DataWorks:DataWorks activation and purchase guide

Select a DataWorks edition

This license fee determines your access to advanced development, governance, and operations and maintenance (O&M) capabilities.

• Basic Edition: Provides core development and scheduling features, ideal for new users or individual developers getting started.

• Standard Edition/Professional Edition/Enterprise Edition: Offer more powerful standard features. You can upgrade to these advanced editions from the Basic Edition as needed.

• Value-added feature (Smart Data Modeling): As a standalone module, Data Modeling supports dimensional modeling. You can use it to plan and design your data warehouse, establish and manage corporate data standards, perform dimensional modeling, and define data metrics to build your data warehouse.

  For software-related fees, see Editions and billing and Smart Data Modeling billing.

  Edition	Recommended for	Recommended use cases	Key differences
  Basic Edition	Students, individual developers, and startups	Run POCs to quickly validate the feasibility of data projects Develop non-critical, small-scale data applications Get started with data development at a low cost	Provides cloud data ingestion, basic development and scheduling, and simple data governance capabilities for quick validation and lightweight use cases.
  Standard Edition	Small businesses, production operations teams, and business-team pilots	Build an enterprise data quality monitoring system Support core business data flows in a production environment Collaborate on and manage enterprise data	Adds enterprise data management features such as data lineage and tag management. Ensures business continuity through intelligent baseline alerts.
  Professional Edition	Small and midsize businesses, and business units with high SLA requirements	Meet data security and compliance requirements Manage complex business processes and multi-party collaboration Ensure high SLAs for data assets	Primarily provides enhanced data security features such as data masking and access control. Integrates business-oriented data management capabilities and improves developer access and collaboration.
  Enterprise Edition	Midsize and large enterprises, and corporate headquarters	Build an enterprise-grade data middle platform architecture Centralize resource management across multiple business lines Enable fine-grained cost and resource management	Delivers comprehensive, end-to-end data governance with built-in best practices across development, O&M, quality, security, and assets. Adds multi-account permission management through Cloud SSO, a full set of open APIs, message events, and an extension plug-in framework.

Select a resource group and billing model

A resource group covers the cost of computing resources consumed by tasks such as data development and Data Integration, and this cost is a core component of your operational costs. DataWorks recommends that you use serverless resource groups instead of legacy resource groups (exclusive resource groups and shared resource groups). Serverless resource groups support two billing models, and you can flexibly choose and switch between them based on the stability of your business workload.

• Pay-as-you-go serverless resource group: Billed based on the actual CU (compute unit) hours consumed. This model is highly elastic and suitable for scenarios with fluctuating workloads.

• Subscription serverless resource group: Requires you to purchase a fixed amount of CUs in advance at a lower unit price. This model is suitable for scenarios with stable and continuous computing requirements.

  For a detailed comparison of serverless resource group billing models, see Serverless resource group billing comparison.

Estimate and monitor additional fees

• Other fees: Cover advanced services such as intelligent monitoring and Data Quality. These services typically include a free tier, and usage beyond the free tier is billed on a pay-as-you-go basis.

• Compute engine and storage fees (billed separately): DataWorks is a big data development and scheduling platform that does not perform core computing or storage itself. When you submit an SQL task through DataWorks, the task is executed by the underlying compute engine (such as MaxCompute, Hologres, or E-MapReduce), and the generated data is stored in the corresponding service (such as MaxCompute or OSS).

  Billing references for common engines: MaxCompute billing, Hologres billing, E-MapReduce billing.

Scenario 1: Individual developer or new user

• Recommended configuration: Basic Edition software + pay-as-you-go serverless resource group.

  

• Why this is recommended:

  • Zero-barrier startup: The Basic Edition software is completely free, allowing you to learn and use all core development features of DataWorks at no cost.

  • Cost-effective: Pay-as-you-go resource groups incur no charges when not in use. Costs remain low during light testing and development, perfectly matching the needs of the learning and exploration phase.

Scenario 2: Small to medium-sized team with rapid business growth

• Recommended configuration: Standard Edition/Professional Edition software + pay-as-you-go serverless resource group (consider switching to subscription).

  

• Why this is recommended:

  • End-to-end development and governance capabilities: On top of the core development capabilities of the Basic Edition, the Standard Edition provides SLA assurance for critical tasks (baseline alerts) and column-level lineage tracing, enabling your data production to enter a standardized and reliable team collaboration phase. The Professional Edition builds on the reliable O&M capabilities of the Standard Edition by enabling automatic masking of sensitive data and proactive risk monitoring, helping you establish a systematic enterprise-level Data Security and governance framework.

  • Balancing elasticity and cost: During the business growth phase, task volumes may still fluctuate, making the pay-as-you-go resource group a safe starting choice. Once the runtime and resource consumption of core ETL tasks stabilize, you can switch to the subscription model to lock in lower long-term operating costs.

Scenario 3: Large enterprise or data platform construction

• Recommended configuration: Enterprise Edition software + Smart Data Modeling (value-added module) + hybrid resource groups (subscription as primary, pay-as-you-go as supplementary).

  

• Why this is recommended:

  • Building an enterprise-level system: The Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive Data Governance capabilities, advanced security controls, and Open Platform capabilities, serving as the foundation for building a standardized, secure, and scalable data platform. Combined with Smart Data Modeling, you can implement data standards and ensure the long-term value of your data assets.

  • Achieving optimal cost efficiency: For core ETL pipelines with stable workloads, subscription resource groups maximize cost savings. Meanwhile, retaining a pay-as-you-go resource group for ad hoc analysis queries or test tasks provides the best balance of performance, elasticity, and cost.

Prepare an account

Before activating DataWorks, prepare the required accounts as follows:

• We recommend that you use an Alibaba Cloud account (primary account) to activate DataWorks. After you activate DataWorks in a specific region, you do not need to repeat the operation. For preparations, see Register an Alibaba Cloud account.

• If you use a RAM user to activate DataWorks, you must attach the AliyunBSSOrderAccess and AliyunDataWorksFullAccess policies to the RAM user. These policies grant broad permissions, so grant them with caution. For more information, see Grant permissions to a RAM user.

• RAM users cannot independently activate the trial edition of DataWorks. DataWorks edition purchases and activation are managed by the Alibaba Cloud account (primary account). RAM users access DataWorks through authorization from the primary account and do not need to purchase an edition separately.

Select a region

DataWorks services and resource groups are activated at the region level. If you need to use the services in multiple regions, you must activate the services and resources in each region. When you select a region, consider the following:

• If your business data is stored in other Alibaba Cloud services, select the same region as those services.

• If your business is on-premises and requires public network access, select the region closest to your physical location to reduce access latency.

This topic uses the China (Shanghai) region as an example to describe how to activate DataWorks.

Purchase and activate

Log on to the DataWorks console, switch to the China (Shanghai) region, and check whether DataWorks is activated in this region.

For first-time activation, go to the DataWorks buy page to purchase a bundled package.