Better Data Products
with Data Contracts
Entropy Data (formerly known as Data Mesh Manager) is a marketplace for data products, enforced by data contracts, to make high-quality data available across the entire organization.
Made by the authors of datamesh-architecture.com and datacontract.com.
Discover data products
Marketplace
A self-service Data Product marketplace for teams and AI clients to discover, request, and access data products.
- Discover.
- Entropy Data helps data consumers to discover the data they need for their business case with a clear user interface, semantic search and filter capabilities, fully optimized for data products.
- Request. Approve. Access.
- Entropy Data supports the full life-cycle of data access as a self-service. Data consumers can request access and owners approve or reject. Use integrations to automate permissions in your data platform.
- MCP.
- Enable your AI clients to find and access your data products to answer business questions in natural language. Data contracts give the required semantical context for LLMs to automatically write SQL queries. The MCP server checks that data access is in line with data contract terms of use and global policies.
Create and manage
Studio
The workspace for data teams to design, develop, and monitor their data products and data contract in easy-to-use Web UI, YAML-Editor, API, and -yes- Excel.
- Data-first or Contract-first?
- Both is supported: Create data products from existing data sets in your data platform or data catalog and put them under contract. Or draft new data contracts for your data requirements and create data products that implement them.
- Open Standards.
- Entropy Data uses open standards like Bitol Open Data Contract Standard (ODCS) to specify data contracts and Open Data Product Standard (ODPS) for data products. With user-friendly editors or the Excel template, data product owners can easily create and edit data contracts.
- Data Contract Testing.
- Ensure that your data products are compliant to the data contract, even before they are deployed to production. As a data consumer, use data contracts to validate the upstream data quality. Entropy Data fully integrates our popular open-source Data Contract CLI tool.
Ensure compliance
Governance
Define the rules of play for your data product platform.
Automatically check for policy compliance for less manual effort and immediate feedback to data product developers.
- Define Ownership.
- Probably the hardest part in data management: Define who is responsible for high-quality data products. Define roles and permissions for team members and notify them when something needs attention.
- Global Policies.
- Ensure consistency across all data products: Ownership, naming conventions, mandatory fields, data classification, access control, and more. Document your policies in natural language.
- Automated Policy Checks.
- Data Governance checks use AI to automatically check if your policies are correctly applied in your data products and data contracts. Rely on our pre-trained and managed Data Governance AI Assistant, or use your own hosted model (even on-premise).
Put your data under contract
Start managing data products with data contracts and build a trustworthy data product marketplace
Pricing
Choose your deployment option
Starter Cloud
Ideal for PoCs
Free
Unlimited, and actual useful
Start now for freeIncludes:
- Simple user management (What does it mean?)
- Unlimited data products
- Unlimited data contracts
- Limited Data Governance checks
Team Cloud
Ideal for small teams
/month per user
Minimum of 10 users
Order nowEverything in Starter, plus:
- Advanced user management with roles and permissions
- SSO
- Fast help from our team of experts
Business Cloud
Customize for your needs
/month per user
Minimum of 25 users
Order nowEverything in Team, plus:
- Custom roles
- Custom schemas for your data products and data contracts
- Test and staging environments
Enterprise Cloud
Get the services you need
Let's talk
Minimum of 50 users
Get in TouchEverything in Business, plus:
- SCIM
- 1-day support SLA
- A dedicated success engineer
- Optional single-tenant hosting or hosting in your own cloud
- Access to professional services for individual customization
Community Self-hosted
Runs on your own servers.
Free
Unlimited, and actual useful
Download now- Simple user management (What does it mean?)
- Unlimited data products
- Unlimited data contracts
- Data Governance AI checks (BYO)
Team Self-hosted
Ideal for small teams
/month per user
Minimum of 10 users
Order nowEverything in Community, plus:
- Advanced user management with roles and permissions
- SSO
- Fast help from our team of experts
Business Self-hosted
Customize for your needs
/month per user
Minimum of 25 users
Order nowEverything in Team, plus:
- Custom roles
- Custom schemas for your data products and data contracts
- Test and staging environment
Enterprise Self-hosted
Get the services you need
Let's talk
Minimum of 50 users
Get in TouchEverything in Business, plus:
- SCIM
- 1-day support SLA
- A dedicated success engineer
- Access to professional services for individual customization
Our Story
We (Simon & Jochen) founded Entropy Data after working for many years as consultants at INNOQ with enterprises to build software systems that scale with methods such as Domain-driven Design, autonomous development teams, and self-contained system architectures, but data was never really part of the equation. When w e started to use domain data to analyze our own backlog, it fundamentally changed the way we thought about data in software engineering. Data-driven decisions motivated us to build the right things. It created a purpose. It was an inflection point for us. So, we combined our existing knowledge in software engineering and data analytics to share our perspective of data mesh on datamesh-architecture.com. We also translated Zhamak Dehghani's amazing Data Mesh book into German. And we started to help companies to adopt these principles.
When we discussed data product management software with enterprise clients, we realized that existing tools, such as data catalogs, were not fitting well to data products and the UX was not exactly user-friendly. Business users and engineers avoided these tools. So, we created Data Mesh Manager to help business and technical teams work with data products and discover data that was actually relevant for their business case in a user-friendly way, while always keeping the developer experience in mind.
And we introduced a successful concept from software architecture to data architecture: APIs - and we called them Data Contracts to make it easier to understand (though we're not sure if that name was the best idea). However, with an open specification standard, data teams finally had a concrete tool that embraces collaboration from the beginning and ensures data quality in the long run. We knew that to make a standard adopted, we needed to be part of the community and convince the hearts of engineers: We created the Data Contract CLI as an open-source project to integrate data contracts into the development process.
We also noticed that consulting and product development have conflicting goals and priorities. So we decided to spin off from INNOQ and founded Entropy Data to focus our efforts on building Data Mesh Manager and contributing to the data community.
Frequently asked questions
Have a different question and can’t find the answer you’re looking for? Reach out by sending us an email and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
- What is the difference between Entropy Data, Data Mesh Manager, and Data Contract Manager?
- It is just the name. The product is the same. The new name is "Entropy Data". In some technical documents and code, you might still see the old name.
- Which data platform do you support?
- Entropy Data is focusing on the data mesh governance aspect and is data platform neutral. Through the API, Data Platform Manager can be integrated in all deployment pipelines and platforms, such as AWS Athena, AWS Redshift, GCP BigQuery, Azure Fabric, Snowflake, Databricks, and others.
- We already have a data catalog. Do we need Entropy Data?
- Probably, yes. Entropy Data is a user-friendly frontend on top of your data catalog. Most data catalogs focus on data assets, often containing too many entries, such as tables and internal data structures, which can quickly become overwhelming. Entropy Data, on the other hand, manages data products using data contracts to provide a higher-level view. It enables you to connect these products to build an enterprise data marketplace. Importantly, Entropy Data works alongside your existing data catalog (see our integration architecture). Learn more about the differences: From Data Catalog to Data Marketplace
- We are just starting our data mesh journey or data product architecture. Why should we consider Entropy Data?
- You need to have a goto place where you document and discover your data products and data contracts. The data product inventory of Entropy Data offers you such a place and can give you a feeling of joy when you watch your mesh grow. At some point, you need to start to focus on data governance. Your first global policies should cover interoperability, documentation, and security.
- Where are your servers located?
- For the cloud version, all servers and data are hosted on Azure in the EU Data Boundary. Enterprise customers can also choose to have managed hosted on a single tenant in their preferred data region or even in their own cloud environment.
- What's the difference between the Community Edition and the paid version?
- The Community Edition is a free version of Entropy Data that you can host yourself. The paid versions is our commercial cloud or on-premise offering and comes with support, advanced user management, SSO, customizations, and additional features for enterprises.
- What does "simple user management" mean?
-
In the free versions of Entropy Data (Community Edition and Starter), you can invite users to Entropy Data. Every invited user gets the "Organization Owner" role (think of an Admin role), i.e. every user can create and update teams, data products, and data contracts.
The paid versions of Entropy Data come with advanced user management, i.e. you can assign different roles to users.
Read more about roles and their permissions in the documentation.
- Are you ISO 27001 certified?
-
Yes. Certificate