Databricks vs IBM SPSS Modeler comparison

Databricks and IBM are both solutions in the Data Science Platforms category. Databricks is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0. Databricks holds a 9.3% mindshare in Data Science Platforms, compared to IBM’s 3.5% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Databricks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Databricks

Read 93 Databricks reviews

18,865 Views
8,112 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

IBM SPSS Modeler

Read 40 IBM SPSS Modeler reviews

2,695 Views
1,967 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Databricks

IBM SPSS Modeler

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 2024

IBM SPSS Modeler and Databricks are data analytics competitors. Databricks has the upper hand due to its scalability and real-time processing for large-scale operations.

Features: IBM SPSS Modeler offers robust statistical tools, intuitive flowchart modeling, and effective predictive analytics. Databricks provides strong integration with big data technologies, advanced machine learning workflows, and collaboration through its notebook interface.

Room for Improvement: IBM SPSS Modeler could enhance its cloud capabilities and collaboration features. It may also benefit from more advanced machine learning tools. Databricks can improve by simplifying its initial adaptation to cloud environments, optimizing cost for smaller operations, and streamlining complex workflows for non-technical users.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM SPSS Modeler is straightforward to deploy on-premise with minimal cloud infrastructure and offers attentive customer service. Databricks supports quick, cloud-native deployments with strong team collaboration but may require additional training for cloud acclimation.

Pricing and ROI: IBM SPSS Modeler generally presents lower initial setup costs with good ROI for small and mid-sized statistical analyses. Databricks, while involving higher upfront investment, often yields a higher long-term ROI through its scalability and big data capabilities, justifying the initial expense for extensive data operations.

To learn more, read our detailed Databricks vs. IBM SPSS Modeler Report (Updated: December 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Databricks vs. IBM SPSS Modeler

December 2025

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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

Databricks

Ranking in Data Science Platforms

1st

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Data Warehouse (9th), Data Management Platforms (DMP) (5th), Streaming Analytics (1st)

IBM SPSS Modeler

Ranking in Data Science Platforms

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Mining (3rd)

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Databricks is 9.3%, down from 18.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 3.5%, up from 2.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Science Platforms Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Databricks	9.3%
IBM SPSS Modeler	3.5%
Other	87.2%

Data Science Platforms

Featured Reviews

Satyam Wagh

Consultant at Nice Software Solutions

Unified data workflows have cut ticket processing times and are driving faster business insights

Databricks already provides monthly updates and continuously works on delivering new features while enhancing existing ones. However, the platform could become easier to use. While instruction-led workshops are available, offering more free instructional workshops would allow a wider audience to access and learn about Databricks. Additionally, providing use cases would help beginners gain more knowledge and hands-on experience. Regarding my experience, I was initially unfamiliar with the platform and had to conduct research and learn through various videos. I did find some instruction-led classes, but several of those required payment. The platform should provide more free resources to enable a broader audience to access and learn about Databricks. The platform itself is user-friendly and easy to use without complex issues, so I believe it does not need improvement in its core functionality. Rather, supporting aspects can be enhanced.

Read full review

Prof. Dr. Rudolf Bisping

Business Owner at SASS GmbH

Support and flexibility enable effective project initiation and meet customer needs but deployment requires enhancement

The customer comes to you and says they want to deploy it and make a production out of this, which is very difficult and expensive with IBM SPSS Modeler. With MATLAB, there is no problem. I have a solution, and then I convert my MATLAB solution to C programming language. This I can deploy, and I can check it, and it is MISRA compatible. It is very easy to deploy it, to go from MATLAB to C or C++, which is actually needed in the car industry. In the car industry, they want to have it in the hardware. You cannot put MATLAB or IBM SPSS Modeler in the hardware of a car, but with C, there is no problem with a microcontroller. They can shoot it into the microcontroller, and I can check it with Polyspace, and it is MISRA compatible, which is an industrial standard. There is nothing similar in IBM SPSS Modeler. I made solutions with IBM SPSS Modeler, and then the customer said they wanted to make a production out of it, and it was not possible. I stopped with IBM SPSS Modeler 18. It is now 18.6 from what I know at the moment. I do not believe that there is a possibility to design a graphic user interface with it. It is itself a graphic user interface, where you put all sorts of little icons into the display.

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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

"We are completely satisfied with the ease of connecting to different sources of data or pocket files in the search"

"The initial setup phase of Databricks was good."

"We like that this solution can handle a wide variety and velocity of data engineering, either in batch mode or real-time."

"The integration with Python and the notebooks really helps."

"I would rate them ten out of ten."

"Imageflow is a visual tool that helps make it easier for business people to understand complex workflows."

"It helps integrate data science and machine learning capabilities."

"The processing capacity is tremendous in the database."

More Databricks pros

"The visual modeling capability is one of its attractive features."

"It handles large data better than the previous system that we were using, which was basically Excel and Access. We serve upwards of 300,000 parts over a 150 regions and we need to crunch a lot of numbers."

"It scales. I have not run into any challenges where it will not perform."

"You take two quarters and compare them and this tool is ideal because it gives you a lot of visibility on the before and after."

"It is just a lot faster. So you do not have to write a bunch of code, you can throw that stuff on there pretty quickly and do prototyping quickly."

"Automated modelling, classification, or clustering are very useful."

"New algorithms are added into every version of Modeler, e.g., SMOTE, random forest, etc. The Derive node is used for the syntax code to derive the data."

"Some basic form of feature engineering for classification models. This really quickens the model development process."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pros

Cons

"Doesn't provide a lot of credits or trial options."

"This solution only supports queries in SQL and Python, which is a bit limiting."

"It would be great if Databricks could integrate all the cloud platforms."

"Can be improved by including drag-and-drop features."

"Databricks has added some alerts and query functionality into their SQL persona, but the whole SQL persona, which is like a role, needs a lot of development. The alerts are not very flexible, and the query interface itself is not as polished as the notebook interface that is used through the data science and machine learning persona. It is clunky at present."

"The API deployment and model deployment are not easy on the Databricks side."

"Databricks can improve by making the documentation better."

"Implementation of Databricks is still very code heavy."

More Databricks cons

"I would like see more programming languages added, like MATLAB. That would be better."

"Unstructured data is not appropriate for SPSS Modeler."

"The standard package (personal) is not supported for database connection."

"We would like to see better visualizations and easier integration with Cognos Analytics for reporting."

"Customer support is hard to contact."

"There are performance issues. Extracting data from many combined tables can take hours and occasionally crash the server due to memory leaks. This performance problem bothers people. The performance issue seems to be related to the server. We design streams on the client and submit them to the server, which generates a large SQL statement. There are two potential bottlenecks: one in the server and another in data extraction. I'm unsure about the exact mechanics of data splitting when fetching from the database."

"If IBM could add some of the popular models into the SPSS for further analysis, like popular regression models, I think that would be a helpful improvement."

"Neural networks are quite simple, and now neural networks are evolving to these architecture related to deep learning, etc. They didn't incorporate this in IBM SPSS Modeler."

More IBM SPSS Modeler cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We pay as we go, so there isn't a fixed price. It's charged by the unit. I don't have any details detail about how they measure this, but it should be a mix between processing and quantity of data handled. We run a simulation based on our use cases, which gives us an estimate. We've been monitoring this, and the costs have met our expectations."

"We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is."

"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."

"We implement this solution on behalf of our customers who have their own Azure subscription and they pay for Databricks themselves. The pricing is more expensive if you have large volumes of data."

"There are different versions."

"The basic version of this solution is now open-source, so there are no license costs involved. However, there is a charge for any advanced functionality and this can be quite expensive."

"Databricks are not costly when compared with other solutions' prices."

"It is an expensive tool. The licensing model is a pay-as-you-go one."

More Databricks pricing and cost advice

"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."

"When you are close to end of quarter, IBM and its partners can get you 60% to 70% discounts, so literally wait for the last day of the quarter for the best prices. You may feel like you are getting robbed if you can't receive a good discount."

"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."

"The government has funds and a budget, it's hard to say if it's expensive or cheap. In Canada, they have a yearly budget. They used to encourage people to use the modeler for development. If ten users use the server with ten licenses, it runs faster. But if forty users use the same appliance, everything slows down. People then think it's not easy to do things and prefer using remote tools like Python to extract data from the database. It's not about being expensive or cheap, but about people's knowledge and experience in how to do the work."

"It is an expensive product."

"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."

"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."

"It is a huge increase to time savings."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

18%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Healthcare Company

Government

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

University

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	26
Midsize Enterprise	12
Large Enterprise	56

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	32

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?

Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or Python. It offers many different cluster choices and excellent integration with ...

See all answers

How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?

We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designed to accelerate innovation projects. It is based on Spark so it is very fast. It...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?

Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analytics teams that have to interpret data to further the business goals of their orga...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM SPSS Modeler?

The government has funds and a budget, it's hard to say if it's expensive or cheap. In Canada, they have a yearly budget. They used to encourage people to use the modeler for development. If ten us...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM SPSS Modeler?

See all answers

What is your primary use case for IBM SPSS Modeler?

I have been using IBM SPSS Modeler for a long time. I am using IBM SPSS Modeler mainly for ETL. Sometimes I use it to compare the results of the modeling as compared to MATLAB. MATLAB is the main t...

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Databricks

February 2026

Download Databricks product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Modeler

January 2026

Download IBM SPSS Modeler product report

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash

SPSS Modeler

Overview

Databricks offers a scalable, versatile platform that integrates seamlessly with Spark and multiple languages, supporting data engineering, machine learning, and analytics in a unified environment.

Databricks stands out for its scalability, ease of use, and powerful integration with Spark, multiple languages, and leading cloud services like Azure and AWS. It provides tools such as the Notebook for collaboration, Delta Lake for efficient data management, and Unity Catalog for data governance. While enhancing data engineering and machine learning workflows, it faces challenges in visualization and third-party integration, with pricing and user interface navigation being common concerns. Despite needing improvements in connectivity and documentation, it remains popular for tasks like real-time processing and data pipeline management.

What features make Databricks unique?

Notebook: Enables collaborative work among team members.
Delta Lake: Optimizes data management operations.
Unity Catalog: Provides governance over data assets.
Cloud Integration: Seamlessly connects with major cloud platforms.

What benefits can users expect from Databricks?

Versatility: Supports diverse applications in data science and engineering.
Performance: Delivers efficient handling of large-scale analytics tasks.
Collaboration: Enhances teamwork in data projects.
Unified Environment: Centralizes machine learning and analytics activities.

In the tech industry, Databricks empowers teams to perform comprehensive data analytics, enabling them to conduct extensive ETL operations, run predictive modeling, and prepare data for SparkML. In retail, it supports real-time data processing and batch streaming, aiding in better decision-making. Enterprises across sectors leverage its capabilities for creating secure APIs and managing data lakes effectively.

Databricks

IBM SPSS Modeler is an extensive predictive analytics platform that is designed to bring predictive intelligence to decisions made by individuals, groups, systems and the enterprise. By providing a range of advanced algorithms and techniques that include text analytics, entity analytics, decision management and optimization, SPSS Modeler can help you consistently make the right decisions from the desktop or within operational systems.

Buy
https://www.ibm.com/products/spss-modeler/pricing

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https://www.ibm.com/account/reg/us-en/signup?formid=urx-19947

IBM

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware

Reisebªro Idealtours GmbH, MedeAnalytics, Afni, Israel Electric Corporation, Nedbank Ltd., DigitalGlobe, Vodafone Hungary, Aegon Hungary, Bureau Veritas, Brammer Group, Florida Department of Juvenile Justice, InSites Consulting, Fortis Turkey

Buyer's Guide

Databricks vs. IBM SPSS Modeler

December 2025

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