Alteryx Designer

Probably Alteryx's best selling point is accessibility. I personally learnt how to use Alteryx quite comprehensively in a matter of days without any training resources whatsoever. The intuitive UI makes it easy to construct even incredibly complex ETL processes.

Alteryx's feature-set is also extremely powerful. It is really greater than the sum of its parts. With the wide range of modules it provides as well as the ability to construct many types of macros yourself, Alteryx allows you to do things with the product that may not have even been intended by the developers.

The community is well fleshed out and there are a number of macros out there (shout-out to the CReW macros) that pick up the slack where some native functionality is missing (eg. triggering workflows from other workflows). However, some of this reliance on external macros/connectors can be problematic for software updates when some can be broken.

We'd love to have our team all using Alteryx, but the heavy price-tag limits us to only justifying the purchase of a couple licenses at a time. There are a number of features that are attractive to us about Alteryx Server too, but the jump in price to that product is too high to justify.

Things can get awkward when it comes to automating workflows. In order to trigger workflows on demand outside of the designer, you are required to pay even more for a Desktop Scheduling license. That license only grants you access to the engine via the command line, which can be awkward in some scenarios (eg. if the workflow accesses network shares that require domain access, a user with sufficient rights must be the one to run the engine via command line).

While Alteryx can provide significant throughput of data, there does seem to be some issues when capturing large SQL datasets sometimes. I and others in the community have witnessed significant performance degradation when not using the "TOP" SQL clause in SQL statements. It's an odd issue, but it is one that slowed down our organisation's ETL processes significantly (some large workflows ran for 24 hours) in the past before identifying the "TOP" clause workaround.

Not so steep learning curve, Alteryx is built around the human common sense. The fact that you can (View/Process) the data as a branch at any stage of the processing is really useful, and the way the software designed allows you to go backward and see what happened.

The limitation of some tools and the high barrier to developing new functionality.