Informatica Data Lineage Tool Pricing and Informatica Lineage Cost per Scanner Hour
Informatica has no lineage price. Lineage draws IPUs from the same pool as every other IDMC service, at multipliers Informatica publishes in its rate card. We read the multipliers and the dollar price of an IPU, then built the monthly bill, so you can check a quote before you sign it, or map the same warehouse here with a read-only role.
Read-only connection. DataTrail never moves or mutates your data.
Informatica data lineage lives in Cloud Data Governance and Catalog and is paid in IPUs, not as a lineage line. The smallest public package is 120 IPU a month for $131,760 a year on AWS Marketplace, or $91.50 per IPU. Scanners meter at 0.32 IPU per compute unit hour on a Secure Agent and 0.56 on serverless, while storing 100,000 catalog assets costs only 0.83 IPU. A typical lineage estate burns about 84 IPU a month, roughly $92,000 a year of the pool. DataTrail maps the same warehouse, dbt project and dashboards for $2,148 a year.
Informatica lineage is billed as scanner hours drawn from a shared IPU pool
You do not buy lineage from Informatica. You buy a monthly quantity of Informatica Processing Units for the whole Intelligent Data Management Cloud, and Cloud Data Governance and Catalog spends them. Data integration, data quality, masking and the catalog all draw from the same pool.
For lineage, four meters matter: catalog assets stored, governance assets stored, metadata API calls and scanner compute hours. The first three are small for most teams. The fourth is not. Lineage only exists after a scan, and Informatica's own setup guide says you need "at least 1 data source, target and ETL system scanned to generate end to end technical lineage", so every source in the path is a scheduled scan that meters every time it runs.
The price of the IPU itself is the second half of the math, and it comes from the full list on our Informatica pricing breakdown. This page stays on the lineage meters.
Multipliers from Informatica's IPU rate card updated 4 August 2026. The IPU price is the AWS Marketplace package of 120 IPU a month at $131,760 a year, read 8 October 2026. Move the same scans to Advanced Serverless and the scanner line becomes 112 IPU, which pushes this estate past the 120 IPU package on its own.
Informatica data lineage meters on the published rate card
These are the Data Governance and Catalog rows of the IPU rate card, which now sits on salesforce.com after Salesforce completed its acquisition of Informatica on 18 November 2025. The dollar column multiplies the base multiplier by $91.50, the per-IPU price of the smallest public package.
| Meter | Unit | Base multiplier | Volume tier | Base cost at $91.50 per IPU |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Catalog, assets stored | Per 100,000 assets | 0.83 IPU | 0.067 IPU after 500,000 | $75.95 |
| Governance, assets stored | Per 1,000 assets | 0.95 IPU | 0.475 IPU after 40,000 | $86.93 |
| Metadata API calls | Per 1,000 calls | 0.0 IPU | 0.32 IPU after 100,000 | $0.00 |
| Scanner on a Secure Agent | Per compute unit hour | 0.32 IPU | No tier | $29.28 |
| Scanner with Advanced Serverless | Per compute unit hour | 0.56 IPU | No tier | $51.24 |
| CLAIRE GPT | Per 1,000 queries | 50 IPU | No tier | $4,575.00 |
Informatica's metering documentation says stored records reset at the end of the billing period rather than daily, so the stored-asset meters are read here as a monthly charge. The rate card states that usage types, units, tiers and multipliers "may be updated from time to time". Ask your account team for the multipliers in your own order form.
Dark bars: Secure Agent at 0.32 IPU per hour. Orange bars: Advanced Serverless at 0.56.
What scanning costs a month
| Compute unit hours | Secure Agent IPU | Secure Agent $ | Serverless IPU | Serverless $ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 16 | $1,464 | 28 | $2,562 |
| 100 | 32 | $2,928 | 56 | $5,124 |
| 200 | 64 | $5,856 | 112 | $10,248 |
| 400 | 128 | $11,712 | 224 | $20,496 |
Compare that with storage. Two million catalog assets cost 5.16 IPU a month, because everything above 500,000 drops to 0.067 IPU per 100,000. Scanning has no volume break at all. Hours one and four hundred meter at the same 0.32.
Four things that decide your Informatica lineage cost
Storing 300,000 catalog assets costs 2.49 IPU a month. Two hundred compute unit hours of scanning costs 64. The graph is cheap to keep and expensive to refresh.
Informatica's own lineage deck says reference assets, the placeholders created before connection assignment, "count toward IPU consumption like regular technical assets".
The same scan on Advanced Serverless meters at 0.56 IPU per hour against 0.32 on your own Secure Agent. A January 2025 write-up of the same table showed 0.52.
For Cloud Data Integration, the near-real-time Auto Catalog sync is listed with IPU consumption "More due to near real-time", against "On-demand basis" for the scheduled scanner.
Which lineage types Informatica supports
Informatica's March 2026 lineage deck lists six kinds. Technical automated lineage comes from ETL scanners (Cloud Data Integration, PowerCenter, databases), BI scanners (Tableau, Power BI, MicroStrategy), stored procedure and script scanners, and AI model scanners for Databricks and Google Vertex AI. Inferred lineage links assets across catalog sources with CLAIRE or rules and can auto-accept above a confidence threshold. Business lineage is "semi-automatic (requires user curation)". Custom lineage is drawn by hand to fill gaps. External lineage is imported from Databricks Unity Catalog, Apache Atlas or Microsoft Purview.
Technical lineage resolves at three levels: catalog source, data set and data element, which is column level. Getting there takes a Secure Agent with the right connectors, network access to every system, metadata privileges on each one, a catalog source per system in Metadata Command Center, and then connection assignment, which maps the placeholder objects an ETL scan creates onto the real scanned tables. Informatica's advice is to aim for a 100 percent match rate. Until you do, those placeholders sit in the catalog and count toward IPU consumption.
None of this makes Informatica's lineage weak. Native PowerCenter and Cloud Data Integration lineage, with a near-real-time sync for CDI mappings, is something no warehouse-first tool can match, and the glossary ties each column to a governed term. If twenty years of Informatica ETL feed your regulated reports, that coverage is what the IPUs buy.
Informatica lineage compared with a lineage-first tool
Informatica wins several of these rows outright. The table is here so you can see which rows your team actually needs.
| Informatica CDGC | DataTrail | |
|---|---|---|
| What you buy | Cloud Data Governance and Catalog on a pooled IPU subscription shared with every other IDMC service | A lineage and observability product with a fixed annual price |
| Smallest public package | 120 IPU a month, $131,760 a year on AWS Marketplace | $708 a year on Starter |
| How lineage is collected | Scanners configured in Metadata Command Center, run on a Secure Agent or serverless, then connection assignment | Read-only role on the warehouse, parsed from query history and dbt artifacts |
| Column-level lineage | Yes, column-to-column at the data element level | Yes, from the queries that actually ran |
| Informatica PowerCenter and Cloud Data Integration | Yes, native, including near-real-time sync for CDI | No |
| BI tools | Tableau, Power BI, MicroStrategy and others through BI scanners | Tableau, Power BI, Looker |
| Lineage from other catalogs | Imports lineage from Databricks Unity Catalog, Apache Atlas and Microsoft Purview | Reads Unity Catalog alongside query history |
| Business glossary and stewardship | Yes, with business lineage curated by users | No. A catalog generated from lineage, without stewardship workflows |
| Freshness and schema-change alerts | Data quality runs on a separate meter (0.38 IPU per compute unit hour) | Included in every plan |
| Cost when scans run more often | Rises with every compute unit hour | Unchanged |
DataTrail prices are Starter $59, Team $179 and Scale $479 a month billed yearly. Informatica figures are the public rate card and AWS Marketplace listing cited above.
PowerCenter or Cloud Data Integration moves most of your data, you already hold an IPU pool with headroom, and auditors need each report column tied to a governed term.
The question is what breaks if this column changes, the estate is a cloud warehouse with dbt and dashboards, and scanner hours are eating the pool. See impact analysis.
Governance owns CDGC and scans the ETL estate weekly, while the platform team needs daily warehouse lineage with freshness and schema alerts. Fewer scans, same coverage.
How to see your lineage before the next IPU renewal
On Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks or Postgres. Metadata and query history only. No agent to install and nothing written back.
Query history and dbt artifacts are parsed into table and column lineage. There is no connection assignment step and no placeholder to resolve.
Tableau, Looker and Power BI content is linked to the columns it reads, so the graph ends where people look at numbers.
Pick a column and see every model and dashboard downstream. Freshness and schema alerts carry the same list.
Even if you keep Informatica, a working warehouse graph tells you which sources really need a daily CDGC scan and which can drop to weekly, and that is the number that sets the size of the scanner line in your IPU forecast.
Informatica data lineage questions buyers ask
How much does Informatica data lineage cost?
Informatica data lineage is part of Cloud Data Governance and Catalog and is paid in Informatica Processing Units. The smallest public package is 120 IPU a month for $131,760 a year on AWS Marketplace, which works out to $91.50 per IPU. Scanning runs at 0.32 IPU per compute unit hour, so 200 hours of scans a month cost about $5,856 of that pool.
Is data lineage included in Informatica CDGC?
Yes. Technical lineage, inferred lineage, business lineage and imported lineage are all features of Cloud Data Governance and Catalog, with no separate lineage line. You pay for it through the meters it consumes: assets stored in the catalog, governance assets, metadata API calls and, above all, scanner compute hours. A lineage-heavy setup simply burns more IPUs.
What is an IPU in Informatica?
An IPU, or Informatica Processing Unit, is the prepaid credit that every Informatica Intelligent Data Management Cloud service draws from. You subscribe to a monthly IPU quantity, and each service converts its usage into IPUs at a published multiplier. On the AWS Marketplace listing read on 8 October 2026, 120 IPU a month costs $131,760 a year.
How are Informatica scanner costs calculated?
Each catalog scan is metered in compute unit hours and multiplied by 0.32 IPU when it runs on your own Secure Agent, or 0.56 IPU on Advanced Serverless, per the IPU rate card updated 4 August 2026. Profiling, classification and data quality options add work to a scan, so lineage-only scans on a fixed schedule are the main lever on cost.
Does Informatica support column-level lineage?
Yes. Informatica documents technical lineage at three levels: catalog source, data set (tables, files, views, mapping tasks) and data element (columns, fields, attributes). ETL scanners produce column-to-column flows from PowerCenter, Cloud Data Integration and databases, and BI scanners link columns to report fields in Tableau, Power BI and MicroStrategy.
What is the difference between Informatica EDC and CDGC lineage?
Enterprise Data Catalog and Metadata Manager are Informatica's older self-managed catalog and lineage products. Cloud Data Governance and Catalog is the cloud service inside Intelligent Data Management Cloud, sold on IPUs, and it is where Informatica now publishes its lineage material and rate card. Teams moving from EDC should price the move as scanner hours, not as a license line.
Does Informatica lineage work with Databricks Unity Catalog?
Yes. CDGC imports upstream and downstream lineage from Databricks Unity Catalog when the "Lineage from Unity" option is enabled on the scanner, and it can also ingest lineage from Apache Atlas and Microsoft Purview. Imported lineage reflects what the source catalog recorded, so it carries the same coverage and retention limits as Unity Catalog itself.
What is a cheaper alternative to Informatica for data lineage?
If the estate is a cloud warehouse with dbt and a BI tool and the goal is impact analysis, a lineage-first tool costs far less than an IPU pool. DataTrail reads Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks or Postgres with a read-only role for $2,148 a year on the Team plan. It does not replace Informatica for PowerCenter lineage, glossary or stewardship.
Where these numbers came from
The multipliers are the Data Governance and Catalog rows of "Informatica Processing Units, IPU Rate Card", marked "Updated as of August 4, 2026", read on 8 October 2026. The IPU price comes from Informatica's Intelligent Data Management Cloud listing on AWS Marketplace, read the same day: one bundle of 120 IPU a month at $131,760 for 12 months, $263,520 for 24 and $395,280 for 36. Dividing the 12-month price by 12 and by 120 gives $91.50. The longer terms are exactly two and three times the one-year price, so a multi-year commitment buys no discount at list.
The lineage types, prerequisites and the note that reference assets are billed come from Informatica's Tech Tuesdays deck "Data Lineage in CDGC, Part 1", dated 17 March 2026. The worked statement is ours: 300,000 catalog assets, 8,000 governance assets, 50,000 API calls, 200 scanner hours and 200 CLAIRE GPT queries a month. Scanner hours depend on the size of each source and the options enabled on the scan, so replace that line with your own consumption report before you budget. List prices are a starting point for negotiation, and a large account will pay less per IPU.
Related pages
The IPU package, term math and what the rest of IDMC costs.
The other governance suite, where lineage is an add-on per source type.
The enterprise lineage scanner priced per data source and per table.
Two catalogs, two pricing models, and where lineage costs extra.
The field of lineage products, from governance suites to warehouse-native tools.
How DataTrail builds column lineage from query history with a read-only role.
Get column-level lineage without metering every scan
Connect your warehouse with a read-only role and see what feeds what, down to the dashboard, with freshness and schema-change alerts included. Plans start at $59 a month billed yearly.