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 7.2, while Ascend.io is ranked #93. 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

3,194 Views
2,970 Comparison Views

90% willing to recommend

Ascend.io

Read 1 Ascend.io review

497 Views
328 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

93rd

Average Rating

9.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

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
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 like Alteryx's browser tool because you can view how your data is handled live. There are many other valuable tools like transpose and the crosstab. You can quickly pivot your data, and there are connections throughout the database. It's so easy to create a connection. If you connect to sign apps or a more complex database, the tool contains all the tools you need."

"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."

"The most valuable feature of Alteryx Designer is its ability to select all the inputs and formulas."

"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 is user-friendly."

"Alteryx Designer is stable."

"The functionality of drag and drop is the most valuable. It is a very user-friendly tool that can be understood easily. My teams also work with other solutions, such as Integration Services, and these solutions are very difficult for people who don't have technical knowledge."

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

"We need more documentation."

"Alteryx could move faster to create a cloud equivalent of the desktop version of Designer."

"The actual usage part of it needs to be explained more. It's too vague right now."

"The only thing is sometimes it can be a bit slow."

"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."

"When configuring the Logix, the UA could be improved."

"Its cost can sometimes be a drawback."

"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."

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

"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."

"The licenses are expensive, making it difficult to consider acquiring additional licenses to the existing ones."

"I rate Alteryx Designer a six out of ten for pricing."

"The tool is priced high."

"Alteryx Designer is an 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 solution is expensive. It has license fees, which are renewable every year."

More Alteryx Designer pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

21%

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

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Alteryx Designer

January 2026

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Buyer's Guide

Data Integration

January 2026

Download Ascend.io product report

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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