Tool Comparison - what is the advantage of Alteryx? Worth the price tag?

[vball]

Our office is trying to decide whether to keep investing in Alteryx. We currently have tried Alteryx, IDEA, PowerBI and in my previous job, I tried Arbutus, which is similar to ACL. 

Our needs are basic data analysis and visualization such as top spender, duplicate transactions, transactions of certain characteristics, key-word search. (i.e. no machine learning, no predictive analysis).

Our experiments of tools find that Alteryx seems to require a lot of steps and logics to achieve basic analysis goals and do not seem to be as user-friendly compared to IDEA or Arbutus/ACL. It does not have strong visualization capability compared to PowerBI. Yet it is way more expensive than other tools. The only benefit of Alteryx is that it is more visually appealing in terms of documenting workflow but I wonder if it's worth paying $4500 more and spending longer human time on basic analysis goals just for this benefit.

Maybe I am missing something? Maybe I don't truly understand the advantage and beauty of Alteryx? Can anyone share their thoughts on this? Why do you choose Alteryx over other tools? Or do you think Alteryx is not worth it unless predictive analysis and machine learning are desired?

(Optional Details)

This is the details of what we found.

Visualization and data exploration: PowerBI and even Excel are better than Alteryx. In both PowerBI and Excel, it's easier to make a quick filter on data to check something and it's easier to make a bar chart compared to Alteryx where you have to run the workflow every time you want to check anything.

Duplicates: IDEA is better than Alteryx. IDEA has dedicated function that allows you to identify duplicates based on keys and even allows you to identify duplicates that share certain characteristics but also are different in one key field (e.g. transactions of same amount, date, but of different vendors). In Alteryx, in order to find duplicates, I need several steps to summarize and join back original data. In order to find duplicates that are of same amount/date but different vendor, Alteryx requires 3-4 more steps and involves writing formulas and arranging data in certain ways, very complicated.

Others pointed out in the past too that in IDEA and ACL you can do all kinds of fuzzy match and there are dedicated functions for that. In Alteryx, I have never tried but I bet it involves a complicated formula.

Transactions of certain characteristics: Fair game of any tool. Every tool can achieve this easily. 

Key-word search: Didn't find any dedicated tool of Alteryx that enables key word search of multiple key words. Alteryx probably requires a long formula or a join of keyword table with additional formula to achieve this. Arbutus has a dedicated function for it that can be done in one step.

Other areas such as supported data source, data type, output file type, are fair game of any tool. Nothing special of Alteryx.

Data download from database: Alteryx is quicker than PowerBI, but similar speed as dedicated database SQL editor.

Interface and documentation of workflow: Alteryx is better than other tools in terms of showing the workflow visually. I don't think PowerBI documents workflow very well. Arbutus documents workflow in codes, which is not user-friendly. I don't know how IDEA/ACL documents workflows.

Price: Alteryx is 10X more expensive than any of the tools mentioned. 

[Felipe_Ribeir0]

Hi @vball 

It is always a good thing to compare all possible alternatives, and nowadays we have dozens tools trying to do everything, so it can be challenging to choose one/some of them to work with. Anyway, here are my few cents about your points and why i think Alteryx is a worth tool:

Visualization and data exploration: Even considering that Alteryx has some visualization capabilities, the tool does not compete with Power BI. At my work for example, we use Alteryx for data prep/ETL and Qlik for data visualization. I understand that Power BI/power query is very powerful nowadays to treat data, but Alteryx capabilities go far beyond this. For example, here i use Alteryx to integrate with SurveyGizmo API everyday, get some specific data and update this data inside Salesforce API. Normally this integration would need some software development to be done, and surely it cant be done with Power BI. Some other examples of jobs that Power BI cannot do is sending emails periodically based on some logic and with attachments, or loading data into a database. So, what i am usually seeing is that people will have at least Alteryx + some database + Power BI/Qlik/Tableau together, instead of choosing one of them.

Duplicates/Key-word search: I dont feel your pain here, maybe i am used to it. But i would argue that these "extra steps" also gives us more flexibility to make some fine adjustments that other tools would not allow us to do.

Some other points:

Speed of development: Once i got some practice with Alteryx, i noticed that it can be much more faster to solve problems with Alteryx than with some other tools. At my work today i am working specifically with Alteryx, but we do have a guy working with Databricks and another one with Power Automate. I also had the opportunity to compare my development speed with a guy working with R/Python too. At least in my experience, the difference of value delivered per hour to the business is massive. I can go from development to production much more faster than them.

Maintenance: As you said, Arbutus uses coding to document the workflow. Imagine the situation where you have 100+ workflows in production to give maintenance, this can easily become a chaos. With Alteryx, i had the opportunity to handle this 100+ workflows in production situation with just one more Alteryx developer.

Support: You will find support, either with the community, either with the Alteryx team. With open source software like Pentaho, depending on what issue you are facing, you can really be alone against the unknown. I had been there, it is a cold place. 

Price: I agree with you, it is not cheap. If you consider that almost everything could be done with open source software, it sounds like you should not spend this money, right? Look again at the speed of development/maintenance/support topics. Once you have hundreds of jobs running everyday to maintain, and dozens of new expected developments, or you spend some money with softwares that help you being user friendly/low code/easy to document/fast to develop or you spend much more money with very skilled people to keep it working properly.