Alteryx Designer

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 Designer is a very intuitive way to map out a process in a step by step visual workflow which can be then executed with the click of a button. Tedious manual tasks can be automated with ease. Traditionally, programming required drawing out ones algorithm in a flowchart and then having to translate that into computer code. With Alteryx, the flowchart itself is the code. It features a vast array of icons called tools, each of which has a specific function such as importing data, filtering based on criteria, summarizing, merging information and so forth. You simply drag and drop each tool into the work area for each step in your process and then click the play button. It's like having a robot to whom you can describe your work and then have it do it for you in a fraction of the time.

Alteryx Designer is excellent for data mining/wrangling for eventual output to be used for reporting but it's internal report generation and presentation tools are not as robust as others when it comes to publishing a polished presentation. I prefer to use Designer to produce my final data result set and export to Excel where I can then take advantage of Microsoft Office formatting and presentation options.