DataWorks:DataWorks activation and purchase guide

Select a DataWorks edition

The edition license fee determines your access to advanced development, governance, and 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 DataWorks edition selection and billing and Smart Data Modeling billing.

  Edition	Recommended for	Recommended use cases	Key differences
  Basic Edition	Students, individual developers, and startup teams	POC: Quickly validate the feasibility of data projects. Develop non-critical, small-scale data applications. Get started with data development practices at a low cost.	Offers capabilities for data cloud migration, basic development and scheduling, and simple data governance for quick validation and lightweight use cases.
  Standard Edition	Small businesses, production O&M teams, and pilot teams in business departments	Build an enterprise data quality monitoring system. Support core business data flows in a production environment. Enable enterprise data collaboration and management.	Enhances enterprise data management capabilities, such as lineage analysis and tag management. It ensures business continuity and stability with intelligent baseline alerts.
  Professional Edition	Small to medium-sized enterprises and business departments with high SLA requirements	Meet data security and compliance requirements. Manage complex business processes and multi-party collaboration. Ensure high SLA for data assets.	Provides enhanced data security capabilities, including data masking and access control. It integrates business-oriented data management capabilities and enhances development-side access and collaboration.
  Enterprise Edition (recommended)	Medium to large enterprises and corporate headquarters	Build an enterprise-level data platform architecture. Achieve unified resource management across multiple business lines. Enable fine-grained cost and resource management.	Provides comprehensive, systematic, and built-in best-practice full-lifecycle data governance capabilities covering development, operations, quality, security, and assets. Supports CloudSSO multi-account permission management, enterprise-oriented open and customization capabilities, and full Open API, message event, and Extensions mechanisms.

Select a resource group and billing model

Resource groups cover the computing resources consumed by data development, Data Integration, and scheduling tasks, making them a core component of your operational costs. We recommend serverless resource groups over legacy resource groups (exclusive and shared). Serverless resource groups support two billing models that you can switch between based on workload stability.

• Pay-as-you-go serverless resource group: Billed by actual CU (compute unit) hours consumed. Highly elastic and suitable for fluctuating workloads.

• Subscription serverless resource group: Purchase a fixed amount of CUs in advance at a lower unit price. Suitable for stable, 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 it 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 computing or storage itself. When you submit an SQL task through DataWorks, it is executed by the underlying compute engine (such as MaxCompute, Hologres, or E-MapReduce), and 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 is free, so you can learn and use all core DataWorks development features at no cost.

  • Cost-effective: Pay-as-you-go resource groups incur no charges when idle, keeping costs low during light testing and development.

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: Beyond the Basic Edition's core development features, the Standard Edition provides SLA assurance for critical tasks (baseline alerts) and column-level lineage tracing, enabling standardized and reliable team collaboration. The Professional Edition adds automatic masking of sensitive data and proactive risk monitoring, helping you build an enterprise-level Data Security and governance framework.

  • Balancing elasticity and cost: During business growth, task volumes may fluctuate, making pay-as-you-go resource groups a safe starting choice. Once your core ETL tasks stabilize in runtime and resource consumption, switch to subscription to lock in lower long-term 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, advanced security controls, and Open Platform capabilities as the foundation for a standardized, secure, and scalable data platform. Combined with Smart Data Modeling, you can enforce 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. Retaining a pay-as-you-go resource group for ad hoc 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. To use them in multiple regions, activate them in each region separately. When selecting 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.

The following example uses the China (Shanghai) region 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.