No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM SPSS Modeler vs KNIME Business Hub comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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

IBM SPSS Modeler
Ranking in Data Mining
3rd
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
KNIME Business Hub
Ranking in Data Mining
1st
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 16.0%, down from 18.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of KNIME Business Hub is 10.7%, down from 24.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
KNIME Business Hub10.7%
IBM SPSS Modeler16.0%
Other73.3%
Data Mining
 

Q&A Highlights

EzzAbdelfattah - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Professor Of Statistics at a university with 10,001+ employees
Dec 30, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

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.
NataliaRaffo - PeerSpot reviewer
Co Founder & Chief Data Officer Cdo at NTT DATA
Workflow automation has accelerated advanced analytics and machine learning delivery
Sometimes it is a little bit difficult to use some nodes when we have many large-scale data, for example, CSV files with a large amount of data. It is sometimes difficult to try to import the data in KNIME Business Hub nodes because I think that some features that are in the CSV in text, for example, large text, is difficult for KNIME Business Hub to import these fields. I don't know why, but it is very difficult. We need to try to use different nodes for importing the data, such as File Reader and CSV Reader. However, I think that it is always the features that have much text, it is difficult for KNIME Business Hub to understand and import this information. I don't know why, or maybe I don't know if we don't know what the better option is to configure the node to import all the CSV or the data set. However, we have always had this problem. In some nodes, sometimes it is the same because sometimes, for example, I have a CSV and in my CSV, I have a feature that is, for example, a date. When I import this data set in the File Reader node, I have problems with this field because it is a date, but the problem is that it imports it as text, for example. We try to use their nodes that convert text to date, but sometimes it is difficult, and it is not immediate to transform the text into a date. So we needed to convert the text into a date in the CSV, and then import it again in the KNIME Business Hub node and try to have a good read of this field. I know that KNIME Business Hub has some nodes to convert text to date and others, but sometimes it is difficult to use these nodes. I don't know why. Maybe it needs a specific format for the date and we need to transform our feature in this option. So sometimes it is a large process to convert these features. However, sometimes we need to investigate and search for other nodes, and try with other nodes to import these cases.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The main benefit is it makes things a little easier to do."
"Some basic form of feature engineering for classification models. This really quickens the model development process."
"IBM SPSS Modeler is the easiest solution."
"IBM was chosen because of usability. It's point and click, whereas the other out-of-the box-solution, or open-source solutions, require full-on programming and a much higher skill level."
"I like the automation and that this product is very organized and easy to use."
"Stability is good."
"SPSS Modeler is a friendly interface for a beginner user."
"It's very easy to use. The drag and drop feature makes it very easy when you are building and testing the streams. That's very useful."
"For organizations with a small team of data analysts or data scientists, it is a very easy tool to become familiar with predictive modeling, and makes it possible to hand over projects to colleagues without the need to extensively document them."
"KNIME is more intuitive and easier to use, which is the principal advantage."
"The nicest part of KNIME is that the designer tool is free."
"All of the features related to the ETL are fantastic. That includes the connectors to other programs, databases, and the meta node function."
"The most valuable is the ability to seamlessly connect operators without the need for extensive programming."
"The solution allows one to do many things, including data preparation, and I was able to apply basic algorithms through just dragging and dropping, in contrast to Python and other solutions, which involve much coding."
"I would rate the stability of KNIME a ten out of ten."
"For anybody who is looking for a new data science platform, KNIME is a product that I can recommend."
 

Cons

"Unstructured data is not appropriate for SPSS Modeler."
"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."
"The time series should be improved."
"I think mapping for geographic data would also be a really great thing to be able to use."
"The challenge for the very technical data scientists: It is constraining for them.​"
"Regarding visual modeling, it is not the biggest strength of the product, although from what I hear in the latest release it's going to be a lot stronger. That, to me, has always been the biggest flaw in using this. It's very difficult to get good visualization."
"There are issues, we try to mitigate them. There are always issues."
"We have run into a few problems doing some entity matching/analytics using this portion of the software."
"For graphics, the interface is a little confusing. So, this is a point that could be improved."
"I wish there were more video training resources for KNIME. The current videos are very short, and most learning is text-based. Longer training sessions would be helpful, especially for complex flowchart use cases. Webinars focusing on starting projects and analyzing data would also be beneficial."
"It's very general in terms of architecture, and as a result, it doesn't support efficient running. That is, the speed needs to be improved."
"I've had some problems integrating KNIME with other solutions."
"The solution is inconvenient when it comes to wrangling data that includes multiple steps or features because each step or feature requires its own icon."
"The user interface could be a little bit more comfortable."
"KNIME doesn't handle large datasets or a high number of records well."
"In the previous versions, I had some issues when reading large Excel files due to memory usage."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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 a huge increase to time savings."
"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"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."
"Scaling to the on-premises version requires a licensing fee per user that is a bit expensive in comparison to R, Python, and SAS."
"It is expensive to procure the license."
"KNIME Business Hub is expensive for small companies."
"I use the open-source version."
"We're using the free academic license just locally. I went for KNIME because they have a free academic license."
"It's an open-source solution."
"I use the tool's free version."
"KNIME is an open-source tool, so it's free to use."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Mining solutions are best for your needs.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Answers from the Community

EzzAbdelfattah - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Professor Of Statistics at a university with 10,001+ employees
Dec 30, 2019
Dec 30, 2019
The main difference lies in the community that has KNIME because the additional modules serve a multitude of different jobs from image processing, management of ssh file systems to chemical molecule calculations.
2 out of 4 answers
ZW
Robotics Club President at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Dec 27, 2019
KNIME. It free, open-source, and you can plug in Java, Python, R, and Matlab. The community is awesome.
Dec 28, 2019
The main difference lies in the community that has KNIME because the additional modules serve a multitude of different jobs from image processing, management of ssh file systems to chemical molecule calculations.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
9%
Construction Company
7%
University
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Educational Organization
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for KNIME?
I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with KNIME?
I would describe KNIME Decision Hub as somewhat helpful in making data-driven decisions more efficient. It could have been a scalable decisioning as a service at the back end, but it's not working ...
What is your primary use case for KNIME?
I mainly use KNIME Business Hub currently for data ETLs and then it meets with predictive analytics. Sometimes I utilize it for forecasting, but mostly it's predictive analytics. I have utilized bo...
 

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler
KNIME Analytics Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Infocom Corporation, Dymatrix Consulting Group, Soluzione Informatiche, MMI Agency, Estanislao Training and Solutions, Vialis AG
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SPSS Modeler vs. KNIME Business Hub and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,838 professionals have used our research since 2012.