# OpenMetadata **Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/openmetadata **Vertical:** Data Catalog **Subcategory:** Open-Source Metadata Management **Tier:** Emerging **Website:** open-metadata.org **Last Updated:** 2026-04-14 ## Summary OpenMetadata is an open-source metadata management and data catalog platform providing discovery, governance, lineage, and data quality across the modern data stack. ## Company Overview OpenMetadata is an open-source metadata management platform that provides data catalog, data discovery, data lineage, data quality, and data governance capabilities through a single unified metadata store, designed to serve as the central metadata layer for the modern data stack across cloud data warehouses, ETL pipelines, BI tools, ML platforms, and operational databases. The platform's architecture is built on a metadata API layer that aggregates metadata from connected data sources into a centralized repository with a standardized schema, enabling search and discovery across the full data environment without requiring each tool to be queried separately. OpenMetadata's open-source foundation means that organizations can deploy the platform without vendor licensing costs and can extend or customize the platform for specific use cases by contributing to or forking the codebase — an important consideration for data engineering teams that need to adapt catalog functionality to match their specific data stack configuration. OpenMetadata's data lineage capabilities capture column-level lineage across supported data sources and pipeline tools, allowing organizations to trace the transformation of individual data fields from source to destination rather than only understanding table-level data flow. This granular lineage enables impact analysis at the field level — identifying which downstream dashboards or models are affected when a specific source column changes — which is critical for data quality incident response and for understanding the downstream implications of data model changes. The platform's data quality framework allows teams to define data quality checks, run them on a schedule against data assets, and surface quality results in the catalog alongside other metadata, making data reliability visible to catalog users. OpenMetadata was incubated at Collate, a YC-backed company that provides a managed cloud version of the open-source platform, and has grown a substantial open-source community with contributions from data engineering teams at technology companies and data-driven enterprises globally. The platform targets data engineering teams and data platform teams at organizations that prefer open-source foundations for their metadata infrastructure and want to avoid proprietary catalog vendor lock-in. OpenMetadata competes with Atlan, DataHub (LinkedIn's open-source platform), and managed commercial catalogs in the data catalog market. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What are the advantages of using an open-source data catalog like OpenMetadata versus a commercial platform? Open-source platforms have no licensing costs, can be extended or customized by internal engineering teams, and avoid proprietary lock-in — but they require internal resources to deploy, operate, and maintain, whereas commercial platforms provide managed hosting, support, and ongoing feature development in exchange for licensing fees. ### How is OpenMetadata priced? OpenMetadata is open-source and free to self-host, with no licensing cost for the community edition. The company offers OpenMetadata Cloud, a managed SaaS version, with subscription pricing based on user count and data asset volume. Commercial support and professional services are available for enterprise self-hosted deployments. ### Who are OpenMetadata's primary users? OpenMetadata is adopted primarily by data engineering and data platform teams at technology companies, startups, and mid-market organizations that have the technical resources to self-host and maintain an open-source platform. It appeals to organizations that want full control over their metadata infrastructure and prefer avoiding proprietary vendor lock-in. ### What data sources does OpenMetadata support? OpenMetadata supports over 80 connectors including Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, dbt, Airflow, Kafka, Looker, Tableau, and most major databases and pipeline tools. Its open connector framework allows engineering teams to build custom connectors for proprietary systems not covered by the built-in library. ### How does OpenMetadata compare to DataHub (LinkedIn's open-source catalog)? DataHub was developed at LinkedIn and has a more Kafka-centric, stream-based metadata architecture favored by large engineering organizations with complex event-driven pipelines. OpenMetadata has a more REST API-centric, schema-first architecture with a more complete out-of-the-box UI and governance workflows — making it more accessible to teams without deep Kafka infrastructure experience. ### What governance features does OpenMetadata include? OpenMetadata includes data classification, sensitivity tagging, ownership assignment, data quality integration through its native quality framework, access request workflows, and a business glossary. These governance features are available in the open-source version, making it one of the most feature-complete open-source metadata platforms available without a commercial license. ### What recent milestones has OpenMetadata reached? OpenMetadata reached version 1.0 with significant feature additions including a native data observability and quality module, improved lineage visualization, and an AI assistant for metadata enrichment using large language models. The project has grown its GitHub star count past 5,000 and expanded its commercial cloud offering with enterprise SLA tiers. ### What is OpenMetadata's collate offering? Collate is the commercial company behind OpenMetadata that provides enterprise support, managed cloud hosting, and professional services. Collate raised venture funding to accelerate OpenMetadata development while keeping the core open-source, offering enterprise buyers a vendor-backed support relationship without proprietary lock-in of the software itself. ## Tags open-source, saas, b2b, platform, analytics, data-warehouse, developer-tools, startup, global --- *Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*