Alteryx Designer vs Ascend.io comparison

Alteryx and Ascend.io are both solutions in the Data Integration category. Alteryx is ranked #16 with an average rating of 7.1, while Ascend.io is ranked #36 with an average rating of 9.0. Alteryx holds a 1.5% mindshare in DI, compared to Ascend.io’s 0.4% mindshare. Additionally, 90% of Alteryx users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Ascend.io users who would recommend it.

Alteryx Designer

Read 31 Alteryx Designer reviews

3,327 Views
3,127 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Ascend.io

Read 1 Ascend.io review

562 Views
365 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Alteryx Designer

Ascend.io

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Alteryx Designer and Ascend.io based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, IBM and others in Data Integration.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Integration Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Data Integration

January 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Alteryx Designer

Ranking in Data Integration

16th

Average Rating

7.8

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Ascend.io

Ranking in Data Integration

36th

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Alteryx Designer is 1.5%, down from 2.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Ascend.io is 0.4%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Integration Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Alteryx Designer	1.5%
Ascend.io	0.4%
Other	98.1%

Data Integration

Featured Reviews

Prince Raju

Lead Data Analyst at Ernst & Young

Powerful tool for cleansing, formatting, and transforming data – especially unstructured files

When you open a raw Excel file, it can be hard to look at everything in detail. Alteryx makes it much easier to go through the data, summarize it, and use different tools for analysis. So, Alteryx Designer have significantly reduced the time I spend on data analysis tasks. Moreover, the drag-and-drop interface of Alteryx Designer improved our overall workflow.

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reviewer2784462

Software Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Automated data pipelines have transformed complex workloads and now deliver faster, reliable insight

The standout feature is the Data Awareness Engine, in my opinion the intelligent control plane. Unlike traditional orchestrators that run tasks based on schedules or external events, Ascend.io understands the state of the data. If a source file changes or transformation logic is updated, the engine automatically identifies only the impacted data partitions and recalculates exclusively those. This eliminated the need to write complex logic for partial reloads and ensures that downstream data is always consistent with the latest version of the code. Ascend.io impacted my organization positively because it helped me solve my problem by solving our operational maintenance crisis. Previously, every time a Spark job failed, we had to manually intervene to clean up partial data and restart the pipeline. With Ascend.io, infrastructure management and checkpointing are fully automated. It drastically reduced our technical debt, allowing our data engineers to focus on business logic rather than cluster management or writing boilerplate ingestion code. Code reduction eliminated 60% to 70% of custom Spark code. Operational cost saw a 30% reduction in man-hours dedicated to pipeline maintenance and incident management. The meantime to recovery reduced from hours to minutes due to automatic failure tracking. With Ascend.io, you write what you want, not how to do it. It is a declarative approach and reduces code by 80%. This is very important to me. A good feature is the integrated lineage because an instant visualization of data flow across all components is very useful.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Alteryx Designer offers a drag-and-drop interface, making it highly user-friendly. Unlike Python and Apache Airflow, which require coding, Alteryx allows users to accomplish tasks without any programming knowledge. Its simplicity makes it accessible to anyone, even those without coding experience, and this ease of use is one of Alteryx's key advantages."

"I believe in the ability to connect to multiple data sources, as well as the ease of use to transform data and output data in a variety of formats."

"Alteryx Designer is a tool that is pretty much easy to install."

"The product is intuitive and easy to use."

"Alteryx Designer's best features are that it's easy to use and performs well."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its API connections. Its predictive analytics feature has helped us pass some ETL processes to analysts rather than developers."

"It helps them to create customized workflows, transform data, perform calculations, and consolidate multiple data sources into a target database."

"Alteryx Designer is stable."

More Alteryx Designer pros

"With Ascend.io, infrastructure management and checkpointing are fully automated, drastically reducing our technical debt, allowing our data engineers to focus on business logic rather than cluster management or writing boilerplate ingestion code."

Cons

"When it comes to the pivoting part, the drill-through option is not there in Alteryx."

"An improvement for Alteryx Designer would be faster bug fixes and updates."

"I would like to be able to include small snippets of code inside of the solution. The tool has only drag-and-drop features to make it easy to use, but sometimes I feel like this makes it more complicated."

"Its cost can sometimes be a drawback."

"Alteryx Designer is not as fast as SSIS and is not good for large datasets. It also needs to improve database procedures. Though it is easy to use, it is limited in terms of technical aspects."

"Optimizing processing times is one area I would like to see improved in Alteryx Designer. Sometimes, the workflows take an extremely long time to run. There are days when I have had to wait two to three hours for a single process to complete. There needs to be a functionality to split the processes."

"Sometimes, while getting data from a third-party product, the solution works slowly."

"Based on my experience, the tool could be improved by providing sample reports or pre-configured workflows tailored to specific industries, like finance. It needs to integrate an AI chatbot as well."

More Alteryx Designer cons

"Ascend.io can be improved regarding the initial learning curve because for those used to writing pure Spark code, a mindset shift is required to trust the tool's automation."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Alteryx Designer is a very expensive solution."

"I rate the price of Alteryx Designer a ten on a scale of one to ten, where one is low price and ten is high price."

"The tool is priced high."

"The pricing is bit expensive."

"Alteryx is a little bit expensive compared to competing solutions."

"The solution is expensive. It has license fees, which are renewable every year."

"Alteryx Designer is an expensive solution."

"It is too expensive for our country. We are a small country, so it is too difficult to sell this solution. With Alteryx Designer, if you want to automate the data and run the flows, you have to pay more money. We were trying to automate the flows, and we found out that people have to pay 600 more for this feature, which makes it even more expensive. We are a partner for Tableau, and we are working with Tableau Prep, which is like a mini Alteryx. In Tableau Prep, you can drag and drop and make new connections with the different data sources. You can make all the connections. You can also publish a source. You don't have to pay more money with Tableau. You pay like $5 per user per month to access it."

More Alteryx Designer pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

Energy/Utilities Company

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	12
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	17

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Alteryx Designer?

When you open a raw Excel file, it can be hard to look at everything in detail. Alteryx makes it much easier to go through the data, summarize it, and use different tools for analysis.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Alteryx Designer?

It's cheaper than Palantir, but even Alteryx is too much for small clients. It is expensive, considering the server capabilities.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Alteryx Designer?

For smaller clients with ten to 15 employees, Alteryx can be expensive. The server capabilities are costly too. The technical support could also improve by being quicker in response times.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Ascend.io?

Our experience has been very positive due to the AWS Marketplace integration. The customer shared this feedback with us. Regarding setup cost, they were remarkably low because Ascend.io is a SaaS p...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Ascend.io?

Ascend.io can be improved regarding the initial learning curve because for those used to writing pure Spark code, a mindset shift is required to trust the tool's automation. Another area for improv...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Ascend.io?

My main use case for Ascend.io is that we have been working with an e-commerce client that was struggling to manage the complexity of their ETL pipelines. The team was spending 80% of their time wr...

See all answers

Comparisons

SSIS vs Alteryx Designer

Compared 11% of the time

Azure Data Factory vs Alteryx Designer

Compared 8% of the time

FME vs Alteryx Designer

Compared 7% of the time

Palantir Foundry vs Alteryx Designer

Compared 6% of the time

Qlik Talend Cloud vs Alteryx Designer

Compared 5% of the time

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Fivetran vs Ascend.io

Compared 100% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alteryx Designer

February 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Data Integration

January 2026

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Overview

Information not available

Alteryx

Ascend.io is a versatile data automation platform designed to empower businesses in constructing and maintaining robust data pipelines. Operating in the cloud, it caters to organizations of all sizes, irrespective of their existing infrastructure. Ascend.io offers a comprehensive set of features, including seamless data ingestion from various sources, diverse data transformation tools, and efficient data orchestration capabilities encompassing scheduling, chaining, and branching of data pipelines. With a focus on data governance, it also provides valuable features like data lineage and auditing. Ascend.io proves to be an invaluable asset for businesses seeking to enhance data management and analytics. It delivers benefits such as heightened productivity through task automation, improved data quality via cleansing and validation tools, cost reduction by streamlining manual processes, and increased data agility for simplified pipeline deployment and management.

Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, IBM and others in Data Integration. Updated: January 2026.

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