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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
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
7.1
Number of Reviews
60
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 18.9%, up from 17.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of KNIME Business Hub is 12.8%, down from 25.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
KNIME Business Hub12.8%
IBM SPSS Modeler18.9%
Other68.3%
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.
DG
BI Analyst at a photography company with 11-50 employees
Enables fast project development with efficient workflow modifications and promising features while offering modularity and reusability
KNIME is simple and allows for fast project development due to its reusability. I appreciate the ability to make improvements or modifications in existing workflows. Although I have not yet used the forecasting and customer profiling features, I find them promising. Another effective feature is the ability to use GET request objects to retrieve data from websites or APIs. This makes iterative steps easy to manage. It is more elastic and modern compared to SAP Data Services, allowing node creation and regrouping components or steps for reuse in different projects.

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."
"We are using it either for workforce deployment or to improve our operations."
"I also use SAS, but SPSS is easier than SAS, and I enjoy it."
"New algorithms are added into every version of Modeler, e.g., SMOTE, random forest, etc. The Derive node is used for the syntax code to derive the data."
"It scales. I have not run into any challenges where it will not perform.​"
"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."
"The quality is very good."
"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."
"It offers a node-based data integration and processing system connected through a user-friendly drag-and-drop interface. This makes it an excellent choice for data analytics and engineering tasks."
"With KNIME, I am able to get that process down to under one minute, with data broken down into individual tabs."
"KNIME is fast and the visualization provides a lot of clarity. It clarifies your thinking because you can see what's going on with your data."
"We are able to automate several functions which were done manually, and I can integrate several data sets quickly and easily to support analytics."
"It is a free open-source tool that performs very similarly to other expensive tools."
"From a user-friendliness perspective, it's a great tool."
"This is a very handy tool and I use it quite interactively."
"We have found KNIME valuable when it comes to its visualization."
 

Cons

"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."
"It would be helpful if SPSS supported open-source features, for example, embedding R or Python scripts in SPSS Modeler."
"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."
"It would be good if IBM added help resources to the interface."
"I would like see more programming languages added, like MATLAB. That would be better."
"The biggest issue with the visual modeling capability is that we can't extract the SQL code under the hood."
"It is very good, but slow. The slowness may be because we have not finalized all the background information in SPSS."
"Expensive to deploy solutions. You need to buy an extra deployment unit."
"System resource usage. Knime will occupy total system RAM size and other applications will hang."
"​The data visualization part is the area most in need of improvement."
"The predefined workflows could use a bit of improvement."
"It's difficult to pinpoint one single feature because KNIME has so many. For starters, it's very easy to learn. You can get started with just a one-hour video. The drag-and-drop interface makes it user-friendly. For example, if you want to read an Excel file, drag the "read Excel file" node from the repository, configure it by specifying the file location, and run it. This gives you a table with all your data."
"Compared to the other data tools on the market, the user interface can be improved."
"The overall user experience feels unpolished. In particular: Data field type conversion is a real hassle, and date fields are a hassle; documentation is pretty poor; user community is average at best."
"I think some of the online training content could be better, although I have been able to find all of the information."
"The visualization functionalities are not good (cannot be compared to, for instance, the possibilities in R)."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a huge increase to time savings."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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 got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"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."
"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."
"$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."
"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 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."
"The price of KNIME is quite reasonable and the designer tool can be used free of charge."
"The client versions are mostly free, and we pay only for the KNIME server version. It's not a cheap solution."
"This is a free open-source solution."
"KNIME desktop is free, which is great for analytics teams. Server is well priced, depending on how much support is required."
"KNIME is free and open source."
"It's an open-source solution."
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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
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
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 Business20
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise29
 

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 do you like most about KNIME?
Since KNIME is a no-code platform, it is easy to work with.
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 have seen the potential to interact with Python, which is currently a bit limited. I am interested in the newer version, 5.4, when it becomes available. The machine learning and profileration asp...
 

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: March 2026.
884,933 professionals have used our research since 2012.