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A Comparison of Alteryx and Fivetran for ETL Processes

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cndro
in

Fivetran and Alteryx

Introduction

ETL Tools can deliver instant data integration solutions to help businesses in saving time, cost, and resources. Recently, there has been an increase in usage of Alteryx and Fivetran by companies. Both have gained a lot of attention as several companies are really adopting them. Alteryx and Fivetran have been used to solve many pressing issues in the world of Data Analytics, Data Engineering, and Data Science.

Today, I would like to provide what each of these cool software does, probably you might be in a situation where you would like to know which one you would need for your business processes.

Alteryx

Alteryx is a drag and drop software used for data cleansing, mining, ETL, and other Business Intelligence activities. It is very easy to use. In fact, you do not need to have the technical skills to start using Alteryx. Alteryx provides you with many tools for various purposes. You can pick these tools, drag and drop them on the canvas for your extraction, transformation, and loading workloads. It also provides you with different products access for your data integration workloads which are being used for different purposes.

There is a designer version of Alteryx which is being used for the development of applications and workflows. You can install Alteryx Designer on your machine and start using it to develop workflows.

There is an Alteryx Server version that provides the company with the ability to publish and automate your resources. You can collaborate with your team and get feedback on the application you are building with just a few clicks in Alteryx Gallery.

It’s worth noting that Alteryx is used for a variety of purposes one of which is that you can use Alteryx to work with ETL processes. You can use it to extract data from APIs, webpages, transform varieties of data, JSON, CSV, XML, and load the data into different databases or warehouses. Now let us look at each of these products.

Alteryx Designer: It provides you with different tools that have different configurations. This is where development happens and as well as your playground to connect with different Alteryx resources and external data. Alteryx Designer is used by Data Analysts, Data Engineers, and Data Scientists. Interestingly all the tools needed for development by them are all in Alteryx Designer.

Alteryx Server: It serves as a sharing platform; you are able to move your development to production with this powerful software. You can use macro and applications built by your co-workers and collaborate with each other on the Server. Alteryx Server gives you the ability to connect your applications with internal and external applications.

Alteryx Connect: It  is a place where you keep resources like data sources connection metadata, workflows information, Analytical app information, e.t.c for easy access. I want you to see Alteryx Connect as your room wardrobe where you can easily find your array of clothes easily. With Alteryx Connect, companies can easily locate resources and keep all the Alteryx resources and packages organized. All your resources are cataloged for you.

Alteryx Gallery: With Alteryx gallery, you can collaborate with your team, you can access your company’s Alteryx Gallery anywhere you want because it is a cloud-hosted or self-hosted application. Alteryx Gallery allows you to share data, macros, applications, and insights within your organization. With the Alteryx Gallery, you have the ability to manage and accommodate many more users as your business needs grow. All these users can then develop different applications and share them on the platform.

Alteryx specializes in self-service analysis with an elegant user interface. These analyses can be used as Extract, Turn, Load (ETL) methods within the Alteryx system. You can use Alteryx to connect with different data sources and perform complex analysis, do spatial, predictive, and statistical analysis with just drag and drop tools.

Fivetran

Fivetran is a data integration platform you can use to extract, transform and Load (ETL) processes. The design orientation of Fivetran is such that it does not want you to do any manual work for your data integrations, just plug and play.

Read along as I give a better illustration. I want you to think of how you pay for your electricity every month. You would not need to go to the power source itself to extract the electricity you need; you believe that all you need is to pay for your electricity and you sit back at home to watch your television.

Sounds cool, right? No stress! This is exactly how Fivetran works. Even if you have the engineering capability, the time factor to get the electricity from the extraction point would wear you out.

Fivetran provides you with many connectors to different data sources. For example, it provides you with connectors to Facebook Ads Insight, Salesforce, Zendesk, Twitter Analytics, and lots more. You can check Data Sources | Connector Directory | Fivetran.

Interestingly, Fivetran provides you with the ability to create your custom connectors, but in some cases, you would not need to create custom connectors yourself because there are many connectors in the box already. Personally, What I like about Fivetran is that I can stream my data into Fivetran, you can choose to use either Amazon Kinesis, Apache Kafka, and others.

Pricing

Fivetran pricing is flexible and the costs are calculated based on your workload. There are four pricing/workload plans namely the Starter ($1 per credit), Standard ($1.5 per credit), Enterprise ($2), and the Business-Critical plan (contact support for this).

In fairness, there are many things you can use this powerful software to achieve. They are powerful and they make things easy for you. I cannot tell it all to you here, the best way is to explore them. Alteryx provides you with 30 days free trial with full access to all the Alteryx Designer resources. On the other hand, Fivetran provides you with 14 days free trial as well, you can use over 150 plus connectors freely for the period of 14 days. I will advise you to try them out.

Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed this post, do give it a clap and share it with your friends. See you next time.