A complete review of Alteryx

The Alteryx platform is an easy-to-use and scalable data analytics and management solution that offers sophisticated pipeline, analytics and data science capabilities. This review explores the platform, its features and functions, pricing, and the most important pros and cons users have experienced while using Alteryx.

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What is Alteryx?

Alteryx is a low-code/no-code, end-to-end data analytics platform that converges data science, analytics and process automation in a single easy-to-use platform. It enables users to quickly generate insights from large datasets while creating automation “breakthroughs.” Alteryx lists the following capabilities as its main focus points:

• Data preparation and analytics
• Data science and machine learning
• Analytic automation
• Governance and auditability
• Machine learning operations

Alteryx review

The Alteryx platform is built on analytic process automation and data privacy and security. Through the Alteryx Analytic Process Automation (APA) Platform, the company offers end-to-end automation for analytics, data science and machine learning processes. This allows the brand to deliver the agility customers need to accelerate digital transformation efforts.

Alteryx APA impacts the transformation of business outcomes as well as the transformation of workforces in organizations. Data privacy and security services from Alteryx aim to build a foundation of trust by covering areas such as information security, data privacy, data transfers, data practices, data subject rights, usage data, ethics compliance, trust, reliability and sustainability in its scope.

The Alteryx product portfolio includes Alteryx Analytics Cloud, Alteryx Designer and Alteryx Server. Combined, these products offer advanced capabilities and features.

Data preparation and analytics

Alteryx uses low-code/no-code analytics automation to generate powerful insights, enabling analysts to work quickly as the tool sources, blends and enriches data. The platform offers 300+ no-code low-automation building blocks to help teams get started. Users can leverage data cataloging features to discover and govern analytics and data assets for seamless collaboration across the organization.

Alteryx’s data profiling features involve bar charts, scatterplots and colorizations. The data exploration features enable customers to explore their variable distributions and raise their quality. Alteryx also offers data enrichment features to help users understand demographic data from customer behavior and geospatial analytics to explore customer locations on street maps.

Data science and machine learning

With automated machine learning, predictive analytics and text analytics, Alteryx equips and empowers data science teams with comprehensive and supportive tools. It offers time-series forecasting techniques like ARIMA and exponential smoothing models that are capable of taking seasonality into account. The platform also provides advanced predictive analytics features with over 40 drag-and-drop tools. For users who prefer to code, predictive analytics functions can be coded with Python or R.

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Users can swiftly create machine learning pipelines using AutoML and Deep Feature Synthesis. Automated insight generation empowers users to uncover hidden signals. Finally, Alteryx provides text mining and NLP capabilities to unlock hidden insights from PDFs and documents.

Analytics automation

Harnessing complex data is not an issue with Alteryx, as it delivers a unified approach to data science, analytics and process automation to rapidly tackle real-world problems. Its end-to-end automation functionality allows users to automate data preparation, data science, machine learning, analytics and business processes.

SEE: Top data science tools and software (TechRepublic)

Users can create highly accurate and robust models using automated feature engineering. They can also automate inputs and outputs.

Governance and auditability

Consistent, auditable and governable analytics ensure data and access to analytics can be democratized throughout an entire organization without losing control. Governed self-service analytics from Alteryx makes sure data is trustworthy and delivered with consistency and auditability. Alteryx offers certified and reusable analytic assets as well as features for sharing and collaboration. Furthermore, it has built-in security, governance and best practices.

MLOps

Alteryx makes the machine learning lifecycle simpler for its customers. Users can deploy predictive models much faster while ending error-prone, labor-intensive processes that cost precious time and resources. In addition to lifecycle management, its MLOps features include model deployment and model performance monitoring.

Pros of Alteryx

Intuitive user interface

With its integrated no-code and low-code format, no coding experience is required to use Alteryx. Alteryx delivers drag-and-drop functionality for data preparation, blending and analytics. Its drag-and-drop interface helps customers generate faster insights and smarter decisions. It does this by creating analytic workflows of any business process with 300+ no-code and low-code automation building blocks.

Share, collaborate and create

With Alteryx, authorized users can share and update workflows created in Designer. They can also develop rich analytics applications that can be leveraged throughout an organization.

Accelerated analytics journey

Alteryx Analytics Cloud accelerates the analytics journeys of organizations by delivering AI-driven insights. The Alteryx Community provides built-in recommendations and best practices.

Unified platform

Alteryx enables teams to tear down barriers to data analysis and insights across the organization by consolidating the capabilities of more than one tool into a single platform. This is helpful for team-wide visibility and for companies that want to focus their budgets on fewer software solutions.

Cons of Alteryx

Some lacking visualization features

Data visualization capacity could be improved in Alteryx, as it does not include extensive visual output options. Furthermore, the user interface can be improved to deliver a better user experience since it can be slow and clunky; though, it does have many intuitive user features that make these downsides worth it.

Cost

Alteryx is costlier than many similar tools on the market, with most of their products costing several thousand dollars. For companies that choose to work with Alteryx solutions, it’s important that you first determine which products and functions are most important to you. This will save you time and money in the long run.

Alteryx pricing

Alteryx pricing is not only dependent on the package you choose but also on the type of license. For the Alteryx Designer package, an individual user per year license costs $5,195. Prospective users have to contact Alteryx directly for pricing information for the Teams and Organizations licenses.

Alteryx Server and Cloud require prospective customers to contact Alteryx for both individual and team license pricing information. Intelligence Suite costs $2,300, Data Package — Location Intelligence is $11,700 and Data Package — Consumer Intelligence costs $33800 for an individual license, with the Teams and Organizations licenses requiring you to contact Alteryx for more information.

Many of these price points are steep for the average company budget, so be sure to have your staff of data professionals do their own research and ask questions before committing to several tools in the Alteryx portfolio.

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