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Databricks vs IBM SPSS Modeler comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 5, 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

Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
1st
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
94
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (4th), 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
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (3rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Databricks is 7.6%, down from 16.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 3.1%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks7.6%
IBM SPSS Modeler3.1%
Other89.3%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
RB
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"It is fast, it's scalable, and it does the job it needs to do."
"It offers AI functionalities that assist with code management and machine learning processes."
"Databricks is a robust solution for big data processing, offering flexibility and powerful features."
"One of the features provides nice interactive clusters, or compute instances that you don't really need to manage often."
"I like the simplicity and ease of use."
"Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed."
"We are primarily interested in the supply chain data analytics, focusing mainly on procurement, because we believe that there is a lot of value in spend analytics in understanding and identifying opportunities, reducing prices, improving negotiations, and better understanding the categories."
"We are using it either for workforce deployment or to improve our operations."
"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."
"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."
"I was familiar with using IBM SPSS Modeler separately in the private sector before that. It's a good tool for extracting data from data warehouses, creating streams, and manipulating logic to extract final data."
"The visual modeling capability is one of its attractive features."
"It's a very good and reasonably priced solution."
"Projecting models, forecasting, being able to incorporate things that we could only imagine, and coming into new, faster learning capabilities from it."
 

Cons

"There is room for improvement in the documentation of processes and how it works."
"It would be better if it were faster. It can be slow, and it can be super fast for big data. But for small data, sometimes there is a sub-second response, which can be considered slow. In the next release, I would like to have automatic creation of APIs because they don't have it at the moment, and I spend a lot of time building them."
"Databricks is not geared towards the end-user, but rather it is for data engineers or data scientists."
"Databricks is an analytics platform. It should offer more data science. It should have more features for data scientists to work with."
"If I want to create a Databricks account, I need to have a prior cloud account such as an AWS account or an Azure account. Only then can I create a Databricks account on the cloud. However, if they can make it so that I can still try Databricks even if I don't have a cloud account on AWS and Azure, it would be great. That is, it would be nice if it were possible to create a pseudo account and be provided with a free trial. It is very essential to creating a workforce on Databricks. For example, students or corporate staff can then explore and learn Databricks."
"While Databricks is generally a robust solution, I have noticed a limitation with debugging in the Delta Live Table, which could be improved."
"From a purely technical perspective, I would rate Databricks an eight out of ten. However, there is a failure in terms of user adoption."
"I would like to see improvement with the UI. It is functional and useful, but it's a bit clunky at times."
"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."
"It is not integrated with Qlik, Tableau, and Power BI."
"​I would like better integration into the Weather Company solution. I have raised a couple of concerns about this integration and having more time series capabilities.​"
"There are issues, we try to mitigate them. There are always issues."
"The product does not have a search function for tags."
"Setup is a little problematic for desktop. A nightmare for server."
"The software is quite expensive and IBM is currently marketing its other digital dashboard tools such as IBM cognos, now we aren't sure on the plans of IBM integrating these two softwares."
"Time Series or forecasting needs to be easier. It is a very important feature, and it should be made easier and more automated to use. For instance, for logistic regression, binary or multinomial is used automatically based on the type of the target variable. I wish they can make Time Series easier to use in a similar way."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are different versions."
"The price is okay. It's competitive."
"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."
"I rate the price of Databricks as eight out of ten."
"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."
"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."
"The solution uses a pay-per-use model with an annual subscription fee or package. Typically this solution is used on a cloud platform, such as Azure or AWS, but more people are choosing Azure because the price is more reasonable."
"We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is."
"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."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"The scalability was kind of limited by our ability to get other people licenses, and that was usually more of a financial constraint. It's expensive, but it's a good tool."
"It is a huge increase to time savings."
"$5,000 annually."
"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."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"Having in mind all four tools from Garner’s top quadrant, the pricing of this tool is competitive and it reflects the quality that it offers."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
7%
Healthcare Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise57
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
 

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 ...
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...
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...
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...
What needs improvement with IBM SPSS Modeler?
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 ...
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
SPSS Modeler
 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks vs. IBM SPSS Modeler and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.