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Alteryx vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Alteryx
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
79
Ranking in other categories
Predictive Analytics (1st), Data Science Platforms (5th), Data Preparation Tools (1st)
Microsoft Power BI
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
315
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. Alteryx is designed for Predictive Analytics and holds a mindshare of 24.2%, down 25.7% compared to last year.
Microsoft Power BI, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 22.4% mindshare, up 22.4% since last year.
Predictive Analytics
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Vivek Vaibhav - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a good UI and drag-and-drop features which makes it easy to understand
There have been some issues with licensing, particularly with the increased prices. This has led some companies, including ours, to consider reducing the number of licenses or potentially discontinuing their use of Alteryx. Since most of our team members work with Alteryx, deploying workflows to clients who may not have licenses became a hurdle. Every user needed a license to run the workflows, which could pose difficulties, especially for clients who only needed occasional access for small data analyses. Unlike other software like Microsoft Power BI, which offers free trials or user licenses for basic functionality, Alteryx doesn't provide such options, potentially limiting its accessibility for occasional users. It should improve scalability.
Amol Rane - PeerSpot reviewer
Supports AI initiatives in terms of predictive analytics
The only issue is with permissions. Sometimes, despite granting granular permissions, dashboards are visible to people who shouldn't have access. It's difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. Sometimes dashboards are visible to stakeholders even though they should not have permission. It's a bit difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance, and the permissions should be easier to understand. At this point, we have to go through a lot of details. It takes a lot of time to understand the permissions, so if there were better options available within the Power BI setup, it would be quite beneficial, especially for admins. So, there should be a more user-friendly dashboard appearance and easier-to-understand permissions.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Alteryx makes it easy for the end customer to see clean data in a structured form."
"The Alteryx designer has been the most useful feature in the solution."
"The drag and drop and layout is simple to understand, with intuitive names of features."
"The solution has excellent drag and drop functionality. There's no need for coding."
"The most valuable feature is user-friendliness, as Alteryx can be used by those without any coding experience or experienced data scientists as it has the functionality to embed R and Python scripts."
"Alteryx is a simple and easy-to-use solution."
"The drag-and-drop features are useful for data scientists who do not like to code because it is already in the system."
"You get more support with Alteryx, and it's good for non-sophisticated users who can benefit from the support included in the price."
"There are some great automation elements in the product."
"Many of my customers already use Microsoft products like Office 365, so I often propose Microsoft Power BI because it integrates well with all the standard Microsoft business tools. And it's the quickest tool to implement and start using daily."
"Tech support is very helpful."
"With Power BI, you're able to store your data within spreadsheets and SharePoints, and then have Power BI pull the data out and report on it. So we actually saved a ton of money not needing to load the data into databases, which is a big prerequisite for many other reporting tools."
"Real-time refresh is quite interesting and user-friendly, provided you have access to a gateway. It works well."
"Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, "What is the total sale in the Eastern region?", and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses. You can even have a dashboard with positive remarks. This feature has been introduced recently. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis."
"We have found the product to be scalable."
"Provides a full platform (database, ETL, reporting, analysis, and so on)"
 

Cons

"It seems to me that it is not always user friendly."
"The scalability worries me a lot at the moment because the cost of the solution is high and it is not growing considerably. Unfortunately, we started during early COVID times and because of the economic downturn, all the cost cuttings, and everything, it is not growing as expected."
"There are a few imputation techniques which they really need to include."
"The product's pricing needs improvement."
"It's a technical product and those that don't have proper training will have to deal with a steep learning curve."
"The solution could improve in the visualization."
"It would be great to create the final users' visualization within Alteryx."
"We are hoping that the NLP features will also support Chinese characters."
"I believe there is room for improvement in terms of authentication and certain functionalities in Power BI. For instance, adjusting the width of columns is not easily done, as there is only an option to enable or disable automatic adjustment. This can be a significant drawback for clients who desire more flexibility."
"I have to write scripts to query data for analyzing performance."
"Microsoft BI could improve by allowing large-size data sources. We have large data sources, and we have problems loading them in Microsoft BI."
"Integration with products that are not Microsoft could be more improved."
"The way you navigate the product, compared to other products in this industry, that could be improved a bit."
"People without private emails cannot publish and, frankly, this doesn't allow for easy training."
"The performance of Microsoft BI could improve for large datasets and it would be beneficial to have more visualization features."
"It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights. Right now, you need other solutions for that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is $5000 per year per production license."
"While it offers extensive features, including predictive analytics, for those who mainly use it for data preparation and blending, the cost can be prohibitive."
"The designer license costs 5000 euros. The server edition is 1000 euros."
"If one is a high price, and ten is a low price, I rate the tool's price as a one. The tool is expensive."
"I rate the tool's pricing a two out of ten."
"In my opinion, it's actually quite expensive."
"I don't know much about the licensing, but there are some additional costs for certain features."
"The cost of Alteryx is approximately $2,900 annually."
"The price for this solution is reasonable. However, there is an additional cost if you want to publish the dashboard privately."
"We're charged a monthly subscription fee of 500 rupees per person."
"Globally, we evaluated a number of products, including Salesforce's product, Microsoft won on the ground of simple functionally and cost."
"I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution."
"The solution is affordable."
"The license is on a yearly basis."
"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."
"Its pricing is great."
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Healthcare Company
6%
Educational Organization
42%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Computer Software Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the Biggest Difference Between Alteryx and IBM SPSS Modeler?
One of the differences is that with Alteryx you can use it as an ETL and analytics tool. Please connect with me directly if you want to know more.
What is the Biggest Difference Between Alteryx and IBM SPSS Modeler?
Alteryx is an extremely easy and flexible data tool, flexible in terms of drag and drop toolset and also has python, R integrations if your team requires this. It can handle over 2 billion rows of...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Alteryx and IBM SPSS Modeler?
I am not familiar with IBM SPSS Modeler, therefore, I cannot compare these two products. Regarding Alteryx I can say the following: - An excellent desktop tool for Data Prep and analytics. - Featu...
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AnalyticsIq Inc., belk, BloominBrands Inc., Cardinalhealth, Cineplex, Dairy Queen
Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
Find out what your peers are saying about Alteryx vs. Microsoft Power BI and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.