Alteryx and Tableau are two of the popular business intelligence solutions in the world for analytics. Both are used in many corporations to obtain valuable insights from data. Alteryx is a solution that offers products mainly for data analytics. It allows companies to answer common business questions efficiently and quickly by serving as the major building block in digital transformation. On the other hand, Tableau helps businesses build elegant and intuitive data visualization models to gain a perfect understanding of their data. It allows companies to extract meaningful and actionable insights from their data.
But what role does each of these solutions play in an organization? Do the two software products compete with each other or complement each other? Let’s have a look.
What is Alteryx?
Alteryx is an ETL solution designed to extract, transform, and load a vast amount of data from a wide range of different data sources. This system is specially designed for use by BI analysts, but it works regardless of whether or not you use SQL. It uses workflows to engage with data throughout the ETL process, and the system allows you to make these repeatable so you do not waste time on manual processes.
A scalable and intuitive user interface makes working in the product fast, easy to learn, and flexible, and data discovery and management tools let you access dozens of data connectors and make edits to the incoming data. One significant shortcoming with Alteryx is data visualization. You can use Alteryx to generate reports, but these are not accessible to employees who do not work in data or business intelligence. Instead, Alteryx provides analytic templates for loading data into third-party visualization platforms.
Alteryx also offers advanced capabilities, including spatial tools and predictive analytics. After changing your data, you can use Alteryx to run advanced analyses such as time series forecasting or predictive analytics to provide deep insights into your data.
What is Tableau?
Tableau is a data visualization solution that uses drag and drop features to develop various interactive graphs and charts. People know Tableau for providing some of the best data visualization tools on the market, and they use this product to reveal hidden insights and to tell stories with data. Using Tableau, you can develop forecasts, spot trends & outliers, generate maps, and more.
Tableau also uses drag and drop functionality to apply visuals to data segments to see data in different ways instead of imposing a variety of transformations on data to clean it. This means users with any amount of coding know-how can use Tableau, but the product also supports natural language to custom SQL queries. It fulfills a different role in the world of analytics software.
Tableau is known as a data visualization tool. It turns data into compelling dashboards and charts, which let you uncover the insights that are contained in your data. The selection of charts that can be produced through Tableau is broad, and it has been a leader in the visualization market for years; the feel and looks of the charts have been refined to a high degree. When used well, you can be sure that tableau visuals will possibly impact your audience.
Can you combine both products?
As you might assume from the above discussion, Tableau and Alteryx can often be used together. You could simply import raw data into Alteryx, process it there, and then export the transformed data into Tableau to create a dashboard and charts. Tableau and Alteryx complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses. While Alteryx is perfect at getting data into a practical format, it has a limited ability to visualize or otherwise show off your statistics to an audience. Tableau fills this gap efficiently.
Tableau visualizes data perfectly but is less robust in the area of data preparation. While it lets you merge and blend data sets, there are many advanced analytics features; Tableau lacks compared to Alteryx.
What is their market position?
Understanding the Tableau vs. Alteryx
Now, you can look at the differences between these two popular products. So far, you have seen that Tableau distinguished itself with data visualization and dashboarding. On the other hand, Alteryx is a valuable product that supports data blending, manipulation, excel process automation, data access, and process documentation, to name a few.
General Purpose: Alteryx vs. Tableau
The general purpose of implementing Alteryx in your workflow is to make the data preparation process more accessible. Whereas incorporating Tableau can help simplify and improve the data visualization process like never before. Therefore, Tableau and Alteryx complement each other. Alteryx can fetch data from a vast number of sources, transform it and then feed this data to various sets of destinations like Tableau, Power BI, and Excel. It can also load data to well-known data warehouses like Snowflake, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Redshift. Tableau can consume data from ERP, CRMs, Alteryx, Oracle, Google BigQuery, Excel, SQL Server, and data warehouses.
Ease of Use: Alteryx vs. Tableau
Both Tableau and Alteryx are pretty simple to use and house a minimal learning curve. Hence, these products do not need a grasp of advanced technical skills to excel at them. Both the tools promote drag and drop interfaces that are easy to use. In Alteryx, you can build a workflow that processes data in a sequential arrangement. The workflow can be build by dragging the tools onto a canvas. In Tableau, You can create charts by dragging the different fields you might need into a specified area. Therefore, data analysts go for Tableau and Alteryx to boost their operations.
Data Connectors: Alteryx vs. Tableau
Alteryx connects to a wide variety of sources to synthesize the raw data. Here are a few connectors that are linked with Alteryx:
- Amazon S3 Upload Tool: This tool lets you transfer data from Alteryx to the Cloud.
- Adobe Analytics Tool: This tool can authenticate the Adobe Analytics report suites and develop ad hoc reports.
- Salesforce Einstein Analytics Output Tool: This product allows you to publish data from an analytics workflow as a dataset in Einstein Analytics.
- MongoDB Output Tool: This tool allows you to write data to MongoDB databases.
- SharePoint List Output Tool: This product allows you to write the content of a data stream using a SharePoint list.
- Publish to Tableau Server Tool: This tool allows you to publish an Alteryx data stream in Tableau as a .hyper file.
Tableau supports the many connectors that are mentioned below:
- In-Built Data Connectors: It offers in-built data connectors that can connect to significant sources like SQL Server, MongoDB, Oracle, BigQuery, Salesforce, and Redshift.
- File-based Connectors: Tableau can link to a file-based connector that permits connecting with JSON, CSV, Excel, etc.
- Apache Drill: This tool allows you to establish a serial connection to Apache Drill data and set up the data source.
- Actian Matrix: This tool allows you to connect to the Actian Matrix database and set up the data source.
- Box: This product allows you to connect Tableau to Box data and set up the data source.
- Aster Database: You can connect Tableau to the Aster database by offering the server’s name and the database and sign-in details.
- Databricks: You can attach Tableau to a Databricks database data and set up the data source.
- Cloudera Hadoop: This allows you to connect to a Cloudera Hadoop database and set up the data source.
Scheduling and Collaboration: Alteryx vs. Tableau
Tableau Scheduling allows you to accommodate fresh extracts, running workflows, and delivering subscriptions. Alteryx scheduling will enable you to schedule a trigger for an Alteryx app or a workflow. In terms of collaboration, both Tableau and Alteryx let the centralization of data. This centralization data can be access through the Cloud or a company’s secure network. This centralization data also makes sure that the data is scalable for as many users as you need.
Significant Differences: Tableau vs. Alteryx
These two products might sound similar, but they are different in many aspects. Here is the table to understand how they differ from each other:
Pricing: Alteryx vs. Tableau
Conclusion
Alteryx and Tableau are both popular tools in their areas of analytics. Alteryx deals with data preparation, and Tableau deals with data visualization. As a result, these tools complement each other well, and there is no reason you could not use both in your organization. Their pricing models mean they would not be the right option for every business, but if you need the best products out there, you are unlikely to go wrong with these two in the current marketplace.
When Alteryx and Tableau are used together, it is useful for businesses to make efficient decisions based on the data insights offered by these products. Both analytic tools are uniquely important in their own way, but using them together can get you the best possible results in analyzing complex data.