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The pros and cons of Alteryx
Updated February 04, 2015

The pros and cons of Alteryx

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

8.6

Overall Satisfaction with Alteryx

Alteryx is currently used for geospatial data processing an analysis by a team of five within the company. Alteryx allows us to easily address drive time analysis, demographic analysis, and our analyses with geospatial components.
  • The drag and drop interface is very intuitive allowing users to hit the ground running on this product.
  • Alteryx allows input and output of various data types (.csv, .tab, .shp, .png, .xlsx, .yxdb, etc.)
  • The user is able to "browse' the data along the way unlike some data processing programs.
  • The map visualization is terrible. If you're planning on outputting presentation worthy maps, Alteryx is not the software for it!
  • The program has glitches - sometimes everything will be created perfectly (data joining as it should, appropriate fields selected, etc), but the program will fail to read in or "update" the workstream and cause errors
  • Though Alteryx is touted as "Big Data" friendly, we have seen those limits reached (billions of records) and been disappointed with run times.
Alteryx is in a world of its own compared to other products I've used or tested. Previous to this software, I mainly used MapInfo Pro or ArcMap, but they are quite different. Obviously MapInfo and ArcMap have the upper hand when it comes to visualiztaion while Alteryx wins out in terms of ease-of-use and quick data analysis.
I will likely continue to use Alteryx because it allows quick, customizable data analysis. Often, I will be given a business question, which I might not know how to answer, but after getting into Alteryx, dragging and dropping some tools, I can formulate the answer. At the same time, this is definitely a niche software (not something that would ever be adopted by my entire company), which makes it a bit less appealing to some.
Alteryx is particularly well-suited for demographic analysis and drive time analysis. Anything at the block group level seems to run quickly and without a hitch. Below though things get bogged down and slow. I would never suggest Alteryx as a map visualization software as this function is not user friendly and does not create presentation-quality results. While the software was originally known for its geospatial function and integration, it seems the company is moving its focus away from this - nice in some ways as R functionality and others have been added, but disappointing as I don't expect improvement in the existing geospatial tools.

Using Alteryx