Soda, Elementary, Metaplane have free plans. The highest-ranked is Soda (9.6/10): Free plan with free Soda Processing Units (SPUs), unlimited users, pipeline testing, metrics observability and alerting; no credit card. Soda Core library is also free to use (Elastic License 2.0).
Data monitoring tools (often called data observability tools) watch production data continuously and alert you when something changes unexpectedly: a table stops updating, row volumes drop, values drift, or a schema changes. Some learn normal behaviour with machine learning; others run rules you define. The main differences are how checks are created, how alerts reach your team, and whether lineage shows what a broken table affects downstream.
| Tool | Score | Free plan | Paid from (annual) | ML anomaly detection | Freshness and volume checks | Alerts (email, Slack or Teams) | Data lineage | Custom rule checks |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Soda | 9.6/10 | Yes | See vendor | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Elementary | 9.2/10 | Yes | See vendor | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Metaplane | 9.2/10 | Yes | See vendor | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Tool | What the free plan includes | First paid plan |
|---|---|---|
| Soda | Free plan with free Soda Processing Units (SPUs), unlimited users, pipeline testing, metrics observability and alerting; no credit card. Soda Core library is also free to use (Elastic License 2.0). | See vendor |
| Elementary | Elementary OSS: open-source dbt package and CLI, self-hosted | See vendor |
| Metaplane | Free forever: 10 monitored tables, basic monitoring, Slack/email/Teams alerts | See vendor |
Data quality platform built around data contracts, with metric monitoring and a Python engine (Soda Core).
dbt-native data observability with an open-source package and CLI plus a paid cloud platform.
Data observability tool for warehouses with automated anomaly detection and column-level lineage, now owned by Datadog.
Yes. Free plan with free Soda Processing Units (SPUs), unlimited users, pipeline testing, metrics observability and alerting; no credit card. Soda Core library is also free to use (Elastic License 2.0). Paid plans start at see vendor.
Yes. Elementary OSS: open-source dbt package and CLI, self-hosted Paid plans start at see vendor.
Yes. Free forever: 10 monitored tables, basic monitoring, Slack/email/Teams alerts Paid plans start at see vendor.
Scores come from published, repeatable data (features, free plan, entry price, pricing transparency). No vendor can pay to change a score. Read the methodology · Disclosure.