Alteryx vs. KNIME (vs. Excel) in 2021: Which to use for analysis in 

Thanks! Doing KNIME courses right now (they are from KNIME, are good, low cost or even free). You can also get certified in KNIME. So my comments will be for KNIME only. I might have understood it wrong, but while you can tell KNIME to execute any arbitrary node, as long as it and its predecessors are configured. It means, however, that any preceding node not having been executed yet, gets executed. The possibility to execute stepwise is very, very compelling to me. With respect to data exploration, with the new interface of KNIME you do not even need to open a window by context/shortcut. Select the node of interest and the data, as long as the node has been executed, and a table at the bottom shows the data as it looks after the processing of the respective node. So far, I have felt the KNIME community helpful and good. There are also KNIME developers in them. I suspect, they get a portion of their worktime to help people there. About the costs: KNIME is a for-profit organisation, too. However, it is true that their Analytics platform is free and as far as I understood open source. If you only want to use your workflows/report on your local computer, you should be fine with it. However, if you want to automate the generation of reports (e.g. pdf), charts (e.g. web based) etc. you probably need their non-free business hub.

Hi Eric, great overview of the two tools...really enjoyed it. As an avid Alteryx user I wanted to add some perspective and maybe get your feedback on them. Data Exploration: You mentioned you can't disable part of your workflow you have to run the entire flow, this can be fixed by putting your flow into tool containers and disabling them allowing you to run pieces or all of your workflow. I came across this issue when I first started us Alteryx and was frustrated until I found out about the 'tool container tool'. You also said you have to add a browse tool after every process to see the output, this isn't entirely true. You can view the output without ever using a browse tool if you just click on the green arrow after the tool, this will show you what the output looks like at every step; but you're correct in that you can see details about the data output, you'll only see it in a data table format. Data Cleaning: you mentioned KNIME 'guesses' the data types a lot better than Altyerx, that's because Alteryx doesn't try to 'guess' your data, it reads it in it's native form. If you did want Alteryx to 'guess' your data, just drop an Auto Field tool in and it does what I imagine KNIME does. I wouldn't see it as a positive or negative, one guesses and one doesn't, depending on your need that could be great or not so great feature. Flexibility: KNIME has 'add ins', Alteryx has the same concept in the Alteryx Gallery. Alteryx is out of the box, but you can customize that box by downloading 'tools' from the Alteryx gallery. Think of it as importing packages in R, same concept with Alteryx and it's free! I will say one weak point of Alteryx is APIs, as far as connections go, you have to be a borderline Full Stack developer to get APIs working in Alteryx, which isn't a great model for a 'no code' tool. ML Models: I use ML models in Alteryx quite frequently, and haven't had any problems but I don't work with 'big data' as much as my counterparts; so I couldn't accurately speak to the model size limitations. I'd also suggest the "Machine Learning" ribbon, it provides an even more clear cut approach to ML models for 'citizen data scientists' but it does incur an extra fee for access to that ribbon. Community: I haven't used KNIME community, but I'd be absolutely AMAZED if their community is better than Alteryx is as you mentioned. Their community is on par with Tableau community which I think should be the standard for tool communities. Price: Of course I can't argue for Alteryx on this, I'm lucky enough to work with a company that provides access to Alteryx so price isn't an issue. I'm happy I came across this video, and I'm more than happy to check out KNIME because clearly I'm in the Alteryx band but am open to learning about KNIME. Thanks again. Cheers

If you learn how to use KNIME, it is excellent. What blows my mind is that it is free.

I'm in the middle of a project migrating Alteryx workflows to Knime as a cost-saving measure (Alteryx is quite pricy). This review is excellent and I completely agree with most of your points. However, I think you missed a category for evaluation: performance. When reading from local files (spreadsheets, delimited, etc.) Alteryx is definitely faster than Knime and if you use Alteryx's proprietary Alteryx DB format, it blows Knime away.. However when pulling data from relational databases, we tested 5 different database platforms and in every case, Knime was much quicker.

Do u think that i should use python for high storage enviroments,or i can use in these?

power query can do a lot of this things that you mentioned excel can't do or it is slow for.

Great information but at times it was hard to understand what uou

In your opinion, how does Palantir’s no code tools compare?

Nice overview, however I disagree with your assessment that Alteryx can't be extended beyond out-of-the-box functionality. People build macros and apps with alteryx tools to extend it wide and far, while more technically apt users use Alteryx' SDKs to build custom tools in Python (and soon in other languages as well).

Alteryx community is amazing

I wonder what is your day job that helped you gain that much exposure with analytics tools?

Alteryx has tool container that you don’t have to run the entire workflow each time

I'm sick and tired of people talking about excel while ignoring powerquery and powerpivot