With the volume of new data now measured in the hundreds of exabytes each day and Web 3.0 becoming a thing, businesses are in need of advanced analytics and big data tools that can turn that data into real-time insights and personalized services for their customers.

And for that data to be effectively used for decision-making, it must be cleaned, normalized, formatted, and analyzed.

For this purpose, many businesses are turning to data profiling tools, which monitor and clean data to improve its quality, allowing them to secure a competitive advantage in the burgeoning marketplace. One common use of data profiling software is to maximize potential opportunities from sales data, for example.

Also see the Top Data Quality Tools & Software

What is Data Profiling?

Data profiling involves examining source data; understanding its structure, content, and relationships; and creating information summaries that can be used to make critical business decisions.

Data profiling is combined with the extract, transfer, and load (ETL) process and is vital for business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, and data conversion and migration projects.

Types of Data Profiling

The types of data profiling include:

• Relationship discovery detects the interactions between data sources and establishes links within the data.
• Content discovery takes a closer look at data and discovers issues in specific rows and columns of datasets. It also leverages techniques like frequency counts, uniformity, and outlier detection.
• Structure discovery examines the rows and columns of datasets and determines the consistency of data. It also leverages techniques such as validation with metadata and pattern matching.

What are the Steps of Data Profiling?

Data profiling includes the following steps:

1. Gather data types, patterns, variation, uniqueness, frequency, and length.
2. Collect statistics and descriptive information.
3. Check metadata and its accuracy.
4. Tag data with labels, categories, and keywords.
5. Identify structures, relationships, and dependencies.
6. Calibrate the ETL process and data conversion and migration.
7. Assess data quality.
8. Assess the risk involved in data integration.
9. Understand data challenges early to avoid issues.
10. Determine the validity, completeness, and accuracy of data.

Also read: Top DataOps Tools

Top Data Profiling Tools

Here are five top data profiling tools and software that stood out to us in our survey of the market.

WinPure Clean & Match

WinPure Clean & Match is a data quality, cleaning, matching, and deduplication data profiling software suite for customer relationship management (CRM), spreadsheets, databases, mailing lists, and more.

Key Differentiators

• The one-click data cleaning mode processes all the clean options across numerous columns simultaneously.
• The data profiling tool immediately fixes data quality issues. WinPure Clean & Match scans every data list and provides more than 30 statistics ranging from common values and counts to the percentage of filled or empty cells.
• WinPure Clean & Match features amber and red coloring to bring to light potential data quality problems, including trailing/leading spaces, hyphens, dots, etc., all of which can be fixed from a solitary click.
• The solution features an intelligent data matching engine that is speedy and accurate.
• Standard and proprietary algorithms detect abbreviated, miskeyed, fuzzy, and phonetic variations using an in-depth domain knowledge of names that includes multicultural name variations and nicknames.
• Data matching reports are created automatically and can be emailed, printed, or exported.

Pricing: WinPure Clean & Match is available in four editions: Community, Small Business, Pro Business, and Enterprise. The Community edition of WinPure Clean & Match is free while the Enterprise edition is feature-laden and ideal for enterprise use. Those interested can take advantage of a free trial or reach out to the WinPure sales to request a demo.

DemandTools

DemandTools by Validity is a secure and versatile data profiling tool that effectively cleans and maintains your CRM data. By providing report-ready data in less time, DemandTools enhances the effectiveness of your revenue operations.

Key Differentiators

• All aspects of data can be managed in minutes, rather than months, by leveraging repeatable processes.
• Records can be automatically assigned, standardized, and deduped as they come in from integrations, end-user entry, and spreadsheets.
• Clean data can be obtained to enhance the performance of support, marketing, and sales as well as the retention and revenue they generate.
• Users can better understand how weak or strong data is and where to focus remediation efforts with the data quality assessment feature
• With data migration management, data integrity can be maintained during record deletion, exports, and imports.
• The email verification feature helps verify email addresses in your CRM to maintain seamless communication with customers.
• Other features include duplicate management, user management and standardization, mass modification, and business insights.

Pricing: DemandTools starts at $ 10 per CRM license per month. Before purchasing the data profiler, you can make use of a free trial.

Introhive Cleanse

Introhive Cleanse is a data profiling tool that provides an on-demand manner to maintain the accuracy of your prospect and customer data.

Key Differentiators

• With Introhive Cleanse, users can clean up CRM data simply and efficiently.
• Accounts and contacts can be enhanced and enriched with clean and compliant data in real time.
• Introhive Cleanse eliminates waiting for bouncebacks, armies of data stewards, and batch updates.
• With Introhive Cleanse, users can enjoy data quantity and quality.
• Users can identify stale contacts, merge data dupes, and maintain relevance.
• Using clean data, sales can prospect efficiently, and marketing can increase the effectiveness of campaigns.

Pricing: Those interested can book a demo at the earliest. Contact the Introhive sales team for pricing details.

RingLead Cleanse

RingLead Cleanse by Zoominfo is a data profiler that uses patented duplicate merging technology to discover and eradicate duplicates inside a CRM and marketing automation platform (MAP).

Key Differentiators

• The RingLead Deduplication merging module permits users to have full control of how duplicates merge into a solitary record.
• Any custom or standard object can be deduped while leveraging best-practice templates and an adaptable drag-and-drop configuration for merging and matching duplicates.
• Users can take advantage of advanced fuzzy matching criteria for high match rates.
• With the mass delete feature, users can locate and delete junk data files in a few simple clicks.
• Along with single table deduplication, RingLead Cleanse enables users to locate and merge duplicates at the cross-object level.
• Batch normalization templates can be customized to unify data to a single format, proper-case data, and fix data errors and typos.
• With the mass update feature, existing records can be modified without complex manual work.

Pricing: You can enjoy a free trial of the complete RingLead platform. Reach out to the RingLead sales team for pricing information or to schedule a demo.

Openprise Data Cleansing Automation

The Openprise Data Cleansing Automation platform helps clean and format data; normalize field values; dedupe accounts, contacts, and leads; match leads to accounts; and more to make all data go-to-market ready.

Key Differentiators

• Openprise bots can be deployed to monitor and clean data in real time.
• The data profiling tool normalizes data according to set specifications.
• Openprise consistently deduplicates leads, contacts, and accounts.
• The data profiling tool can deduplicate any object that has been built.
• Lead-to-account matching enables users to analyze numerous fields to establish a match across multiple languages.
• Other features include contacts and accounts segmentation, data enrichment, and data unification.

Pricing: Reach out to the Openprise sales team for product pricing details or to request a demo.

Choosing a Data Profiling Tool

A data profiler cleans, analyzes, monitors, and reviews data from existing databases as well as other sources for a variety of data-related projects. The procedure enables businesses to extract maximum value from garnered data and make effective decisions for business growth.

When making a data profiling tool purchasing decision, be sure to go through product catalogs, evaluate their features, contrast pricing plans, and analyze peer-to-peer reviews to make sure you get the tool that’s right for your needs and business.

Read next: Best Data Analytics Tools for Analyzing & Presenting Data

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