Spoiler
I finally snapped after opening a shared drive and seeing this:
Monthly_Revenue_FINAL_fixed_USE_THIS.yxmd
If you’ve been building Alteryx workflows for more than a week, you know exactly what I'm talking about. We all rely on "shadow versioning"—hoarding a dozen copies of the same file because we are terrified of breaking something that works.
And it leads to absolute nightmares:
The Overwrite: A colleague accidentally saves over the production file, and the previous version is just gone.
The Silent Failure: A formula gets changed. Nobody notices. Three months later, you realize you've been reporting corrupted data, and you have zero paper trail to prove when or why it happened.
The Auditor’s Trap: Compliance asks, "Show me the exact difference between the January workflow and today's." And your only option is to manually squint at raw XML.
I got tired of playing Russian Roulette with my workflows.
So I built a fix: Alteryx Git Companion. ---
What it actually is
It’s a lightweight Windows app that lives quietly in your system tray. You point it at any folder containing your .yxmd or .yxwz files, and it gives you real version control—without forcing you to use the command line.
How it saves you
1. Version History for Humans It watches your folders for changes and lets you save named versions with plain-English descriptions. Want to experiment with a new data source? Create a branch. If it breaks, you can roll back to the exact last working state in under 30 seconds (git reset --soft HEAD~1 happens behind the scenes with a single click).
2. Visual Diffs (No XML Required) This is the magic. When you click on any past version, it generates a proper, interactive report:
3. Bulletproof Compliance If you are under GxP, SOX, or 21 CFR Part 11, audits are no longer a headache. Every diff report includes SHA-256 hashes, generation timestamps, and absolute file paths. It exports as a single, self-contained, offline HTML file you can hand straight to an auditor. Case closed.
(Bonus for the engineers: It connects directly to GitHub/GitLab for PRs and peer review, and the diff engine is a standalone Python CLI you can drop into your CI/CD pipelines).
It's time to stop naming files _v3_FINAL_ACTUALLY_FINAL.
If you're an Alteryx analyst tired of losing your work, or a data leader tired of compliance panic—let's fix how your team builds.
Let me know if there are any suggestions. I would love to hear current pain points and if you would like to use it.
Please find screen shots of the app and GitHub CI in action
