Do you wish to understand what data cleaning is and how it works? Do you want an in-depth analysis of the best Data Cleaning Services? If yes, then you’ve come to the right place.
Today, most industries rely on data for decision-making. This data is typically analyzed to draw insights that can be good for predicting future trends. No company can scan through zillions of records of data manually to solve issues related to Data Cleaning and thus they require the best Data Cleaning Services.
This article will give an in-depth analysis of various Data Cleaning Services that you can use to clean your data.
Table of Contents
What is Data Cleaning?
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Insights from any analysis are only as good as the data you’re using. Garbage data in means garbage insights out. Data cleaning, also known as data scrubbing or data cleansing, is an essential step for your enterprise if your goal is to cultivate a culture around quality evidence-based decision making.
It is the process of fixing or removing incorrect, duplicate, incorrectly formatted, corrupted, or incomplete data within a dataset. When gathering data from multiple data sources into a data warehouse, there are high chances for the data being mislabeled or duplicated. If the data is incorrect, algorithms and outcomes will be unreliable. Note that there is no absolute way to prescribe the data cleaning process since it will always vary from one dataset to another. However, it will be vital for you to come up with a template on how to perform data cleaning in your enterprise to ensure that you’re doing it the right way.
The following are some of the common practices in data cleaning:
- Removal of duplicate/irrelevant observations.
- Fixing structural errors.
- Filtering unwanted outliers.
- Handling missing data.
As the ability of businesses to collect data explodes, data teams have a crucial role to play in fueling data-driven decisions. Yet, they struggle to consolidate the data scattered across sources into their warehouse to build a single source of truth. Broken pipelines, data quality issues, bugs and errors, and lack of control and visibility over the data flow make data integration a nightmare.
1000+ data teams rely on Hevo’s Data Pipeline Platform to integrate data from over 150+ sources in a matter of minutes. Billions of data events from sources as varied as SaaS apps, Databases, File Storage and Streaming sources can be replicated in near real-time with Hevo’s fault-tolerant architecture.
What’s more – Hevo puts complete control in the hands of data teams with intuitive dashboards for pipeline monitoring, auto-schema management, and custom ingestion/loading schedules.
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Best Data Cleaning Services
The following are the best Data Cleaning Services that can help you keep your data clean and consistent for proper analysis and decision making.
Some of the Data Cleaning Services are free, while others are priced with free trial periods:
1) OpenRefine
Formerly called Google Refine, OpenRefine is a powerful tool for dealing with messy data, cleaning it, and even transforming it.
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You can also use it to transform data from one format to another, allowing you to match and reconcile data, explore big data sets with ease, and clean and transform data faster.
OpenRefine Pricing
It’s a free and open-source tool, and hence, you can use it or modify its source code without paying anything.
2) Trifacta Wrangler
Trifacta Wrangler was developed by the makers of Data Wrangler, and it’s an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation.
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Some of its best features include a larger focus on analyzing data and less formatting time. It helps data scientists and analysts to clean and prepare messy and diverse data more accurately and quickly. It comes with machine learning algorithms that suggest the common transformations and aggregations for you to use.
Trifacta Wrangler Pricing
Trifacta Wrangler offers a free version with basic functionality, a Pro version costing $419/month per user, and an Enterprise version, cost for which can be negotiated with the Trifacta team depending on the business and data requirements.
3) Drake
Drake is an extensible and simple tool to use. Its text-based data workflow has data processing steps with defined inputs and outputs, with the ability to resolve their dependencies and determine the command to execute and the order of execution. Drake was designed for data workflow management, and it organizes command execution around data and its dependencies.
Drake Pricing
Drake is a free open-source tool so you can easily access it and perform the required data cleaning operations.
4) Tibco Clarity
Tibco Clarity is a great platform for interactive data cleansing.
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It utilizes a visual interface to streamline data discovery, data quality improvements, and data transformation. You can process your raw data through Tibco Clarity, and it will be converted to a form suitable for analysis. Besides data cleaning, you can perform deduplication operations and inspect addresses before transferring information to the destination. You can also use Tibco Clarity to visualize your data during data cleansing and get a clear view of the data.
Tibco Clarity Pricing
Tibco Clarity offers a 30-day free trial following which the user has to choose between the Standard Edition costing $100 per month or the Premium Edition costing $225 per month depending on the requirements. An analysis of the editions offered can be seen below.
5) Winpure
It is considered to be one of the most affordable out of all Data Cleaning Services and can help you clean a massive volume of data, remove duplicates, standardize and correct errors effortlessly.
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You can use it to clean data from databases, CRMs, spreadsheets, and more. Some of its great features include fuzzy matching and advanced data cleaning, super-fast data scrubbing, and a multi-language edition.
Winpure Pricing
Winpure offers a free community version with basic functionality along with three paid versions depending on the size of the business using it. The edition for small business will cost $999 and for medium and large-sized business will cost $1999. For enterprises, the pricing will vary depending on the business and data requirements. An analysis of all the editions offered by Winpure can be seen below.
This is a data quality suite developed to help enterprises improve their data in Salesforce CRM and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.
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If your data cleansing use case is narrow and mainly focuses on your CRM, then DemandTools is the right tool for you. The DemandTool’s Cleansing Tools module helps improve the quality of data by stopping and fixing duplicate records and managing lead conversions without duplicate contacts.
DemandTools Pricing
DemandTools offers a 5-day free trial. Once the trial period is over, the pricing varies depending on the number of users in the business. The business is charged a base charge of $1200 for 10 users + $120 per user.
7) Data Cleaner
Quadient Data Cleaner is a powerful data profiling tool for determining and analyzing data quality for better decision-making.
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The tool can find patterns, missing values, character sets, and other characteristics in a dataset to provide better results. It uses fuzzy logic to detect duplicates and create a single version of them.
Data Cleaner Pricing
The community version is free; otherwise, its price is on request depending on your business and data needs.
8) Cloudingo
Cloudingo is a Salesforce data cleansing tool that cleans records, eliminates duplicates, and maintains the quality of data all in one place.
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It is suitable for businesses of all sizes in which data updates are made in bulk, and the imported files are cleansed before accessing Salesforce. It has automation capabilities that ensure that data is scanned for any errors.
Cloudingo Pricing
Cloudingo offers three subscription plans depending on the business and data needs starting from a Standard version costing $2,500 per year to an Enterprise version costing $10,000 per year.
9) Reifier
It’s a tool developed by Aficx, formerly Nube Technologies, and it uses Spark for deduplication, distributed entity resolution, and record linkage.
Some of its great features include high accuracy, fast deployment, and runtime performance. It relies on machine learning algorithms to offer the best entity resolution and fuzzy data matching, and a scale-out distributed architecture.
Reifier Pricing
The pricing will vary based on the business requirements and can be finalised after discussion with the Aficx team.
10) IBM InfoSphere Quality Stage
It’s a tool developed to support data quality, and it’s one of the most popular Data Cleaning Services that support full data quality.
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It allows for the cleansing and management of databases with ease, and it facilitates the building of consistent views for the most critical units like vendors, customers, products, locations, etc. It helps deliver quality data for business intelligence, big data, master data management, data warehousing, etc.
IBM InfoSphere Quality Stage Pricing
The pricing will depend on the business and data requirements and can be negotiated upon discussion with the IBM team.
Importance of Data Cleaning in an ETL Process
Data Cleaning plays an important in the overall ETL process. It is the process of analyzing and identifying relevant data from the raw organizational datasets to make security decisions. Data Cleaning in an ETL process ensures that only high-quality data passes through and loads into Data Warehouse. Data Cleaning also involves standardizing the data into a single format.
Data Cleaning ensures that the dataset is free of erroneous or corrupt information and makes the data analysis ready. High-quality data can be seamlessly used by BI tools, Data Analysts, and Data Scientists for making smarter and better data-driven decisions. Data Professionals can carry out this ETL process by using Automated Tools like Hevo Data.
Limitations of Using Data Cleaning Services
- Some Data Cleaning Services are not smart. Hence, they may mishandle some observations in the dataset.
- The best Data Cleaning Services are expensive, and their cheaper or free versions only offer basic features.
- For using these Data Cleaning Services, you have to expose your data, however sensitive it may be, without knowing what the tool may be doing in the background.
- Data cleaning can be a time-consuming process even if the best Data Cleaning Services are used, especially when you’re dealing with a large dataset.
Conclusion
This article provided you with an in-depth understanding of what data cleaning is, how it’s done, and an analysis of the best Data Cleaning Services available allowing you to make the right decision based on your business needs. Since there is no right process for data cleaning, the process should have maximum flexibility depending on the condition of the data.
For a complete Business Performance Analysis, you need to extract & consolidate data from all your data sources. To achieve this efficiently, you require to invest a section of your Engineering Bandwidth to Integrate, Clean, Transform & Load data to your Data Warehouse or a destination of your choice. This is a Time-Consuming & Resource Intensive task. A good alternative is automating the whole process by employing a Cloud-Based ETL Tool like Hevo Data.
Hevo Data provides a No-Code Data Pipeline that allows accurate and Real-Time Replication of Data from 150+ Data Sources and lets you directly load data into a Data Warehouse or a destination of your choice. It is a fully automated, secure and reliable service that offers high flexibility for Data Cleaning and Transformation.
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Skilled in freelance writing within the data industry, Nicholas is passionate about unraveling the complexities of data integration and data analysis through informative content for those delving deeper into these subjects. He has written more than 150+ blogs on databases, processes, and tutorials that help data practitioners solve their day-to-day problems.