Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Alteryx Designer vs Ascend.io comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Ascend.io
Ranking in Data Integration
93rd
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of Alteryx Designer is 1.5%, down from 2.8% 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
ProductMarket Share (%)
Alteryx Designer1.5%
Ascend.io0.4%
Other98.1%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

Prince Raju - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
reviewer2784462 - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I have been using Alteryx Designer only for data modeling and data structuring."
"The main valuable aspect is the simplicity of use across all features."
"One of the things I like about Alteryx Designer is how easy it is to connect numerous data inputs, including API connectors. This helps tremendously in reducing the time required to extract data from systems like SAP that don't have straightforward connectivity options."
"The solution's ability to hold a huge amount of data in its memory is significant."
"Alteryx Designer is a tool that is pretty much easy to install."
"Alteryx Designer's user interface is great, as it is very user-friendly."
"Workflow automation, in general, is valuable."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"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

"Its cost can sometimes be a drawback."
"When it comes to the pivoting part, the drill-through option is not there in Alteryx."
"Its price can be improved. It is too expensive for our country. Because of its high price, we can't sell Alteryx Designer in this region. We used to be their reseller partner. There is also an additional cost for automating the data and running the flows, which makes it even more expensive. It will be very good if they can let users automate the data for free. Other solutions like Tableau provide this feature for free."
"An improvement for Alteryx Designer would be faster bug fixes and updates."
"It is challenging to view the data using Alteryx Designer."
"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."
"The product could offer more connectors and more databases with support for the in-database function."
"The price of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."
"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

"I rate the product's pricing a two to three out of ten."
"I rate Alteryx Designer a six out of ten for pricing."
"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."
"I rate the price of Alteryx Designer as a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is extremely expensive, and ten is a highly cheap product."
"Alteryx Designer is an expensive solution."
"The product is a bit expensive, it should be looked into."
"Alteryx Designer is a very expensive solution."
"Each license is something like $4,000."
Information not available
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Integration solutions are best for your needs.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Computer Software Company
7%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business12
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise17
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.
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.
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.
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Overview

Information not available
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Informatica, IBM and others in Data Integration. Updated: January 2026.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.