With most industries relying on data, especially data intensive fields like banking, insurance, retail, telecoms and others, managing it error-free becomes important. Data scrubbing or data cleansing thus becomes important in editing or removing data in a database that may be incorrect, incomplete, poorly formatted or duplicated. Going through zillions of data manually is a daunting task and may be error prone, making data cleaning tools more prominent than even in analytics driven organisations, that systematically examines data for flaws using rules, algorithms and look-up tables.
Here is a list of 10 best data cleaning tools that helps in keeping the data clean and consistent to let you analyse data to make informed decision visually and statistically. Few of these tools are free, while others may be priced with free trial available on their website.
Best Data Cleaning Tools in 2024
1. OpenRefine
OpenRefine, formerly known as Google Refine, this powerful tool comes handy for dealing with messy data, cleaning and transforming it. It’s a good solution for those looking for free and open source data cleansing tools and software programs. It can also transform data from one format to another, letting you explore big data sets with ease, reconcile and match data, clean and transform at a faster pace.
2. Trifacta Wrangler
A venture started by the makers of Data Wrangler, Trifacta Wrangler is an interactive tool for data cleaning and transformation. One of the best features of this tool includes less formatting time and larger focus on analysing data. It helps data analysts in cleaning and preparing messy, diverse data more quickly and accurately. Its machine learning algorithms help in preparing data by suggesting common transformations and aggregations. This also comes free.
3. Drake
Drake is simple to use, extensible, text based data workflow has data processing steps defined along with their inputs and output, where it can automatically resolve their dependencies and calculate the command to execute and the order that it should be executed. It is designed especially for data workflow management and organises command execution around data and its dependencies.
4. TIBCO Clarity
TIBCO Clarity data cleaning tool offers on demand software services from the web in the form of Software-as-a-service. It lets users to validate the data, in deduplication and cleansing addresses to help identify trends quickly and make smarter decisions. It can standardise raw data collected from disparate sources to provide good quality data for accurate analysis.
5. Winpure
Winpure is one of the most popular and affordable data cleaning tools accomplishing the task of cleaning a large amount of data, removing duplicates, correcting and standardising effortlessly. It can clean data from databases, spreadsheets, CRMs and more, and can be used for databases like Access, Dbase, SQL Server, and Txt files. Some of its key features include advanced data cleansing and fuzzy matching, super fast data scrubbing, multi language edition available, among others.
6. Data Ladder
Data Ladder offers products DataMatch, an affordable cleaning & data quality tool and DataMatch Enterprise, that includes advanced fuzzy matching algorithms for up to 100 million records, and has one of the highest matching accuracies and speed in the industry. These user friendly tools help businesses from any size and any industry to manage their data cleansing processes with ease.
7. Data Cleaner
Quadient Data Cleaner is a strong data profiling engine for analysing the quality of data to drive better business decisions. The tool can find missing values, patterns, character sets and other characteristics in a data set to offer better results. A strong profiling engine, it can detect duplicates using fuzzy logic and create single version of it. It also lets you build your own cleansing rules and compose them into several scenarios to target databases.
8. Cloudingo
Cloudingo salesforce data cleansing tool eliminates duplicates, cleans records, and maintains data quality all in one place. It is suitable for business of all sizes, where the data is updated in bulk, and imported files are cleansed before accessing Salesforce. Its automation capabilities ensure that data is regularly scanned for errors. Some of its features are its simplicity, deleting unnecessary and stale records, update records in bulk, automate on a schedule, among others.
9. Reifier
With features like high accuracy, fast deployment, run time performance and others, Reifier by Nube Technologies utilises Spark for distributed entity resolution, deduplication and record linkage. It uses machine learning algorithms to provide the best entity resolution and fuzzy data matching with a scale out distributed architecture.
10. IBM Infosphere Quality Stage
Designed to support data quality, it is one of the most popular data cleansing tools and software solutions for supporting full data quality. Infosphere Quality Stage allows cleansing and managing database with much ease, and build consistent views of your most important units such as customers, vendors, products, locations etc. It helps in delivering quality data for big data, business intelligence, data warehousing, master data management etc.
