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What does Alteryx do?

Alteryx is a group of tools that helps business teams get insights out of their data, without needing to write any code.

Last updated Jul 4, 2025analytics
Justin Gage
Justin Gage
Read within learning track:Analyzing Software Companies

The TL;DR

Alteryx is a group of tools that helps business teams get insights out of their data, without needing to write any code.

  • Business data is messy and disorganized, and needs to be moved and cleaned to get value out of it
  • But specialized data teams are a scarce resource, especially at larger companies
  • Alteryx helps non-technical teams move, clean, and analyze their own data, without needing to code
  • Alteryx started with a straightforward workflow builder tool, but has expanded to a lot of other analytics-related products since then

Sound like any other number of tools you’ve seen in the data space? That’s because it is! But it didn’t used to be; Alteryx started back in the 90’s with a pretty neat, and unique at the time, data cleaning tool. But more on that later.

Terms Mentioned

Metric

Analytics

Data warehouse

Machine Learning

Companies Mentioned

Alteryx logo

Alteryx

AYX

Data is messy and disorganized: the need for ETL

If you’ve been reading Technically for a while, you’ll be familiar with the fundamental fact that the data you need is usually not the data you have. Imagine you’re part of a marketing team, and you want some insight into how one of your recent campaigns is doing. Easy, right? Not so fast. The data you need is all over the place, physically:

  • Form signups and whitepaper downloads from HubSpot
  • Web traffic data collected via Segment in your data warehouse
  • Paid search data from Google in AdWords
  • …the list goes on

So first, you’ll need to get all of this data into one place so you can analyze it together. But before then, you’ve got another issue: the data is dirty, and needs to be cleaned before you can use it. A few examples:

  • You need to filter out whitepaper downloads that came from your teammates
  • Web traffic data is erroneously overstated for last July because of a bug
  • Your campaigns in AdWords are poorly organized and named
  • …the list goes on

None of this cleaning is difficult but it is necessary and it is time consuming. And this phenomenon extends well beyond just the marketing team – pretty much every team’s data is all over the place and needs some TLC. 

ETL – which stands for extract, transform, load – is the process of remedying all of the above.

💡 Go Deeper

Read more about ETL in depth here.

And if you’re lucky, your organization will have a dedicated data team whose job it is to work with you and get your data in order. But many organizations don’t have dedicated data teams; or worse, they do have dedicated data teams but they don’t have enough time to focus on what you need, because this quarter the CEO said we’re focusing our resources on Sales initiatives. Whatever the reason is, data teams (like software engineers) are and probably always will be a scarce resource. When I was on the data team at DigitalOcean, I think the most common Slack message I sent (statistically) was “Sorry, I don’t have any bandwidth for this right now.” [1] Note: if you say this too much, people will not like you.

The original Alteryx product: visual pipelines

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In this post

  • The original Alteryx product: visual pipelines
  • Alteryx since then: making use of your cleaned data
  • Auto Insights
  • Machine Learning
  • Honorable mentions

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