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Alteryx vs SAS Enterprise Guide comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 10, 2024

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
Ranking in Data Preparation Tools
1st
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
82
Ranking in other categories
Predictive Analytics (1st), Data Science Platforms (5th)
SAS Enterprise Guide
Ranking in Data Preparation Tools
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Data Preparation Tools category, the mindshare of Alteryx is 26.0%, down from 33.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAS Enterprise Guide is 16.3%, down from 25.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Preparation Tools
 

Featured Reviews

Theresa McLaughlin - PeerSpot reviewer
Quick development enables seamless data processing despite occasional support issues
There were times when the product would fail during development without an apparent reason. The support structure changed; initially, we received great support, however, it later became less reliable due to licensing issues and a tiered support system. Licensing negotiations were problematic, affecting our product usage. For instance, our licenses were temporarily lost during negotiations when an agreement couldn't be reached.
Karunakar Kankata - PeerSpot reviewer
A predictive data analytics that lacks support for advanced modeling techniques
I find it challenging when I need to use certain functions and predictive modeling techniques in SAS. The procedures and data steps for database analysis take longer, and I've noticed that the current version we are using, lacks support for advanced modeling techniques. We've requested support for these advanced algorithms, but it seems there have been challenges in implementing them. As a result, we are facing difficulties in developing advanced models. Another issue we've encountered is that the community support for SAS is relatively limited compared to open-source environments.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The analytics are easy​."
"Alteryx has helped us spend more time identifying results instead of performing analysis manually. It has helped us in our loading process, including scrubbing data and identifying data elements that need to be corrected. It enables us to understand our data sets a lot better."
"Technical support is very helpful."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"The design portion of this tool is easy to use without code, which his something that something we can appreciate."
"Its initial setup is easy."
"It helps clean messy data and provides spatial analysis."
"Alteryx effectively visualizes the flow of data and what happens at each stage. I also like that it's a no-code solution. I also like that you can troubleshoot certain parts of the workflow by putting them in a sandbox."
"The data cleaning part is valuable. SAS is a very powerful tool to work with and connect with different sources. We have several tables, and we are looking up tables from one place to another place. We are connecting with different data sources. The data is not coming from one source. There are several sources of data, and we have information coming from different sources. There are some flat files, and there is some information from the data warehouse."
"SAS EG offers many excellent features, such as parallel execution on the same server, controlling output datasets in the process flow, and conditional processing."
"We do not bother any longer with some programs did not run, hence having to rerun them again."
"It has definitely improved our communication with senior management."
"Enabled us to remove PC SAS, which reduced risk."
"Filter and sort query builder is valuable. The ability to do advanced SAS programming is also a useful feature because we can do anything by using Enterprise Guide. It has a lot of functionalities. We can build ETL processes. There are clients who are using SAS Enterprise Guide to build ETL processes. They have a SAS-based program that is scheduled to run at a certain frequency to produce some reports for the business. It is a very useful tool for ETL unit tests and functional tests. You can also do data science projects in SAS Enterprise Guide by using different statistics. During my MBA, we used SAS Enterprise Guide for our statistic course. To query the data, there are many solutions such as SQL, but these tools are only a part of the integration. They are only useful for querying the data and require knowledge of SQL, so they are not suitable for business users. SAS Enterprise Guide can be very easily used by business users to filter and sort the data and build queries. It is not necessary to have coding skills to use SAS Enterprise Guide. For this reason, it is attractive for businesses."
"The point and click makes it easy to transfer the knowledge to new employees."
"An excellent tool for data manipulation and analysis."
 

Cons

"The GUI interface functions but it could stand to be updated to a more modern look and feel."
"It seems to me that it is not always user friendly."
"There have been some issues with licensing, particularly with the increased prices. This has led some companies, including ours, to consider reducing the number of licenses or potentially discontinuing their use of Alteryx."
"More statistics tools: We can use to compare SPSS statistics with some automated advisory."
"The solution is improving continuously. They have, for example, just added automatic insights. If they continue to improve on their overall service offering, that would be ideal."
"There are a few hiccups with specific data sets and languages or formats that the data comes in. That may be a minor problem, but we can work through it. We had some issues looking at XML format in added data, but it wasn't significant."
"If there is any way to make the learning curve less steep, that would be ideal."
"There were times when the product would fail during development without an apparent reason."
"They should provide more information for the errors or logs. Currently, it gives you just the error message without explaining anything."
"Sentiment analytics would be a great feature to add into EG."
"The stability is not very reliable."
"A log belongs to each program. I have experienced a situation where when I run just the exec files, it replaces the whole log and I wanted to see the earlier log, then this was not possible."
"Recently, we realized that SAS Enterprise Guide is not so stable and gives us some outputs which are not suitable...Sometimes it's quite hard to report its stability issues."
"Now that I have experience with Tableau, I think the visualization part of SAS EG could be more user friendly and easier to use. Tableau is very easy to use. It's just does a lot of work by itself, including color schemes. I think that could be incorporated easily into SAS EG, which would make it a much better product. Then you would not need Tableau."
"I would like it to give more information rather than just a forever loop that forces you to shut down the system. Give you more error messages without stopping the entire project, or even the entire application. That it displays more error messages rather than terminating the application."
"I had difficulty with the diagrammatic flow chart style representation of projects. When projects got too large and complex (which was basically every project, except the most trivial). There just wasn't enough real estate to display the flow chart and dependencies without a lot of scrolling, even when a flow was down to minimum tasks. My recourse was making the flow less "atomic". E.g., rather than use the various subset, etc., tasks as program nodes to display the details, I would write chunks of code that did a few things and use them as SAS program nodes."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Alteryx isn't extortionately expensive, but it's not cheap either."
"I don't know much about the licensing, but there are some additional costs for certain features."
"It is an expensive solution."
"It's very expensive. I'd rate it a four out of ten in terms of the price. It's great for big companies but not for small companies."
"Alteryx is an expensive solution."
"The seat is too expensive."
"Alteryx is generally more suited for medium—to large companies due to its potentially high licensing costs."
"The cost of the solution could be reduced."
"I did look at the prices a few years ago, and I believe it was approximately $1,000 for a yearly subscription at that time."
"It is expensive. We get a different price based on our corporate rate. So, I'm not sure what the general cost is because we got a special rate for it."
"The pricing and associated costs are substantial."
"Management liked it a lot because the license per seat was cheaper than a traditional SAS environment."
"It is very expensive. We have a basic license, and there are many features that are not available with the basic version."
"In general, SAS has high prices, which is a reason why some clients don't use SAS solutions. The licensing is on a yearly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Government
9%
Healthcare Company
9%
Insurance Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is the Biggest Difference Between Alteryx and IBM SPSS Modeler?
One of the differences is that with Alteryx you can use it as an ETL and analytics tool. Please connect with me directly if you want to know more.
What is the Biggest Difference Between Alteryx and IBM SPSS Modeler?
Alteryx is an extremely easy and flexible data tool, flexible in terms of drag and drop toolset and also has python, R integrations if your team requires this. It can handle over 2 billion rows of...
What is the Biggest Difference Between Alteryx and IBM SPSS Modeler?
I am not familiar with IBM SPSS Modeler, therefore, I cannot compare these two products. Regarding Alteryx I can say the following: - An excellent desktop tool for Data Prep and analytics. - Featu...
What do you like most about SAS Enterprise Guide?
It streamlines our workflow involving multiple steps, from data extraction to modeling, and it is aimed at improving various aspects of banking operations, including customer retention and risk man...
What needs improvement with SAS Enterprise Guide?
I find it challenging when I need to use certain functions and predictive modeling techniques in SAS. The procedures and data steps for database analysis take longer, and I've noticed that the curr...
 

Comparisons

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

AnalyticsIq Inc., belk, BloominBrands Inc., Cardinalhealth, Cineplex, Dairy Queen
Canary Islands Statistics Institute
Find out what your peers are saying about Alteryx vs. SAS Enterprise Guide and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
861,390 professionals have used our research since 2012.