5 Alternatives, Features & Pricing in 2025

BigID is a DSPM vendor with data detection and response (DDR), data loss prevention (DLP), and file access intelligence (FAI) capabilities. User reviews show that BigID offers highly customizable data classifiers, however, it is inefficient in providing accurate data insights. See the top 5 BigID alternatives with an overview of BigID’s capabilities:

BigID & its top 5 alternatives

Features

See feature descriptions.

DSPM vendors allow enterprises to visualize and investigate their data assets to discover. Each provider has distinct capabilities, here is an  evaluation of the leading top 5 BigID alternatives:

• Sentra is a DSPM tool that provides support for a large number of cloud services (e.g. Amazon AWS, EC2), and containers and virtual machines. The solution leverages BERT ML architecture to classify data and unstructured documents and enables you to use custom classifiers and sensitivity labels.

• Varonis Data Security is a data-centric security platform that offers extensive SaaS, and on-premises coverage. Its integration options with several platforms, including network-attached storage (NAS) devices such as Hitachi and Dell Isilon, make it suitable for companies with diverse file-sharing systems.

• Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks is a DSPM vendor with vulnerability management, compliance, and threat detection capabilities. It provides extensive identity and access management (IAM) security integrations and uses over 100 pre-built classifiers. Note that, Palo Alto Networks recently acquired Dig Security and integrated it into Prisma Cloud.

• Securiti is a DSPM solution that specializes in data privacy management. It provides a “data privacy graph”, which helps security teams track and manage data access and compliance requirements. Additionally, its data security capabilities enable users to identify shadow and cloud-native data assets across 200+ platforms.

• OneTrust Data Discovery & Classification is a DSPM tool that focuses on discovering and classifying structured data across PDFs, and ZIP files. It is useful software for privacy governance and data mapping. The solution can scan over 200 distinct data sources, including cloud and on-premises, however, it cannot identify user account-level access. 

For more details read our article on the top 10 DSPM vendors.

BigID overview

Source: BigID

BigID is a data privacy and protection platform that specializes in data discovery, classification, and governance. It assists enterprises in identifying and managing sensitive data by leveraging data intelligence.

Key features:

• Shadow data analysis: Identifies data captured but remains untouched after data collection. Executes shadow data analysis across 60+ connected services (e.g., SMB, NFS, Box, Google Drive, Snowflake, and Outlook).
• Cluster analysis: Uses machine learning to cluster data based on types (e.g. invoice data).
• Access intelligence: Uses an access intelligence dashboard to show overexposed and over-permissioned data.
• Automated labeling and remediation: Uses automated labeling, policy enforcement, and encryption, to remedy sensitive and personal data risks.

Why we like it:

• Extensive API access: BigID’s API capabilities allow seamless integration with existing enterprise systems. This enables high customization across diverse IT ecosystems. For example, by integrating with IAM systems such as Okta or Active Directory, BigID can effectively automate access control reviews at scale.

• Strong on-prem capabilities: BigID is better suited for on-premises environments. It requires improved support for cloud environments and more integration options with cloud-native platforms.

• Broad compliance focus: Supports several regulatory frameworks NIST, GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, CDMC, BCBS 239, DCAM, CMMC, and CIS Control 3.

What needs improvement:

• Scanning process and false positives: BigID’s scanning process is slow. Users could manually catalog data faster than waiting for BigID to finish. Additionally, BigID creates noise with a high number of false positives. 
• Data visibility and accuracy: The solution has limited visibility of all the data across large environments,  especially for unstructured data repositories. Thus, BigID is inefficient in locating all instances, which can lead to incomplete data retrieval, resulting in inaccurate data insights.

Product offerings

1. Data security platform

BigID’s data security platform (DSP) classifies and stores your data based on sensitivity, type, policy, and context. This helps identify vulnerabilities and decrease your attack surface. 

Source: BigID

2. Data security posture management 

With BigID’s DSPM  solution, you can search, store, and classify your data from anywhere using agentless data discovery and NLP customization that can automatically detect shadow data across on-premises and cloud infrastructure.

BigID can discover structured and unstructured data across IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, mainframes, dev tools, code repos, and apps.

Moreover, with BigID you can automatically trigger a Jira or ServiceNow ticket and assign a data owner to that ticket. Alternatively, you can integrate BigID with SOAR systems to create and implement security playbooks that automate and coordinate diverse data security duties and responses across several technologies and teams.

Source: BigID

3. Data privacy management

BigID also offers a privacy management suite to manage data privacy compliance. This suite enables users to handle data rights requests and manage data lifecycles, including both structured and unstructured data.

Source: BigID

4. Data detection and response

BigID’s DDR capabilities can identify data-related anomalies, including:

• Data accessed from an unusual geographic region or IP address.
• Logging systems deactivated containing sensitive data.
• Sensitive information downloaded or updated.
• An external party downloaded sensitive data.
• An anonymous individual accessed sensitive data for the first time.

Additionally, BigID’s DDR capabilities can scan several platforms, including:

• Cloud service providers (such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Good Cloud Platform) 
• SaaS applications (such as Microsoft 365)
• Data warehouses (such as Snowflake)

This eliminates the blind spots reported by threat detection solutions.

Source: BigID

Coverage: BigID supports interactions across several environments (SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, data centers & on-prem, dev tools) and data types. Some of the key integrations are listed below:

• Cloud SaaS: Box, Confluence, DocuSign, Dropbox, Hugging Face, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle ERP. Salesforce, SAS, ServiceNow, Tableau, Workday, Zendesk and more.
• Cloud IaaS: Amazon (AWS) S3, Amazon SageMakerM Azure Data Lake, Microsoft Azure Blob Storage, Azure File Store, Kafka, OpenAI, Snowflake and more.

Pricing

Pricing for BigID can vary widely but often ranges from $15,000 – $175,000 annually for enterprise-grade tools. Note that pricing is determined by contract duration. Buyers may pay upfront or in installments, depending on the terms of your contract with the vendor.

BigID’s pricing is based on several parameters, including the number of data sources, apps, and connectors, deployment method, and level of service and support. It has numerous pricing options, such as:

• Zero trust bundle (data access intelligence, remediation features)
• Insider threat bundle (data access intelligence + remediation + retention features )
• Data minimization bundle (data remediation, deletion features)
• DSPM bundle (data risk assessment, remediation, access intelligence features)

User reviews

User reviews highlight that BigID offers strong automated controls and customizable connectors for data integration, however, it has limitations such as a non-intuitive UI, classification inaccuracies, and usability issues. See key highlights from BigID’s pros and cons:

Pros

Source: Gartner

Data classifiers and connectors: Data classifiers are highly customizable, which helps maintain strong API integrations with several systems.

Source: Gartner

Automated cloud controls: The cloud environment controls are automated, which helps reduce human errors.

Cons

Source: Gartner

UI and pathing maturity: The user interface for reviewing metadata within the application is clunky. The process for on-premises bug patching is not mature.

Source: Gartner

Usability issues: The catalog is difficult to navigate and does not allow for column searches; instead, it simply returns tables/views/files. The export functionality is buggy; attempting to export data sources with more than 1 million objects is difficult.

Classification accuracy: Data classification algorithms provide low accuracy. This causes high rates of false positives and creates noise.

What is data security posture management (DSPM)?

Gartner defines DSPM as a set of technologies that assist organizations in discovering, monitoring, and protecting their data across several CSPs, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, as well as apps and platforms such as SaaS and IaaS.

Feature descriptions

Vendors with:

• Automated remediation: Provide real-time responses to DSPM issues, these vendors can:
  • Remove unnecessary permissions
  • Remedy misconfigurations
  • Apply DLP policies
• Security playbook orchestration: Integrate tools to orchestrate data security playbooks, reduce manual tasks, and streamline threat detection, investigation, and remediation processes.
• High number of data classifiers: Categorize, and apply more detailed controls to sensitive data.

Further reading

External Links