Soda makes you decide what to check. TestGen profiles every table and writes most of the tests itself. If your problem is coverage across hundreds of tables, that one difference decides it, and the rest of this page is detail.
We sell TestGen, so weigh this accordingly. This page gives DataKitchen’s argument and where it runs out. The scorecard after the argument scores 36 features 0 to 3. The feature matrices are on the Soda OSS and Soda Enterprise comparison pages. Soda facts below come from soda.io/pricing and docs.soda.io, checked October 22, 2026.
Why TestGen comes out ahead
Coverage is the job most teams fail at, and hand-written checks are why. Soda Core, Great Expectations, and dbt tests all help you write tests faster. You still write each one. DataKitchen’s argument for generating 80% of tests is that the data can write the routine ones, leaving people the business rules. TestGen does that from a profile of 55 column characteristics, then adds 19 configured test types for the rules only you know.
The open-source edition is a product, not a library. You get the UI, the scorecards, the catalog, the monitors, and the MCP server under Apache 2.0. Soda Core is Elastic License 2.0, and Soda’s MCP server is for Soda Cloud customers.
Everything runs on your infrastructure. Soda’s deployment options put the scan runner in your Kubernetes cluster or Soda’s, managed from Soda Cloud.
What shipped in October 2026
Two gaps our own comparison pages listed closed in TestGen 5.134.0 on October 14, 2026. A third, data contracts, is coming in November 2026.
Files. TestGen now profiles and tests CSV, Parquet, and JSON on a local path, Amazon S3, or Azure Blob Storage.
Alerts. Notifications now go to email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and any HTTPS webhook. Jira works through a Jira automation rule’s incoming webhook, which the alerts answer walks through.
Data contracts arrive in November 2026, with ODCS export. The receipt post explains how they will work. Soda’s contracts are older and come with AI drafting in preview.
Where Soda is better
Soda wins on enterprise plumbing. On its Enterprise plan it creates, updates, and removes users from Microsoft Entra ID with SCIM. TestGen Enterprise has single sign-on that creates a user at first sign-in and takes the admin role from your identity provider, so sign-in security is covered. What you give up is automation: an administrator assigns project roles and deletes departed users by hand. Soda Enterprise also has audit logs. TestGen gets audit logs in November 2026; until then it has none. Soda’s incidents give a failure an owner and a status; TestGen gives you issue reports.
Soda’s catalog connectors are prebuilt. TestGen reaches a catalog through its REST API, which means you write the glue. Soda also publishes orchestration guides for Airflow, Dagster, and Azure Data Factory. And Soda has an AI chat inside the product, which DataKitchen’s AI post calls useful inside its own walls. TestGen expects you to bring your own assistant over MCP.
Pick Soda if your security team requires SCIM and audit logs, if incidents route through ServiceNow, or if contracts with AI drafting are the whole program.
The price at six users
Six users on three databases pay (6 + 3) × $100 × 12 = $10,800 a year for TestGen Enterprise at list price, with unlimited tables. Soda Team is $750 a month, $9,000 a year, plus Soda Processing Units at a rate Soda doesn’t publish. Enterprise is a quote. Soda’s base is lower, though the Team plan has no SSO or role-based access. TestGen’s bill is the one you can predict. The cost answer prices other sizes, and the edition comparison shows what Enterprise adds. The core profiling, testing, and monitoring engine is free and open source. Enterprise adds team access, security, Commercial Pharma tests, source-data controls for AI, and support. If you’re also weighing Great Expectations, see TestGen or Great Expectations.
Install TestGen and point it at one schema. The first profiling run shows you whether the generated tests find anything.
How we built the scorecard
We built the first draft of the scorecard with Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, in a fresh session with no memory of our earlier work, so it started from the public pages rather than from what we believe about our own product. This was the prompt:
Build a competitive scorecard comparing the enterprise editions of Soda and DataKitchen TestGen, and publish it as a shareable web page.
RESEARCH
Read Soda's docs (docs.soda.io), its plan matrix (docs.soda.io/reference/documentation-access-and-licensing) and its live pricing page (soda.io/pricing). Confirm which column, Team or Enterprise, each feature is listed under on the pricing page.
Search the web for third-party Soda pricing (Toolworthy, Data Stack Index, Modern Data Tools, dataobservability.ai, G2). Record per-dataset rates, SPU details and dates, and flag any that conflict.
Read TestGen's docs (docs.datakitchen.io), including the test types page (cross-table and pharma tests) and the notifications page (which channels it supports), plus datakitchen.io/pricing.We then checked every row against Soda’s pricing page and both vendors’ docs on October 22, 2026, updated TestGen to release 5.134.0, and set the scores. The judgment calls are ours. We dropped the third-party per-dataset rates for Soda from the price comparison, because Soda doesn’t publish one and the listings disagree.
Documentation: Notifications, MCP supported tools, REST API, 14 October 2026 release notes, Access requirements.