Alation Cloud Service vs. Customer-Managed Alation

Alation Cloud Service Applies to Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation

Customer Managed Applies to customer-managed instances of Alation

If you use customer-managed Alation (on-premises), you obtain and host your own physical infrastructure, install the software, and perform administration and maintenance yourself.

If you use Alation Cloud Service, your Alation instance resides on Alation’s servers and runs on a scalable architecture. Alation Cloud Service instances are fully administered, maintained, and upgraded by Alation.

Alation Cloud Service offers a faster time to value as software upgrades and patches are handled by Alation and issued as soon as they’re available. In addition, Alation handles all maintenance, backups, and disaster recovery so you have little administrative overhead.

Feature Comparison

The following table highlights the feature differences between Alation Cloud Service and customer-managed instances of Alation as of 2025.1.2.

Alation Cloud Service offers a broader and more versatile set of features and is the recommended deployment option.

Feature	Alation Cloud Service	Customer-Managed
Administered by Alation	Yes	No
Advanced Access Controls for RDBMS Sources (Beta)	Yes	No
Alation Agent	Yes	No
Alation Anywhere for Microsoft Teams	Yes	No
Alation Anywhere for Slack	Yes	No
Alation Chrome Extension	Yes	No
Alation Consumption Tracker	Yes	No
ALLIE AI Suggested Descriptions	Yes	No
API Authentication with OAuth 2.0	Yes	No
AWS PrivateLink Connectivity	Yes, on Enterprise and Enterprise+ plans only	No
Bring Your Own Encryption Key	Yes, on Enterprise and Enterprise+ plans only	No
Connector Authentication via External Vault through Alation Agent	Yes, on Deluxe, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ plans only	No
Connector Authentication via External Vault through Alation	Yes, on Deluxe, Enterprise, and Enterprise+ plans only	Yes
Intelligent Search	Yes	No
New User Experience	Yes	No
Status Page	Yes	No

System Administration

System administrators for customer-managed Alation can use the Installation & Configuration and Alation for Server Administrators sections of the documentation for help installing and administering Alation. Many of the procedures in these sections assume you have access to the machine where Alation is installed so you can interact with the Alation backend using the command line.

System administrators for Alation Cloud Service instances of Alation can rely on Alation’s Support and Site Reliability Engineers to perform any necessary backend tasks that require access to the Alation machine. See the Alation Cloud Service section of the documentation for more details about availability, security, and configuration for Alation in the cloud.

Note

Alation Cloud Service customers can request server configuration changes through Alation Support.