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[Mike Kromminga]

Hello everyone – 
For the last several years we’ve mainly used Power Query and Dataflows to pull data from transactional systems and model data for our embedded Power BI reports. We’ve recently started exploring Alteryx for a data modeling alternative.
What has your experience been, either positive or negative with Alteryx? What pitfalls should we watch out for? What advantages does Alteryx offer that I can’t already do with Power Query? How well did training and transition go with staff?
It seems like a great, robust tool that I’m excited to trial, just making sure I have a complete picture if we get to the point of formalizing a recommendation to purchase.

Thanks!

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Mike Kromminga
Data Architect
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[Charles Michaud]

Hi Mike, see comments below this video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ys11kq35rHU

Charles Michaud
VS3analytics

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Charles Michaud
5817020998
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[Lutz Bendlin]

You cannot really compare the two. Power Query is a simple ETL tool. Alteryx, Knime and RapidMiner are science instruments.

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Lutz
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[David Lopez]

 

I’ve used Alteryx for a while now, and used it with BI tools like Tableau & Power BI, and I absolutely love it. The biggest negative I’d say is the up front price, but once you start to understand the time/effort it saves with processes/analysis then you’ll realize the price is worth it. I think another negative is getting Alteryx and not using it to it’s full potential, it can do just about anything you can think of as far as ETL work plus a lot more.

When you think about Alteryx vs Power Query as far as ETL capabilities go, they’re fairly similar; I’d say it’s probably a bit easier in Alteryx than in Power Query mainly because of the GUI interface instead of the DAX/SQL code you’ll be writing in Power Query. Overall, you can’t go wrong with either option.

Where Alteryx excels and Power BI fails is it’s analytics capability, it’s a great tool to do a lot of the major methods you’d use in Python/R. Forecast/Cluster/Classification/Sentiment/Regression modeling etc. and again the great thing is it doesn’t require 100s lines of code to create this due to the GUI interface.

Because of the ease of use the GUI provides the training and adoption has been great at our org. I originally borrowed a license from one of our sister departments, and once I showed my leadership of the power of the tool they provided funding for multiple licenses for our department. Just like the Power BI community there’s an Alteryx community that can provide support in just about any issues. 

??Lastly, the way we look at these two tools is relatively simple. Power BI is a visualization tool only, I know it can do a lot more but for our org this is how we treat it, and anything that doesn’t need to be visualized is done in Alteryx.
– Need to send of a reoccurring email of an excel table that had some ETL work done to it, Alteryx 
– Need to do some data modelling in order to create a data table for a dashboard, Alteryx
– Need to forecast sales amount for the next six months, Alteryx
– Need to create some charts and graphs and ‘democratize’ them for consumers, Power BI

Hope this helped. 

Cheers

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David Lopez
Data Scientist
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[Phil Peddle]

Alteryx has a big advantage when used within a team/collaborative setting for ETL tasks, it’s GUI approach and simple documentation features mean its much easier for analysts to pick up complex work from colleagues and understand what’s going on quickly. 

PowerBI tends to be much harder to understand especially in complex situations with several queries being joined. The new visual query representation in Power BI will help but its nowhere near what Alteryx offers. 

?
just to be picky, Powerquery uses M not DAX :)?

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