Alteryx Designer

1. Variety in built processes which helps to transform raw data into more readable formats.
2. Best option for the visual analysts as it provides in depth analysis.
3. Having very easy installation process
4. Powerful analytics product available in market which takes the raw input files and allows analysts to apply multiple processes on it which helps the analysts to prepare valuable information from raw data.

1. Cost of this application is too high as compared to the other alternative projects.
2. Integration with other tools sometimes a big challenge.
3. Dashboard needs an improvement as compared to other products.
4. Consumes more memory and CPU
5. Enhancement required in order to smoothen the integration of python.

Probably Alteryx's best selling point is accessibility. I personally learnt how to use Alteryx quite comprehensively in a matter of days without any training resources whatsoever. The intuitive UI makes it easy to construct even incredibly complex ETL processes.

Alteryx's feature-set is also extremely powerful. It is really greater than the sum of its parts. With the wide range of modules it provides as well as the ability to construct many types of macros yourself, Alteryx allows you to do things with the product that may not have even been intended by the developers.

The community is well fleshed out and there are a number of macros out there (shout-out to the CReW macros) that pick up the slack where some native functionality is missing (eg. triggering workflows from other workflows). However, some of this reliance on external macros/connectors can be problematic for software updates when some can be broken.

We'd love to have our team all using Alteryx, but the heavy price-tag limits us to only justifying the purchase of a couple licenses at a time. There are a number of features that are attractive to us about Alteryx Server too, but the jump in price to that product is too high to justify.

Things can get awkward when it comes to automating workflows. In order to trigger workflows on demand outside of the designer, you are required to pay even more for a Desktop Scheduling license. That license only grants you access to the engine via the command line, which can be awkward in some scenarios (eg. if the workflow accesses network shares that require domain access, a user with sufficient rights must be the one to run the engine via command line).

While Alteryx can provide significant throughput of data, there does seem to be some issues when capturing large SQL datasets sometimes. I and others in the community have witnessed significant performance degradation when not using the "TOP" SQL clause in SQL statements. It's an odd issue, but it is one that slowed down our organisation's ETL processes significantly (some large workflows ran for 24 hours) in the past before identifying the "TOP" clause workaround.

Alteryx is an incredible powerful analytics tool that allows users to input source data, manipulate, clean and transpose that data, then output into a Datawarehouse or other database. Despite the complexity of this product it has a great user interface and this makes it easier to learn and you are able to get up and running in a very short amount of time.

Still lacks some basic functionality, like an in-built tool for creating SQL views or a tool that can run multiple workflows in sequence (like Crew macro).

Data ingestion: Alteryx is capable of connecting with a multitude of data sources from SQL databases to cloud-hosted solutions like Salesforce, Tableau, or Google Analytics. Also supports OleDB & ODBC connections.

Dynamic data munging: Alteryx has a great variety of processing tools to clean and prep data including: dedupe, formulas, joins, union, sort... Performing these functions really quickly on even moderately equipped laptops or desktops. It's dynamic in that it can easily handle changes in data by allowing extra columns to flow through.

Macros: have a process that you are consistently running in separate workflows? Build a MACRO, be it a batch or iterative, Alteryx can do it. I've built 40-50 macros and use at least 4+ in every workflow I design so data is handled the same way in every workflow for consistency and cutting down on copy/pastes.

I've had issues with the scheduler tool getting frozen or stuck in previous versions. For about the last 2-3 months the latest software version has been much more reliable. Previously I had to restart the Alteryx service on my machine at least once a week, which meant my workflows weren't running while the service had been stuck and data wasn't moving.

Some of the connectors, like the Tableau Online connector, should become supported by Alteryx. The online community is fantastic and has created a ton of useful macros and it would be great if Alteryx would adopt, support, and enhance some of the most widely used and useful.

I love how simple it is to cleanse data in Alteryx. You can build linear workflows using their myriad of icons. I love how each icon has a built-in tutorial example that will show you how to use the function. I also really love how you someone with limited SQL knowledge (my colleagues) could use Alteryx to import and refine data to get the exact results they desire. It really is a very intuitive software--well-documented. Oh, and their support is FANTASTIC! I received an email offer to work with an expert from the company and was immediately paired up with a few company trainers who offered their own customized expertise for the specific problems I was working to try to solve. The online portal is excellent as well; there's a whole community ready and willing to assist and help you get better at using Alteryx. Very impressive software.

The parts I found most difficult to use were the neural networking/forecasting & macro/automation widgets & tools. The forecasting/neural networking wasn't very straightforward and seemed to really be more of an art than a science. I would have expected there to be more tutorials on how to effectively use these tools, but I think you would need to have a degree in these arts to really master them. We are probably still too early into this new science. The macro & automation functions really blew my mind and I never learned how to use them--for example, to loop through processes. I would have liked to, but I just didn't have the patience to figure it out on my own and it wasn't high enough of a priority.