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Soda
Data quality platform from Brussels built around checks as code, data contracts, metrics observability, and agents that suggest and apply fixes.
Data engineering teams that want checks and data contracts in their pipelines, with a free tier to start and a $750 Team plan.
Business-led teams that want a no-code catalog first, or buyers who need deep lineage across BI tools.
Verdict
Soda is a data quality platform founded in Brussels in 2018 by Maarten Masschelein and Tom Baeyens. Data engineers use it to write quality checks as code, agree data contracts between producers and consumers, and catch bad records in the pipeline before they reach a dashboard or a model. It stands out because it sits upstream, close to where data is produced, so problems get stopped at the source instead of explained after the fact.
Score Breakdown
How Soda scores in the categories that matter to its buyers.
Pricing
Soda publishes a free tier, a $750 per month Team plan, and custom Enterprise pricing. Extra Soda Processing Units are pay as you go.
| Plan | Price | What stands out |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | Free processing units; pipeline testing; alerting |
| Team | $750 / month | Unlimited users; catalog integrations; add-ons |
| Enterprise | Custom | Data contracts UI; RBAC; private deployment; SSO |
The Field at a Glance
How Soda compares with other AI data quality & observability vendors we reviewed, by Overall Score and relative typical engagement cost.
Soda scores 7.4 in AI data quality & observability, under Anomalo (7.6), and ahead of Bigeye (7.3) and Sifflet (7.3). Relative cost lands lower for this subcategory.
Use-case matrix
| Use case | Fit | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Checks as code | Strong | Core Soda motion. |
| Data contracts | Strong | Collaborative contracts on Enterprise. |
| Pipeline testing | Strong | Runs inside CI and orchestration. |
| Metrics anomaly detection | Mixed | Improving; Anomalo deeper. |
| Field-level lineage | Mixed | Lighter than Sifflet. |
| Compliance automation | Poor | Wrong subcategory. |
Who it’s for
Good fit
- Data engineering teams
- Teams writing data contracts
- Buyers who want a free start
Poor fit
- Business-led data teams
- Buyers who want lineage first
- Teams with no pipeline code
Review Excerpts
Below are excerpts from public reviews. Our team scoured public reviews, forums, and chat rooms to get a balanced view of customers' experience with this company. Paid reviews and pay-for-play sites such as Clutch were excluded.
“Soda has integrated seamlessly into our technology stack and given us the confidence to find, analyze, implement, and resolve data issues through a simple self-serve capability.”
“At the end of the day, we don’t want to be in there managing the checks, updating the checks, adding the checks. We just want to go and observe what’s happening, and that’s what Soda is enabling right now.”
“The free tier gets you going, but once we added more tables the processing units ran out fast and we were on the $750 a month Team plan sooner than we planned.”
Methodology
This page is an independent evaluation of Soda for buyers comparing options in ai data quality & observability. AI Industry Reviews accepts no sponsorships, advertising, or pay-for-placement fees. Soda did not pay for this review.
What we scored
The headline number is an Overall Score on a 0-10 scale. Eight criteria sit under it in two groups.
- Buyer outcomes (for ai data quality & observability)
- Checks & data contracts
- Pipeline testing
- Metrics observability
- No-code business use
- Company & commercial
- Innovation & product leadership
- Project management & communication
- Pricing
- Contract fairness
Pricing measures whether the price looks fair for the value delivered, including packaging and renewal friction that show up in real buying cycles.
Score Composition
| Input | Weight | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Reviews | 40% | A proprietary read of what practitioners say about likes, complaints, and day-to-day use, including public review sites, forums, and private chat rooms. Paid reviews and pay-for-play sites such as Clutch are out of scope. |
| Product | 35% | Hands-on look at screens and workflows. |
| Pricing | 15% | Whether the price looks fair for what you get. |
| Docs & training | 10% | Docs, tutorials, and training material. |
How we balanced the evidence
The Overall Score is the simple average of the eight criteria. Recommendation language follows that score and the fit pattern described above.
Scope
Soda is graded here as ai data quality & observability. Criteria scores can move as more review volume and product checks are added.