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SAS Data Management vs dbt comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 19, 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

dbt
Ranking in Data Integration
18th
Ranking in Data Quality
8th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
5
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAS Data Management
Ranking in Data Integration
29th
Ranking in Data Quality
7th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Data Governance (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2026, in the Data Integration category, the mindshare of dbt is 1.7%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAS Data Management is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Integration Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
dbt1.7%
SAS Data Management1.1%
Other97.2%
Data Integration
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2780388 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Data Engineer at a pharma/biotech company with 10,001+ employees
Streamlined Data engineering and built-in lineages
The best features of dbt include lineage and Jinja templating languages that make it easy for creating pipelines. The built-in lineage feature provides a good understanding of the several layers where data is being loaded in dbt, allowing visibility from different layers into the end product. dbt has positively impacted version controlling as it has different version control steps involved. The specific improvements seen with version control in dbt are that it has helped trace the data lineage, enabled faster trace and rollbacks, and enabled safe collaboration at every scale, which has improved data quality. A return on investment has been seen from using dbt as the time has reduced while utilizing dbt in the form of data pipelines and ETL scripting. There is operational efficiency achieved, and data quality and governance have also been achieved with modular SQL and version controlling, which reduced duplication of data and data errors.
FK
Data Scientist & Scrum Master at Volvo Group
Has supported centralized data access and improved governance through unified administration
The best features I appreciate about SAS Data Management tool are that it's easy to create the flows and schedule data, and the tables are not too big, making it easy to control the ETL process, including user access which is also easy to manage in SAS. The data integration tools with SAS Data Management were quite good because they allowed me to do all lineage, to manage and see all the variables, find the libraries where the data is, and understand the data in just one tool. Offering another development environment combining code and predefined objects, where I could just drag and drop to achieve what I needed, although some objects were not too good, but some were effective. The metadata management feature of SAS Data Management helps a lot; creating your data marts or data lake with good naming conventions, library conventions, and so on is very important because it allows easy queries to find the whole structure, though I think metadata governance also depends on first definitions, not only on the tool. SAS Data Management is very good for data governance; for me, it was the best tool I worked with in data management, although I don't have too much experience with others, and it truly helped a lot.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Since we migrated from SSIS to dbt model architecture, it takes around four hours only to complete a full refresh, and the client is now happy because our downtime was drastically reduced when we perform a complete refresh of the data."
"dbt has positively impacted my organization by allowing us to create our data pipelines much faster, going from ingestion of data to creating a data product in weeks instead of months, and we can do it in-house with the skillset we already have."
"The product is developer-friendly."
"There is operational efficiency achieved, and data quality and governance have also been achieved with modular SQL and version controlling, which reduced duplication of data and data errors."
"The technical support is excellent."
"The data integration tools with SAS Data Management were quite good because they allowed me to do all lineage, to manage and see all the variables, find the libraries where the data is, and understand the data in just one tool."
"The tool is reliable, quick, and powerful."
"I am impressed with the tool's ability to customize."
"The product offers very good flexibility."
"The platform's robust data governance capabilities ensure strong compliance with regulatory standards."
"In terms of which features I have found most valuable, I would say the importing and exporting features. Additionally, the data sorting, categorizing and summarizing features, especially how it can summarize based on categories. These are the key features."
"The solution is very stable. We haven't faced any issues with glitches or bugs. We haven't had any crashes."
 

Cons

"Since dbt has a license cost, if a company is small and does not have much budget, they can explore other tools because there are other tools that provide the same functionality at a lower cost."
"dbt can be improved as I find the co-pilot in dbt is not very good, and my team has tried using it but opted to move off it and use other co-pilots such as GitHub."
"The solution must add more Python-based implementations."
"Dbt is not as stable as preferred, as it has had a few outages in the current year itself, so improvement should be made in the outages section as it is not stable."
"The pricing of the solution needs to be improved. They need to work to make it more affordable."
"The solution is quite expensive and hard to install/configure."
"With SAS Data Management, you have to purchase an external driver, configure all of the tables for all of the data that you will extract from Salesforce. It's not a straightforward process."
"The solution could use better documentation."
"We implemented it a while ago, and we are trying to improve the data delivery performance. We are looking into how to get faster and automated reporting. We would need better designs and workflows."
"We find we often have to go back and re-train users when there are changes made to the solution because the changes are not intuitive."
"Very little needs to improve but perhaps a nicer graphic interface and remaining competetive in the growing field of data analytics."
"One problem is accessing the data using a solution other than SAS. The SAS data, which we create in the SAS, cannot be accessed by other tools. We can't open those data in other applications. So we need to have that application in place."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution’s pricing is affordable."
"The licensing model for vCenter is a perpetual license with yearly payments."
"The tool is a bit expensive."
"The solution is expensive."
"While it is even free for personal use on the cloud, it can be expensive for desktop installations and enterprise use."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
14%
Insurance Company
9%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Government
8%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for dbt?
The pricing, setup cost, and licensing cost are managed by our infrastructure teams. As data engineers, we are not familiar with these details. I need to check with my infrastructure team on whethe...
What needs improvement with dbt?
I am not very familiar with dbt's version control system. I cannot identify any improvements in dbt because I am still exploring more functionality. I have been working with dbt for only three year...
What is your primary use case for dbt?
I am currently working with dbt and Snowflake together. We use dbt for data transformation purposes. We obtain the data and store the raw data directly into Snowflake, then perform all transformati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Data Management?
From my experience, SAS Data Management is an expensive tool.
What needs improvement with SAS Data Management?
There is significant room for improvement, especially with regard to using a hybrid approach that involves both CAS and persistent storage.
What is your primary use case for SAS Data Management?
The main idea for using SAS Data Management was to bring all data inside SAS. I brought the finance area and the sales area in the company that I have worked, along with some market planning data, ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAS Data Management Platform, Data Management Platform, DataFlux
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Data Management, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Absa, Aegon, Allianz Global Corporate & SpecialtyAusgrid, Bank of Queensland, Bell, BMC Software, Canada Post, Ceska pojistovna, Chantecler, Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, Credit Guarantee Corporation, Cr_dito y Cauci‹n, Delaware State Police, Deutsche Lufthansa, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, DSM, Enerjisa, ERGO Insurance Group, Florida Department of Corrections, Generali Hellas, Gitanjali Group, Gloucestershire Constabulary, GS Home Shopping, HealthPartners, IAG New Zealand, iJET, Invacare, Livzon Pharmaceutical Group, Los Angeles County, Miami Herald Media Company, Netherlands Enterprise Agency, New Zealand Ministry of Health, Nippon Paper, North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services, Orlando Magic, OTP Group, PITT OHIO, Plano Independent School District, RWE Poland, Spanish Air Force, Stockholm County Council, Telus, The Travel Corporation, Transitions Optical, Triad Analytic Solutions, UNIQA, US Census Bureau, US Department of Housing and Urban Development, USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service, West Midlands Police, XS Inc., Zenith Insurance
Find out what your peers are saying about SAS Data Management vs. dbt and other solutions. Updated: February 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.