Purview and an open-source tool price on opposite principles. Purview meters work. TestGen open source charges nothing, and TestGen Enterprise charges by seat and connection. Which is cheaper depends on how much testing you do.
Purview’s rates
From Microsoft’s Purview billing page, updated April 2026, and the Azure retail price list for East US, effective November 1, 2026, both checked November 3, 2026:
| Meter | What it counts | Price (East US) |
|---|---|---|
| Data management, Basic | One DGPU, 60 minutes of managed compute | $15 |
| Data management, Standard | One DGPU | $60 |
| Data management, Advanced | One DGPU | $240 |
| Data Catalog governed asset | One table or view linked to a governance concept, per day | $0.0165 |
Basic is the default tier, and data quality on on-premises sources always uses it. Microsoft’s pricing page shows the same meters and points to the Azure pricing calculator for estimates.
What usage costs
Microsoft’s billing page gives the consumption examples: about 0.02 DGPU per rule per run for simple and medium rules on a one-million-row Azure SQL table, and 0.03 to 0.04 for complex rules on large tables. Its own worked example is 100 data quality jobs in a day at 0.02 each, or 2 DGPUs.
| Microsoft’s example, over 30 days | Basic | Standard |
|---|---|---|
| 2 DGPUs a day | $900 | $3,600 |
| Plus 1,000 governed assets | $495 | $495 |
| Monthly total | $1,395 | $4,095 |
That’s an illustration built from Microsoft’s numbers, not a quote. Add rules, runs, or rows and it grows. Data health controls and reports consume Basic DGPUs too.
At team scale, DataKitchen’s Purview comparison estimates $60,000 to $150,000 a year for 10 users and 1,000 tables.
What open source costs
DataOps TestGen open source is free under Apache 2.0 for one user, one connection, and one project, with unlimited tables. It covers every Microsoft source TestGen supports: SQL Server, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse, OneLake, and Azure Blob files.
| Microsoft Purview Data Quality | TestGen open source | TestGen Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price basis | Processing units plus governed assets | Free | $100 per user and $100 per connection per month |
| Per-rule or per-run charges | Yes | No | No |
| Tests | Defined or AI-suggested, one rule at a time | Generated from a 55-characteristic data profile | Same |
| On-prem SQL Server data profiling | No | Yes | Yes |
| 10 users, 1,000 tables, per year | $60,000 to $150,000 (our estimate) | One user only | $12,000 to $36,000 |
The trade-off isn’t only price. Purview catalogs, classifies, and governs across Microsoft’s estate; TestGen doesn’t. Many teams run both: Purview for governance and TestGen to generate and run the tests. DataKitchen’s Purview post counted 2,526 tests for 20 tables and 1,000 columns, two steps in TestGen.
Start at the Purview install page, or see what data quality software costs a small team.