My own Easy Data Transform software (https://www.easydatatransform.com) does a fair amount of what Alteryx does and is just $99 (one time fee). So cheaper than Excel!
How is this better than power query? I know this has a visulaization of the transformations, but that's on the roadmap for PQ.
Apart from the visual UI (which is a big deal, especially if you have lots of transforms):
-wider range of input and output file formats supported (xls/xlsx, fixed width, json, xml, csv, tsv, yaml, html, markdown, vcard)
-much faster
-45 transforms to choose from
-written from scratch for the purpose, rather than grafted on to an existing product
-doesn't mangle your data like Excel does!