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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
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
2nd
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
5th
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 August 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 15.5%, down from 17.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of KNIME Business Hub is 10.5%, down from 24.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
KNIME Business Hub10.5%
IBM SPSS Modeler15.5%
Other74.0%
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

"Some basic form of feature engineering for classification models. This really quickens the model development process."
"I still use it because when I got the latest version it had all those things that I wish I would've had when I was working at the office."
"We have full control of the data handling process."
"I also use SAS, but SPSS is easier than SAS, and I enjoy it."
"Our go live process has been slightly enhanced compared to the previous programmatic process, and there is now a faster time to production from the business end."
"Quickness and ease of use with the guarantee of robust modeling techniques and trustworthy accuracy."
"The visual modeling capability is one of its attractive features."
"It's a very good and reasonably priced solution."
"We leverage KNIME flexibility in order to query data from our database and manipulate them for any ad-hoc business case, before presenting results to stakeholders."
"It also has very good fundamental machine learning. It has decision trees, linear regression, and neural nets. It has a lot of text mining facilities as well. It's fairly fully-featured."
"It's a coding-less opportunity to use AI. This is the major value for me."
"The ETL which helps me to collect, reformat, and load the data from multiple sources into one destination, a storage database."
"I've never had any problems with stability."
"I would rate the stability of KNIME a ten out of ten."
"It has allowed us to easily implement advanced analytics into various processes."
"I've tried to utilize KNIME to the fullest extent possible to replace Excel."
 

Cons

"This tool has a lot of bugs."
"It would be good if IBM added help resources to the interface."
"The platform that you can deploy it on needs improvement because I think it is Windows only. I do not think it can run off a Red Hat, like the server products. I am pretty sure it is Windows and AIX only."
"Dimension reduction should be classified separately."
"​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.​"
"Easier coding language that is more flexible with other platforms."
"The forecasting could be a bit easier."
"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."
"One thing to consider is that the prebuilt nodes may not always be a perfect fit for your specific needs, although most of the time, they work quite well."
"In the previous versions, I had some issues when reading large Excel files due to memory usage."
"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."
"It's difficult to provide input on the improvement area because it's more of self-learning. However, there are times when I am not able to do certain things. I don't know if it's because the solution doesn't allow me or if it's because of the lack of knowledge."
"KNIME doesn't handle large datasets or a high number of records well."
"The current UI is primarily in English. Analyzing data in local languages might present challenges or issues."
"The documentation needs a proper rework. ​"
"They should look at other vendors like Alteryx that are more user friendly and modern."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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."
"It is an expensive product."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"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."
"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."
"KNIME is a cost-effective solution because it’s free of cost."
"KNIME assets are stand alone, as the solution is open source."
"It's an open-source solution."
"They have different versions, but I am using the open-source one."
"Scaling to the on-premises version requires a licensing fee per user that is a bit expensive in comparison to R, Python, and SAS."
"KNIME Business Hub is expensive for small companies."
"KNIME is free and open source."
"It is free of cost. It is GNU licensed."
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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
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
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: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.