Altova is a commercial software development company with headquarters in Beverly, MA, USA and Vienna, Austria that produces integrated XML, UML, and data management software development tools. Their flagship product is XMLSpy although they have recently broadened their product line to include data integration, UML, and Web services development tools and removed their free XMLSpy Home Edition (their Authentic product is still available under a free license, and all other products are available for a free, 30-day trial).

Altova's products include:

XMLSpy - XML editor for modeling, editing, transforming, and debugging XML technologies

MapForce - graphical data mapping and Web services implementation tool

MapForce FlexText - graphical utility for parsing flat files

StyleVision - visual stylesheet design tool

SemanticWorks - visual RDF and OWL editor

SchemaAgent - graphical schema management tool

Authentic - free XML / database content editor for non-technical users

UModel - UML modeling tool

DatabaseSpy - multi-database data management, query, and design tool

DiffDog - XML file and directory differencing tool

Pros of Altova products

Altova's products have a reputation of being highly graphical and responsive, allowing non-technical staff to use these tools

Altova XML tools are standards-conformant with established standards released by the W3C such as XML, DTD, XML Schema, XSLT 1.0/2.0, XPath 1.0/2.0, WSDL, SOAP, XQuery, XHTML, RDF, OWL.

Recent versions allow non-programmers (PMs, BAs) to graphically build Web services.

Altova product generate code in multiple formats (XSLT, XQuery, Java, C++, and C#) that run on many different operating systems.

Altova offers free, instructor-led online training on its tools and supported technologies, as well as extensive documentation and online help.

Cons of Altova products

The product line has become complex consisting of 9 different products. Organizations must carefully understand the costs and benefits of each Altova product and the role each team member will play in a project.

Users often complain that some products are not fully compliant with the W3C specifications. For example a schema that is valid according to XML Spy is sometimes not valid when used with a more conformant tool.