Alphanumeric and data masking not available in data quality |
| SaaS solution which does not require hosting the application or maintaining infrastructure | Limitations with integrations and APIs |
Level of expertise: Intermediate
Level of training: Intermediate
Ideal for: High tech, retailer, healthcare, financial services, insurance
Notable Clients: AstraZeneca, L’oreal, Empire Life, Fulton Bank
User ratings: 4.4/5.0 from 78 ratings
Why it’s on our list: The only MDM solution that promises real-time accessibility and operational ease for business users.
Product Video
Syndigo (Riversand)
Syndigo acquired Riversand in 2021, in a bid to expand product and master data capabilities for a global client base. It’s a cloud-native platform designed for retailers and eCommerce enterprises to manage personalization and customization initiatives efficiently. This is the only MDM tool that facilitates content creation within the platform, where users can create content like images, weight and dimensions, ingredients, packaging information and more. All this content is then verified for completeness, accuracy, and quality.
Product Focus: Omni-channel system to create, connect, manage, and deliver high-quality product content
Key Features:
- Product description enrichment with as many as 171 million additional attributes
- Unify and share information, source and review data and assets from multiple suppliers on a single platform
- Complete validation and verification checks to root out inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and errors
- Ability to distribute product information across internal and external channels
Pros and Cons:
| Govern data from multiple domain regions and business departments | Product ingestion may not be suitable for all business types |
| Highly configurable application with the ability to manage business processes in PIM | Limited integration abilities |
| Data model and hierarchy is greatly improved for scalability | Some feature requests can be denied by the team |
| Highly effective data quality functions | Glitches in the tool causes teams to doubt taxonomy details |
| Flexible data modeling and ease of modification as per business needs | Some users report of negative experiences |
Level of expertise: Basic
Level of training: Basic
Ideal for: Retailers, wholesale distributors, eCommerce enterprises
Notable Clients: Carrefour, Epson, Neutrogena, Philips
User ratings: 4.7 out of 72 ratings
Why it’s on our list: Content creation, product information distribution and so much more!
Product Video
And there you have it! These top MDM solutions have been hand-picked for their ability to make MDM easy, quick, scalable, and effective.
Note: This list doesn’t contain the big three: Informatica, IBM, Oracle, because they provide entire ecosystems for >10B USD enterprise organizations. They require certified talents, specific infrastructure setup, and cost hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
How to choose the Right MDM tool?
The decision to deploy a master data management solution is not an individual one to make. It can take months to build the proper business case, evaluate all of the dependencies, plan, prioritize, test, and come to a decision.
In our experience, choosing the right MDM tool boils down to five important factors:
1). Team Consensus: Does everyone agree on the tool’s capabilities? Are designated users satisfied with the workflow, the UI, or the features that allow for easier MDM implementation?
2). Cost & Budgeting: Does the product require additional resources in terms of talent and systems? Sometimes, the cost of the product is just one of the many costs to incur when using an MDM platform; including training costs, talent onboarding costs, storage and capacity costs, and more.
3). Business Requirements: Sometimes, all your business needs is a simple tool that can clean, transform, match and merge data. Would you really need a whole ecosystem with capabilities that are beyond the immediate scope? The choice of the tool must be made based on a clearly defined scope. Most companies invest in high-end solutions, tempted by AI and automation only to realize they never needed an advanced solution in the first place.
4). Executive Buy-in: CDOs, CIOs, CEOs are the key decision-makers in implementing a master data management. The choice of a solution is highly subjected to a CDO or CIO’s preference and experience.
5). Timelines: If the need for an MDM is urgent, you’ll need a quick, do-it-yourself solution like WinPure which lets you quickly match, clean, merge, and purge data in literally minutes.
To Conclude
Choosing an MDM solution is not an easy process. We highly recommend narrowing it down to five tools based on your immediate requirements and assessing capabilities via demos and trial downloads. For example, you can download the WinPure free MDM trial that lets you connect all your data sources, and access the complete Data Cleanse suite, the Intelligent Match Engine, and the Deduplication feature all for free. Once you’re satisfied, you opt to buy an upgraded version.
An MDM solution should be making your job easier, enabling higher operational efficiency. Choosing a tool that doesn’t meet your business size, requirements, and budget will set you way back from where you are now.
If you’d like to make an informed decision on whether WinPure fits your MDM requirements before making an investment, we’d love to help! Please feel free to contact us via the form below.
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