Alteryx is a platform that provides products mainly for Data Analytics. It allows businesses to answer common business questions quickly and efficiently by serving as the major building block in digital transformation. Tableau, on the other hand, helps organizations build elegant, and intuitive data visualization models to gain a better understanding of their data. It helps businesses extract meaningful and actionable insights from their data.
In this article you will be taking a glimpse at the 5 key differences between Alteryx vs Tableau, to give you an idea of what each tool does, and what use cases find them indispensable. This will allow you to make an educated decision about the tool to pick, based on your business requirements and use cases.
Table of Contents
Introduction to Alteryx
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Alteryx is a powerful tool used by businesses to strengthen their Data Analytics operations. Armed with an interactive user interface, Alteryx can help extract, transform and load the data seamlessly.
In Data Analysis, a large chunk of the time goes into the data preparation process. This involves extracting data from various sources, changing the format of the data, unifying data from a few sources in an attempt to make the data analysis-ready. This process is called ETL (Extract, Transform, Load), and it encompasses everything that’s required to transform the raw data into an analysis-ready form.
The main focus of Alteryx is to make the job of performing ETL less cumbersome. It provides a wide range of tools to choose from to process the datasets. It lets you import data from a large number of sources and convert it into a format, that allows analysts to extract actionable insights from it.
Apart from this, Alteryx also provides advanced statistical capabilities that include Predictive Analytics and spatial tools. Once you have transformed your data, you can use Alteryx to run several analysis processes such as Time Series Forecasting to give you a deeper insight into your data. Here are a few benefits of Alteryx:
- Data can be consolidated, accessed, and integrated from several locations like databases, cloud/REST APIs.
- You can automate and document the manual data processes.
- It allows you to carry out complex data mappings and manipulations.
- It provides predictive models to predict future results, which can also be automated for sales as well.
Introduction to Tableau
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Tableau is a Business Intelligence tool that is popularly leveraged for building impeccable data visualizations. Tableau is responsible for turning the data into several elegant dashboards and charts that make it easier to draw insights from the customer and business data.
Tableau provides a large number of templates to choose from while building reports, dashboards, or charts to explain customer behavior. It houses an intuitive interface, that needs little-to-no training to understand. The drag-and-drop user interface ensures that you do not have to spend your time learning the working of it but spend it on uncovering insights instead.
Here are a few benefits of Tableau:
- Allows you to quickly slice and dice through the data to find the areas of interest and anomalies.
- Tableau comes in handy when you need to provide data that can be consumed, analyzed, filtered, and sorted.
- It helps you put your point across to a large audience effectively through immensely informative visual representations.
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- Real-Time Data Transfer: Hevo provides real-time data migration, so you can have analysis-ready data always.
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- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100+ sources, that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required.
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- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
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Understanding the Alteryx vs Tableau Differences
Now that you have understood the basics of both Alteryx and Tableau, you can now look at the differences between the two. So far you have seen that Alteryx is a valuable tool that supports data clean-up, blending, manipulation, data access, Excel process automation, and process documentation to name a few. Tableau, on the other hand, distinguished itself with dashboarding, and data visualization. Digging a little deeper, here are the 5 main differences between the two tools:
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Alteryx vs Tableau Differences: General Purpose
The general purpose of implementing Alteryx in your workflow is to make the data preparation process easier. Whereas, incorporating Tableau can help simplify and enrich the data visualization process like never before. Alteryx and Tableau, therefore, complement each other. Alteryx can fetch data from a large number of sources, transform it and then feed this data to a diverse set of destinations like Power BI, Tableau, and Excel to name a few. It can also load data to popular data warehouses like Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Microsoft Azure to name a few. Tableau can consume data from CRMs, ERP, Alteryx, Excel, Oracle, SQL Server, Google BigQuery, and data warehouses to name a few.
Alteryx vs Tableau Differences: Ease of Use
Both Alteryx and Tableau are pretty straightforward to use and house a minimal learning curve. Hence, these tools don’t need a grasp on advanced technical skills to excel at them. Both the products espouse drag and drop interfaces that are easy to use.
In Alteryx, you can create a workflow that processes data in sequential order. The workflow can be created by dragging the tools onto a canvas.
In Tableau, you can build charts by dragging the different fields you might need into the specified areas. Therefore, data analysts go for Alteryx and Tableau to boost their operations.
Alteryx vs Tableau Differences: Data Connectors
Alteryx connects to a large number of sources as discussed above to synthesize the raw data.
Here are a few connectors that are associated with Alteryx:
- Adobe Analytics Tool: This can be used for authentication to the Adobe Analytics report suites and create ad hoc reports.
- Amazon S3 Upload Tool: It lets you transfer data from Alteryx to the Cloud.
- Salesforce Einstein Analytics Output Tool: This allows you to publish data from an analytics workflow as a dataset in Einstein Analytics.
- SharePoint List Output Tool: You can write the content of a data stream using a SharePoint list.
- MongoDB Output Tool: This allows you to write data to MongoDB databases.
- Publish to Tableau Server Tool: You can publish an Alteryx data stream in Tableau as a (.tde) file or a (.hyper) file.
Tableau supports the following connectors:
- File-Based Connectors: Tableau can link to File-Based connectors that allow connecting with CSV, JSON, Excel, etc.
- In-Built Data Connectors: Tableau provides in-built data connectors that can connect to prominent sources like Oracle, MongoDB, SQL Server, BigQuery, Redshift, Salesforce to name a few.
- Actian Matrix: This allows you to connect to the Actian Matrix database (previously ParAccel) and set up the data source.
- Apache Drill: You can establish a Direct or a Zookeeper connection to Apache Drill data and set up the data source.
- Aster Database: By providing the name of the server and the database, and sign-in details you can connect Tableau to Aster database data.
- Box: This allows you to connect Tableau to Box data and set up the data source.
- Cloudera Hadoop: This lets you connect to a Cloudera Hadoop database (Hive 2 or Impala) and set up the data source.
- Databricks: You can connect Tableau to a Databricks database and set up the data source.
Apart from the above mentioned connectors, Tableau also allows you to connect with various sources using ODBC and JDBC connectors.
Alteryx vs Tableau Differences: Scheduling and Collaboration
Tableau Scheduling lets you accommodate fresh extracts, delivering subscriptions, and running workflows. Alteryx Scheduling lets users schedule a trigger for an Alteryx application or a workflow. In terms of Collaboration, both Alteryx, and Tableau allow the centralization of data. This centralized data can be accessed through the Cloud or an organization’s secure network.
This centralization of data also ensures that the data is scalable for as many users as you want.
Alteryx vs Tableau Differences: Pricing
Alteryx and Tableau happen to be quite expensive. For companies that may not have the budget for Tableau can go for Power BI in the visualization niche.
Alteryx doesn’t have any major competitors that can one-up the features provided by it at a lower price. A cost-effective alternative is relying on Python or R. But since both of these are programming languages, they demand a higher skill level than what’s required for Alteryx.
Here is what the pricing model for Alteryx looks like:
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- Individuals: For individuals, the pricing model is Alteryx designer that costs $5195/year.
- Teams/Organizations: It is customizable for enterprises.
This is what the Tableau pricing model looks like:
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- Individuals: The pricing model offered for individuals is the Tableau Creator.
- Tableau Creator: $70/user/month
- Teams: For organizations, there are three plans to choose from:
- Tableau Creator: $70/user/month
- Tableau Explorer: $35/user/month
- Tableau Viewer: $12/user/month
Here is a summary of the differences between Alteryx and Tableau.
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Conclusion
This article talks about the 5 key Alteryx vs Tableau differences. You learned that Tableau is a tool best used for data visualizations and analysis while Alteryx is a tool best used for data preparation. Both these tools complement each other and are invaluable to the field of Data Analytics. Extracting complex data from a diverse set of data sources to carry out an insightful analysis can be a challenging task and this is where Hevo saves the day!
Hevo Data offers a faster way to move data from Databases or SaaS applications into your Data Warehouse to be visualized in a BI tool such as Tableau. Hevo is fully automated and hence does not require you to code.
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You can try Hevo for free by Signing Up for a 14-day free trial. You can also have a look at the unbeatable pricing that will help you choose the right plan for your business needs.