Datafold vs OpenMetadata
Datafold
datafold.com
OpenMetadata
open-metadata.orgSide by side
| Figure | Datafold | OpenMetadata |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | — | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Data Observability Tools | 8.1 (#2) | 7.4 (#4) |
| Deployment | Datafold is a web-based application offered as multi-tenant SaaS or dedicated cloud, including customer-hosted options. | Users can deploy OpenMetadata in their own environment, try a live sandbox with demo data, or sign up for a free cloud service with their own data. |
| Integrations | The product page names Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, dbt, Airflow, GitHub, and GitLab, and says Datafold integrates with 50+ data tools. | Its ingestion framework supports connectors for 130+ data services, including Airflow, BigQuery, Databricks, dbt, Kafka, MySQL, Snowflake, and Tableau. |
| Knowledge graph | The Data Knowledge Graph collects lineage, business logic, usage, and ontology, then serves this context to AI agents via MCP. | Its graph captures schemas, tables, columns, dashboards, pipelines, ML models, owners, lineage, and classifications. |
| Purpose | Datafold combines specialized AI agents, a context layer, and data quality tools to automate data engineering. | OpenMetadata unifies technical context, business semantics, and organizational memory in a knowledge graph for people and AI agents. |
| Security | The Trust Center lists GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 compliance statuses and provides access to security documents. | The documentation describes Fernet encryption for stored passwords and connection secrets, SSL/TLS connections, and external secrets manager support. |
Plans
In their own words
OpenMetadata
OpenMetadata is an open-source platform for cataloging and governing data, bringing technical context, business meaning and organizational memory into a knowledge graph. Its capabilities include discovery, data quality, observability, lineage, semantics and memory. The graph connects schemas, tables, columns, dashboards, pipelines, ML models, owners and classifications. Glossary terms, metric definitions and relationships using RDF, OWL, DCAT and Schema.org help represent shared business meaning. For AI workflows, OpenMetadata provides an MCP server, an AI SDK and a Context Center for articles, documents and memories. Its ingestion framework has connectors for 130+ data services, including Airflow, BigQuery, Databricks, dbt, Kafka, MySQL, Snowflake and Tableau. The schema-first architecture includes 700+ open specifications in JSON Schema and RDF/JSON-LD. It can be deployed in an organization's own environment, explored in a live sandbox with demo data, or used through a free cloud service with the organization's data. The self-hosted plan is listed at free, with no usage limits stated. Security documentation describes stored-secret encryption, SSL/TLS connections and external secrets manager support.