DataHub Core
Open-source context platform for data and AI agents, with automated data discovery, column-level data lineage, a business glossary, active metadata propagation, data stewardship workflows, and data classification — self-hosted and community-maintained.
Best for data engineering teams that want a flexible, self-hosted metadata platform and are comfortable operating it themselves across complex, multi-source data environments.
OpenMetadata
Open-source unified metadata platform with data discovery, column-level data lineage, a business glossary, data classification, governance workflows, and built-in data quality checks.
Best for data teams that want a self-hosted open-source platform covering data discovery, governance, and data quality in one tool, with a wide range of connectors.
Marquez
Open-source metadata server and reference implementation of the OpenLineage specification — providing a lineage REST API, persistent storage, and a web UI to visualize end-to-end lineage from Airflow, Spark, dbt, Flink, and Dagster pipelines.
Best for data engineering teams looking for a lightweight, self-hosted OpenLineage-compatible backend to collect and visualize lineage across multi-tool pipelines without adopting a commercial platform.
Apache Atlas
Open-source data catalog with data lineage, a business glossary, data classification, tag-based data policy enforcement, and data governance for Hadoop ecosystems.
Best for data governance teams in Hadoop-centric environments looking for a battle-tested open-source framework for metadata management and policy-driven data classification.
Egeria
Open-source open metadata and governance framework from the Linux Foundation, with an asset catalog, a business glossary, OpenLineage-based lineage, and automated governance actions.
Best for enterprises that want to exchange metadata between many catalogs and tools through open standards, and have the Java skills to run it.
Unity Catalog OSS
Open-source universal catalog for data and AI (LF AI & Data) for tables, unstructured data, and AI assets, with access control and Iceberg REST APIs.
Best for lakehouse teams on Delta Lake or Iceberg that want an open, engine-agnostic catalog with access control; data lineage is only in the Databricks-managed version.
Apache Gravitino
Open-source federated metadata catalog that unifies data and AI assets across regions and sources, with access control, auditing, and OpenLineage event collection.
Best for platform teams with metadata spread across Hive, relational databases, object storage, and streams that want one geo-distributed metadata lake.
OpenDataDiscovery
Open-source data discovery and observability platform with ingestion-to-product lineage, a business glossary, and alerts from integrated data quality tools.
Best for teams that want discovery, lineage, and data quality signals in one self-hosted tool. Note that development has slowed, with most recent commits automated.
OpenLineage
Open standard and SDK for collecting data lineage — providing integrations for Airflow, Spark, dbt, Flink, and Dagster that emit lineage events to any compliant backend (Marquez, DataHub, Atlan, Astronomer, and others) without coupling to a specific server.
Best for data engineering teams that want standardized, portable lineage collection across a multi-tool pipeline stack — and are fine picking a separate backend (Marquez, DataHub, Atlan) to store and visualize the events, since OpenLineage itself doesn't ship one.
Spline
Open-source data lineage library for Apache Spark that automatically captures and visualizes lineage from Spark jobs — recording inputs, outputs, and transformations without code changes.
Best for data engineering teams running Apache Spark who need automatic, code-free lineage capture and a lightweight UI to visualize how data flows through their Spark pipelines.
Zingg
Open-source master data management and entity resolution platform with ML-powered fuzzy matching, persistent entity IDs, incremental identity graph updates, and native integrations with Databricks, Snowflake, BigQuery, and AWS Glue.
Best for data engineering teams building customer 360 views, MDM systems, or composable CDPs who need a scalable, ML-driven record matching solution on their existing cloud data platform.
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Tools List (42 tools) · Feature Matrix (90 features) · At a Glance (13 tools)
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By Ari Bajo - Data Engineer turned Writer.