Palantir or Alteryx: Which Data Analytics Platform is Worth Investing?

While Palantir has a bad reputation for its role in USA immigration scheme, it has received huge market acceptance recently.

There are many data analytics companies that have dominated the industry with their key offerings. Two popular platforms in this niche are Palantir and Alteryx, which also happen to be rivals. In this article we shall explore the variance between these two.

Palantir

Palantir builds software that connects data, technologies, humans and environments. It has developed several platforms, like Foundry and Gotham that are being used by government bodies and commercial customers as a business solution tool. Generally, its solutions cater to capital markets, crisis response, defense, financial compliance, insider threat, intelligence, and legal intelligence.

Palantir Foundry transforms the ways organizations operate by creating a central operating system for their data. Foundry also allows individual users to integrate and analyze the data they need in one place. It allows users to do a better data governance job. It also enables an extensive analysis which cannot be done on a personal computer, or even an on-premises server because of the computational effort that is required.

Meanwhile, Palantir Gotham is used primarily by government agencies that look for bad actors hiding in complex networks: terrorist cells, trafficking rings, money laundering schemes, vectors of foodborne illness, and so forth. These organizations use Gotham to bring their data sources and systems together, map the data to a common model, and analyze it in one place. Though Foundry's market is broad, Gotham is still the best platform on the market for investigative analysis.

Apart from sharing the status of a widely used data mining tool, Palantir is also well-known for its controversial uses. Few years ago, the platform was heavily criticized for its role in USA deportation scheme ran by ICE and Britain's post-Brexit immigration policies.

Alteryx

One of the main competitors of Palantir is market space is Alteryx. Alteryx is popular for its provision of an end-to-end data science & analytics platform for enterprises. For instance, its Alteryx APA Platform is known for its ease of use and no-code, low-code analytics that empowers analysts, business leaders, and C-level executives to create and use data-driven insights. Though this product seems tad confusing owing to its complexity, it has a great user interface and this makes it easier to learn. Further, its built-in tool like time Formaters, Filters and Joins facilitate the work of doing data cleansing and data prepping for any ETL job. Even the input and output formats are highly flexible. Also, its functionality of drag and drop makes it the most valuable.

Alteryx's software services cater to industries like financial services, health care, retail, transportation and logistics, oil and gas, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology and more.

Market Scenario

According to a survey on a group of over 300 Benzinga investors and traders to determine, whether shares of Palantir or Alteryx stock would grow the most by 2025 – the response has been quite promising for Palantir. 69.2% of survey respondents believed shares of Palantir would grow more in the next five years. In contrast, only 30.8% of respondents said Alteryx will grow the most by 2025. One of the key drawbacks of Alteryx is its high pricing.

Sources say that for Alteryx, its stock has been rather volatile over the last year. This volatility was believed to happen due to lower than expected Q2 growth at only 17% and a low forecast for the second half of the year. For a company that has seen 69% compound annual growth for the three years running up to 2020, this was quite a shock to its investors.

At the same time, Palantir's adjusted gross margin, contribution margin (which excludes sales and marketing costs and stock-based compensation), and operating margin witnessed an expansion in the Q4 and also for the full year. In the same quarter (Q4 2020), Palantir had US $5 million or more, including 12 contracts worth US$10 million or more. Some of its major wins included deals with Rio Tinto, PG&E, BP, the FDA, and the NHS. Even the USA Army which already uses Palantir Gotham platform to plan missions, signed a new AI contract, renewed an analytics partnership, and signed a new contract to modernize its ground stations with Palantir over the past year alone. Recently, it secured a huge contract from IBM too.

To surmise, both Palantir and Alteryx offer some unique features that make them exception in market and data analytics sector. While choosing between the two and leveraging them for business functions depends on user requirements, budget, etc., purchasing their stock requires a deeper analysis of stock market trends.