dScribe vs Collibra

Why dScribe (and Why It’s Different from Collibra)

Data governance has long been dominated by a handful of US-headquartered platforms — Collibra, Alation, Informatica, IBM. The Belgian governance market produced one of those (Collibra) in 2008, but along the way the company repositioned its global headquarters to New York and now operates as a US-incorporated entity selling to Fortune 500 procurement.

dScribe Cloud is the newer, lighter-weight Belgian governance platform that stayed Belgian. Founded in 2021 in Ghent by Pieter Delaere and team, it solves the same conceptual problem — business glossary, lineage, in-report documentation, semantic layer for AI use cases — but is structurally European: Belgian corporate base, EU data residency, ISO 27001 certified, designed around the modern BI + AI stack (Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, SAP).

For European organisations adopting data governance, the question is no longer “is governance a category we need” — that battle is settled by GDPR, AI Act, NIS2, and DORA. The question is: do we want our governance metadata — the map of our most sensitive data — sitting under a US-incorporated parent company?

Jurisdiction Comparison

	dScribe Cloud	Collibra
HQ	Ghent, Belgium	New York, USA (with Brussels office)
Corporate entity	Belgian company	US-incorporated (Delaware-style) parent
CLOUD Act exposure	None (no US parent)	Yes (US-headquartered parent)
GDPR posture	Native	Compliant via DPA + SCCs
Regulatory baseline	EU-native (GDPR, DGA, Data Act, AI Act)	Retrofitted on US base
Data centres	EU	Configurable, but parent jurisdiction is US
Certifications	ISO 27001	ISO 27001, SOC 2, etc.

The CLOUD Act is the key structural difference. A US-incorporated company can be compelled by US authorities to disclose data it holds anywhere in the world, including on EU servers. A Belgian company with no US parent cannot. For data governance metadata — which is functionally a map of your organisation’s most sensitive datasets — this is operationally material.

Product Capabilities

dScribe Data — Governance + Documentation + Semantic Layer

• Business glossary: shared definitions across the organisation
• Data lineage: visual lineage across the BI stack (Power BI, Databricks, SAP, etc.)
• In-report context: definitions surface inside Power BI / Fabric reports where users consume data
• Semantic layer: governed definitions exposed as a layer that AI applications (RAG, LLM agents) can query for trusted answers
• Dictionary: technical metadata catalog
• Stewardship workflows: ownership, approvals, certification

dScribe Guide — Digital Adoption

• In-app walkthroughs: how-to guides embedded inside the actual tools (BI, CRM, ERP)
• Faster onboarding: captures process knowledge at the point of work
• Reduces support load: users find answers without raising tickets

Integration Ecosystem

• BI: Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, Tableau, Qlik
• Cloud platforms: Databricks, Snowflake, Azure, AWS
• ERP: SAP, Microsoft Dynamics
• AI / RAG: semantic layer designed to be queried by LLM applications
• Identity: SAML / SSO with major IdPs
• API: REST API for custom integration

Who Should Switch?

dScribe is ideal for:

• European enterprises and mid-market adopting data governance and wanting a Belgian/EU-jurisdiction platform
• Power BI- and Fabric-centric organisations wanting native integration with the Microsoft data stack
• Databricks- and Snowflake-based stacks looking for a governance + semantic layer
• AI-first organisations building RAG pipelines that need a governed semantic layer instead of raw schema
• Compliance-conscious procurement (financial services, healthcare, public sector) wanting EU parent and EU data residency
• DORA, AI Act, NIS2, GDPR programmes wanting the governance platform itself to be European

The Bottom Line

Collibra is the established global leader in data governance and remains the right choice for organisations whose procurement processes specifically require a Magic Quadrant Leader, or whose use case (large pharma, US federal, the most data-intensive Fortune 500 enterprises) genuinely needs the heaviest enterprise tier of governance tooling.

For European organisations standardising on the modern data stack — Power BI / Fabric / Databricks / Snowflake — and wanting their governance metadata to sit under a Belgian/EU parent rather than a US-incorporated company, dScribe is the structurally aligned choice. Belgian corporate base, EU data residency, ISO 27001, native modern-stack integrations, and a semantic layer designed for the AI applications you’re already building.

For sovereignty-conscious data and BI teams, dScribe is what Collibra would have looked like if it had stayed Belgian.

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Looking for more European data governance and compliance alternatives? See also: DataGrail EU vs TrustArc, Avokaado vs LegalZoom, and Skribble vs HelloSign.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where is dScribe based?

dScribe Cloud is headquartered in Ghent (Gent), Belgium. The company was founded in 2021 and operates from a Belgian corporate base — meaning the company itself, its data, and its commercial agreements sit under Belgian and EU law. For a data governance platform — which by definition stores metadata about your organisation's most sensitive data inventory — EU jurisdiction at the platform layer matters more than for most categories of SaaS.

Isn't Collibra also Belgian?

Collibra was founded in Brussels in 2008 and still maintains a Brussels office. However, the company globally repositioned its corporate base: it is now headquartered in New York, operates as a US-incorporated entity, and is on a US capital-markets trajectory. For CLOUD Act and FISA analysis, what matters is the parent legal entity — not where the original team coded the product. A US-headquartered Collibra entity is structurally exposed to US extraterritorial data-disclosure law, even when the data sits on EU servers. dScribe Cloud has no US parent — the whole stack is Belgian.

What does dScribe actually do?

Two integrated products. dScribe Data is a data governance and documentation platform: business glossary, lineage, data dictionary, BI report context, plus a semantic layer that downstream AI applications can query for trusted, governed definitions. dScribe Guide is an in-product walkthrough and digital adoption tool — captures how-to guides directly inside the apps your users work in. Together they cover the data side (what data means, where it came from, who owns it) and the people side (how do users actually use this data correctly).

What does dScribe integrate with?

Strong native coverage of the Microsoft-stack and modern data stack: Power BI, Microsoft Fabric, SAP, Snowflake, Databricks, plus generic SQL connectors. The semantic layer is designed so AI applications (RAG pipelines, LLM agents) can query trusted definitions rather than re-deriving them from raw schema. For European organisations standardising on Microsoft Fabric or Databricks with BI on top, dScribe is purpose-built for that footprint.

Is dScribe certified?

Yes — dScribe Cloud is ISO 27001 certified. Trust portal at trust.dscribe.cloud documents the security posture. As a Belgian-headquartered company, dScribe operates under GDPR, the EU Data Governance Act, and the upcoming Data Act and AI Act — meaning the regulatory baseline is European-native rather than retrofitted onto a US legal-corporate base.

Is the data stored in the EU?

Yes. dScribe Cloud hosts customer governance metadata in EU data centres. The corporate entity is Belgian, the data is Belgian/EU-hosted, and the contracts are governed by Belgian and EU law. For data-governance metadata — which is a map of your most sensitive data assets, definitions, lineage, and access patterns — EU-only jurisdiction at the platform layer materially reduces extraterritorial exposure.