In this day and age, data and insights play a significant role in streamlining various operations for businesses. To get those insights, organisations often have to map data from several different sources, and this process is known as data preparation. If we take a look at the current market, there are a host of tools for data preparation, and anyone with basic training will be able to work their way out since these tools are user-friendly. These tools can also deliver enhanced productivity and efficiency to an organisation.

What follows in this article is a list of carefully evaluated data preparation tools that are creating a buzz in 2020.

Altair Monarch

Considered a leader in the desktop-based self-service data preparation solution space, Altair Monarch connects to multiple sources of data, such as structured and unstructured data, cloud-based data, and big data. With the need for coding, a user can connect to data, cleanse, and manipulate data. The tool comes with over 80 pre-built data preparation functions and models that can be converted into common BI or any other analytics platform. The tool can also quickly convert disparate data into several rows and columns. Last but not the least, the tool also allows a user to enrich and transform during the data preparation process via its virtual based data-preparation and machine learning tools.

Alteryx

Alteryx is at the forefront of the self-service data analytics movement. The company’s platform ‘Designer’ is designed to discover, prep, and analyse a client’s detail at a fast pace. Once done, it can maintain the same pace to deploy and share the analytics for broader insights. The easy-to-use interface of the tool allows a user to connect and cleanse data from data warehouses, cloud applications, and spreadsheets. The tool from Alteryx also includes data blending for spatial files, which can be attached to other third-party data such as demographics. 

Paxata

Better known as a DataRobot company, Paxata offers Adaptive Information Platform, which features flexible deployment and self-service operation. It enables analysts and data scientists to collect multiple raw datasets and turn them into valuable information which can be instantly transformed to perform a model training and extract business insights. Designed on a visual user interface, the platform has similar spreadsheet metaphors due to which a user does not need to learn a new tool. Moreover, the Assistance Intelligence of the platform offers algorithm assistance to deduce the meaning of the collected data. 

Trifacta

When it comes to self-service data preparation, Trifacta has chosen a different approach. This is known as ‘data wrangling’ and is distributed into three iterations – Trifacta Wrangler, Wrangler Edge, and Wrangler Enterprise. A user can easily prep data without the need to perform any coding or mapping-based systems. What makes the process easier is the transformation step getting logged, and automatically executed at the time of compilation into the appropriate processing framework. Last but not the least, Data Wrangler enables a user to discover data, structure, clean, enrich, and validate capabilities. 

TIBCO Software

TIBCO Software has recently made a name for itself in this fast-evolving domain. It allows a user to connect, clean, combine and wrangle data from different sources, which also includes big data storage. The software enables a user to make changes as per their preferences through its easy in-line data-wrangling along with providing complete API support. Last but not the least, making the operation more convenient is the tool’s engine, which does not require a user to change the documents during data-wrangling manually.