Introduction
The modern IT industry is majorly Data-Driven where managing huge amount of data and extracting meaningful insights is very critical for the businesses. If you are searching for what Tool to choose for your Data Analytics, you are at the right place. In this article, we will compare Snowflake and Alteryx, the two leading Data Analytics Tools in the IT industry. But, before we compare the features of Snowflake and Alteryx, let us look into the basic overview of both platforms.
Overview of Snowflake
Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing platform that is majorly used to store and manage and analyze huge volumes of data. It provides a unique feature of separate storage and Compute Services, which is different from traditional data warehouses. This allows organizations to allocate resources on the basis of specific business needs.
Introduction to Alteryx
Alteryx is Data Analytics platform for Data Preparation and Analytics that allows users to blend, transform, and process data from different sources without the need for complex code. It is a self-service platform and has an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface that makes it easy to create workflows for data processing and supports integrations with different platforms from AWS to Salesforce.
Snowflake vs Alteryx: Key Differences
Features
Primary Applications
Snowflake is mainly used to store, manage, and analyze large amounts of data in a structured manner which makes it ideal for organizations that need scalable and efficient solutions for data storage and analysis. Users can generate reports 200 times faster with processing time reduced from 28 hours to just 13 minutes using Snowflake.
Also, due to its efficient concurrency capability, ETL processes can efficiently pull data from different sources like OLTP Databases, Transactional Database, CRP and web or social media data into Snowflake.
Alteryx, on the other hand is a major choice for Data Blending, Data Transformation, Predictive Analytics, etc. which helps users prepare and process data for analytics and reporting. It can be used by Technical and Non-Technical users for Data Preparation and Analysis
It enables users to create the Robust Data Engineering Pipeline and automate the Analytics Tasks. Alteryx has a parallel processing architecture which fully utilizes the processing power of multi-core CPU. This makes the Analytics Task much faster than the other platforms,
User-Friendliness
Snowflake has a Web-Based SQL interface that provides a user-friendly environment to manage the database, which makes it comfortable for technical analysts who are comfortable with SQL queries. Its interface has has more than 2.4 billion queries on its interface to empower the Advertising, Manufacturing, Retail & CPG, Technology and other sectors with data analytics.
But, Alteryx is a Data Analytics platform with a drag-and-drop interface for performing Data Blending, Data Transformation, and Analytics. Code-free tools supports the advanced analytics so that it can be used by both technical and non-technical to prepare & blend data up to 100x faster than traditional solutions.
Scalability of the System
Snowflake offers a scalable data storage system to store and compute the data. Its architecture is built in such a way that it has separate services for Storage and Computing that enable users to scale the resources as per needs and efficiently handle the data integration tasks. Snowflake enables businesses to scale to multiple petabytes which makes it highly scalable.
Alteryx is aimed at Data Preparation and Analytics due to which its scalability depends on the system on which it is installed. Its scalability is achieved by distributing the tasks over multiple Alteryx Instances. It may face limitations while working on large data sets and complex data integration tasks.
Data Security
Snowflake offers advanced features such as Role Based Access Controls (RBAC) and end-to-end data encryption for enhancing data security. It also supports Single Sign-On and Multifactor Authentication along with the shared data architecture ensuring that the data coming from different sources remains intact and isolated.
Alteryx provides basic data security features in comparison to Snowflake such as authentications and permissions to decide who can access workflows and data assets. Therefore, Snowflake aims to secure the data storage, retrieval, and analytics while Alteryx focuses on securing the Data Analytics workflow.
Integrations with other Platforms
Snowflake is mainly focused on Cloud-based data storage. However, it supports integrations with various data storage and visualization tools such as Looker, Amazon Web Services, Tableau, Talend, and Fivetran. Thus, it offers various ETL and data orchestration services.
While Alteryx supports integration with various platforms with an Open API Model due to which it can extract business-related data from various platforms. It offers integration with a variety of data sources, including databases, cloud services, and flat files. Some of them are Adobe Analytics, AWS services, Databricks, Apache Hive, Apache Spark, and many more.
Pricing Plan
Snowflake offers 30 day free trial which has $400 worth of free usage. In addition to this, for s, Snowflake has Standard, Enterprise, Business Critical and Virtual Private Snowflake as the enterprise plans.. The user can choose the best options according to their business needs.
Alteryx also offers 30-day free trial which has Desktop or Cloud Trial. Along with this it has Designer Desktop which costs $5,195. Also, it has Designer Cloud Pricing Plan which starts from $4,950 per user/year and can vary as per the quote.
Community Support
Both the Analytics tools have an active community where you can ask or find various user information. For Snowflake training and guidance , you have to visit https://community.snowflake.com/s/ while for Alteryx, the community is accessible at https://community.alteryx.com/?category.id=external. Both the community forums are available to resolve all your queries regarding the Snowflake and Alteryx.
Deployment Options
Snowflake is a cloud-native data warehousing platform, meaning it is designed for deployment on cloud infrastructure. Snowflake supports Cloud Based Deployment in which users can select their preferred religion and provider. It is available on major cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. On the other hand, Alteryx supports both on-premises and cloud deployment.
Supported Devices
Snowflake is supported on Windows, Mac, and Web-based systems to serve as a robust data warehousing platform. Alteryx is available on the Windows and Web-based Systems to provide the Data Analytics Tools.
Supported Languages
Snowflake supports only one language English while Alteryx supports 8 different languages including English, Chinese, German, Spanish, Japanese, French, Italian, and Portuguese.
Conclusion
Snowflake and Ateryx are the most popular Data Analytics Tools for extracting insights from large amounts of data. Snowflake focuses more on data storage and management and Alteryx focuses more on Data Blending, Data Transformation, and Data Analytics.
The appropriateness depends on the team members’ specific business objectives and skills. Now, you got a clearer idea of the comparison between Snowflake and Alteryx. Now you are ready to know who to choose for your project.
