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IBM SPSS Modeler vs KNIME Business Hub comparison

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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
13th
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
65
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 13.3%, down from 21.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of KNIME Business Hub is 11.4%, down from 16.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
KNIME Business Hub11.4%
IBM SPSS Modeler13.3%
Other75.3%
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.
FE
Data Analyst at Politecnico di Milano
Automation has transformed payroll reporting and empowers nontechnical teams to run data workflows
KNIME Business Hub could be improved by increasing integration between KNIME and other tools, such as where companies store data and data visualization tools, making it easier to integrate with these tools and faster to create dashboard updates and quick data extraction through KNIME. An ETL process must communicate with both data sources and the data visualization layer. The integration needs to be more robust, and the nodes that act as connectors to these sources and tools need to be more robust, as the flow often broke when the problem was just a connection issue. This should be improved and perhaps expanded. Another problem was that KNIME could not integrate with all tools. Expanding the possibilities of creating reports and connecting to data visualization tools, especially on the data visualization side, would be useful. The output of an ETL process or ETL flow is visualization through a dashboard or report, so more downstream integration in the process would be needed. Regarding improvements needed in KNIME Business Hub, there may be a hierarchy of users and certain applications created. On the security side of accessing company data, I do not know whether this is already sufficiently considered by KNIME or not. I hope so, because certain data are sensitive and need to be handled with care. The fact that KNIME is enabled to access such data means you also need to ensure that authorizations and data processing policies are respected. Because some company data are sensitive, the fact that KNIME reads them also requires guaranteeing that a policy is respected on the other side. I hope this has already been considered by KNIME Business Hub; I am not aware, but if it has not, this could be an aspect to consider: privacy and the protection of company data when they are read by a system that is not company-owned but still must read them with all proper requirements and safeguards.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"In the solution, I like the virtualization of data flow since it shows what goes where, which is mostly the strength of the tool."
"Most of the other solutions are trying to imitate IBM Modeler."
"Extremely easy to use, it offers a generous selection of proprietary machine learning algorithms."
"I like the automation and that this product is very organized and easy to use."
"It will scale up to anything we need."
"Projecting models, forecasting, being able to incorporate things that we could only imagine, and coming into new, faster learning capabilities from it."
"It’s definitely scalable, it’s all on the same platform, it’s well integrated. I think the integration is important in terms of scalablility because essentially, having the entire suite helps a lot to scale it"
"Our business units' capabilities with SPSS Modeler is high. They no longer waste time on modeling and algorithms, meaning they are not coding any more. For example, segmentation projects now take one to three months, rather than six months to a year, as before."
"I would rate the stability of KNIME a ten out of ten."
"We have been using these features extensively and we find them to be very valuable in achieving what we hoped to achieve with the tool."
"So far, it can solve my data analysis problems and I think it's a powerful data analysis tool."
"KNIME is easy to use, it's stable, powerful, and has a lot of features."
"I think that KNIME Business Hub is very robust and is a leading solution for analytics and advanced analytics."
"KNIME is quite scalable, which is one of the most important features that we found."
"Data preparation and data modeling are easy to do."
"If you like data analysis, KNIME is the best option; it's free and easy to set up."
 

Cons

"The standard package (personal) is not supported for database connection."
"The time series is a very important issue, however, it is not given its value in the package as it should be."
"I understand that it takes some time to incorporate some of the new algorithms that have come out in the last few months, in the literature. For example, there is an algorithm based on how ants search for food. And there are some algorithms that have now been developed to complement rules. So that's one of the things that we need to have incorporated into it."
"Formula writing is not straightforward for an Excel user. Totally new set of functions, which takes time to learn and teach."
"There are issues, we try to mitigate them. There are always issues."
"Unstructured data is not appropriate for SPSS Modeler."
"Customer support is hard to contact."
"When I used it in the office, back in the day, we did have some stability issues. Sometimes it just randomly crashed and we couldn't get good feedback. But when I use it for my own stuff now I don't have any problems."
"When deploying models on a regular system, it works fine. However, when accuracy is a priority, hyperparameter tuning is necessary. Currently, KNIME doesn't have the best tools for this which they could improve in this area."
"In my environment, I need to access a lot of servers with different characteristics and access methods. Some of my servers have to be accessed using proxy which is not supported by KNIME, so I still need to create the middleware to supply the source of my KNIME configurations."
"One area that could be improved is increasing awareness and adoption of KNIME among organizations. Despite its capabilities, it is not as well-known as other tools. The advertising and marketing efforts to reach out to companies and universities have not been very successful."
"The integration needs to be more robust, and the nodes that act as connectors to these sources and tools need to be more robust, as the flow often broke when the problem was just a connection issue."
"Not just for KNIME, but generally for software and analyzing data, I would welcome facilities for analyzing different sorts of scale data like Likert scales, Thurstone scales, magnitude ratio scales, and Guttman scales, which I don't use myself."
"I would like to see better web scraping because every time I tried, it was not up to par, although you can use Python script."
"The user interface could be a bit better."
"I've had some problems integrating KNIME with other solutions."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It is an expensive product."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"$5,000 annually."
"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."
"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."
"It is a huge increase to time savings."
"KNIME desktop is free, which is great for analytics teams. Server is well priced, depending on how much support is required."
"KNIME assets are stand alone, as the solution is open source."
"With KNIME, you can use the desktop version free of charge as much as you like. I've yet to hit its limits. If I did, I'd have to go to the server version, and for that you have to pay. Fortunately, I don't have to at the moment."
"KNIME is free as a stand-alone desktop-based platform but if you want to get a KNIME server then you can find the cost on their website."
"KNIME is free and open source."
"I use the tool's free version."
"KNIME Business Hub is expensive for small companies."
"The price for Knime is okay."
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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
Outsourcing Company
9%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

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 Enterprise35
 

Questions from the Community

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 advice do you have for others considering IBM SPSS Modeler?
You should put MATLAB into your database. According to Gartner, from what I have seen last year, there was a Gartner four quadrants perspective, and MATLAB was in a very good position. I remember a...
What needs improvement with KNIME?
KNIME Business Hub could be improved by increasing integration between KNIME and other tools, such as where companies store data and data visualization tools, making it easier to integrate with the...
What is your primary use case for KNIME?
I used KNIME Business Hub in my previous role for approximately six months, from April to September 2025. The primary use case for KNIME Business Hub was creating an ETL flow for the HR team that g...
What advice do you have for others considering KNIME?
Regarding concrete examples of metrics or results obtained with KNIME Business Hub, we definitely saved a lot in terms of time and productivity. The work was also much more fluid and activities wer...
 

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: October 2026.
920,939 professionals have used our research since 2012.