IBM SPSS Modeler vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

The compared IBM and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. IBM is ranked #3 in DM , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 19.1% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 8.9% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

IBM SPSS Modeler

Read 40 IBM SPSS Modeler reviews

2,695 Views
1,321 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 327 Microsoft Power BI reviews

23,151 Views
14,585 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

IBM SPSS Modeler

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM SPSS Modeler and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Knime, IBM, Weka and others in Data Mining.

To learn more, read our detailed Data Mining Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Data Mining

January 2026

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Helped 881,665 peers since 2012

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

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Mining (3rd), Data Science Platforms (12th)

Microsoft Power BI

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

327

Ranking in other categories

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM SPSS Modeler is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 19.1%, up 16.9% compared to last year.
Microsoft Power BI, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 8.9% mindshare, down 21.4% since last year.

Data Mining Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler	19.1%
IBM SPSS Statistics	18.5%
KNIME Business Hub	13.5%
Other	48.9%

Data Mining

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI	8.9%
Tableau Enterprise	6.2%
Amazon QuickSight	3.7%
Other	81.2%

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

Prof. Dr. Rudolf Bisping

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.

Read full review

Livia Vasilescu

HR Manager at PPB

Use advanced data preparation features in analytics projects

Microsoft Power BI can be quite slow when working with data sources that aren't from a data warehouse or a more robust source or data artifact. When working with exports, which we do frequently, the load takes considerable time. This occurs with any BI tool, and it's related to our working methods due to limitations within the area. In HR, we typically use exports because we have numerous data sources. Ideally, Microsoft Power BI would have a no-code or low-code solution for the data sources to be built by the actual developers or development team. This would eliminate the need to work directly with exports. We would have a middle ground to create a warehouse without all the infrastructure, as building a warehouse within an organization can require substantial resources, both in time and personnel.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Automation is great and this product is very organized."

"The visual modeling capability is one of its attractive features."

"It works fine. I have not had any stability issues; it is always up."

"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."

"Automated modelling, classification, or clustering are very useful."

"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."

"We have full control of the data handling process."

"Compared to other tools, the product works much easier to analyze data without coding."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pros

"We have found the solution to be stable."

"Power BI is a complete ecosystem. It has an integrated ETL tool and good connectivity with applications such as Office 365 and SQL. There are also solutions for RPA, such as Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Apps. Power BI now has integration with Power Query, which has an AI feature for text analytics. Text analytics is a very good feature. This feature is also there in Tableau, but I like it in Power BI because you can write something like, "What is the total sale in the Eastern region?", and it will give you the answer. For example, when you have different types of user opinions, you just run one algorithm and you will have the output that provides the number of positive and negative responses. You can even have a dashboard with positive remarks. This feature has been introduced recently. Power BI supports the DAX and Power Query M languages. These languages are making Power BI very strong in data analytics, and you can do many types of analysis."

"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."

"It is a good platform for data analysis, organization, and all of the other interim performances that are necessary."

"Microsoft Power BI is used extensively throughout the organization."

"The uploading of information is very easy, as you just use an Excel sheet to start work right away and obtain the benefits of Power BI."

"The main feature I find valuable is the possibility to work with an extensive amount of data."

"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"The challenge for the very technical data scientists: It is constraining for them."

"The biggest issue with the visual modeling capability is that we can't extract the SQL code under the hood."

"It would be helpful if SPSS supported open-source features, for example, embedding R or Python scripts in SPSS Modeler."

"Initial setup of the software was complex, because of our own problems within the government."

"If IBM could add some of the popular models into the SPSS for further analysis, like popular regression models, I think that would be a helpful improvement."

"Customer support is hard to contact."

"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."

"When you are not using the product, such as during the pandemic where we had worldwide lockdowns, you still have to pay for the licensing."

More IBM SPSS Modeler cons

"Their technical support can be better. They normally take too long to escalate and resolve a case."

"The dashboard could be simplified."

"The default parameters of the prompt could be improved by including a dynamic option."

"I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity."

"The Power Query feature needs to be improved to handle large amounts of data. This feature is also slow for large data transfers making it better to use some kind of script."

"It is getting better but still, there are opportunity areas in some aspects, especially the Windows OS dependency."

"BI is scalable, but there are some problems with limited online storage."

"The DAX in Microsoft BI is quite difficult."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

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."

"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."

"$5,000 annually."

"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."

"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."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pricing and cost advice

"Costs less than most competing solutions."

"If you purchase a license for a server, for users, or the professional version, you might not have to. The free version I think it can satisfy many customers' needs."

"We pay on a monthly basis which is approximately $10 per user on the Microsoft Power BI Pro license. At the moment we are still down at 400 users, but once we reach 500 users, we will move to the premium edition. The premium is $5,000 for unlimited users. Currently, with the 40 users, the cost is roughly $500."

"Microsoft BI requires licenses."

"You don't need a license for development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them."

"Pricing is a big advantage that Power BI has over Tableau. Power BI is three or four times cheaper than Tableau. For my personal use, I will definitely prefer a $20 monthly fee of Power BI rather than a $70 monthly fee of Tableau. If you pay altogether for Power BI, they give you a discount, whereas, with Tableau, there is no discount. There are three versions of Power BI: Free, Pro, and Premium. The Premium version comes with a lot of things. There is no extra or hidden fee. You pay every month, and the software is with you. If you upgrade, there will be some extra charges."

"Pricing, that's where Microsoft beats Tableau. It is priced much cheaper."

"There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head with 5,001-10,000 employees

Feb 4, 2015

Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho

1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…

Read full review

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

12%

Financial Services Firm

11%

University

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	9
Midsize Enterprise	4
Large Enterprise	32

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	135
Midsize Enterprise	57
Large Enterprise	165

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM SPSS Modeler?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Seeking lightweight open source BI software

There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...

See all answers

Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?

Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...

See all answers

How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?

Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...

See all answers

Comparisons

IBM SPSS Statistics vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 46% of the time

KNIME Business Hub vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 6% of the time

Altair RapidMiner vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 4% of the time

Weka vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 4% of the time

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM SPSS Modeler Competitors

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 16% of the time

Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 13% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 3% of the time

KNIME Business Hub vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Modeler

January 2026

Download IBM SPSS Modeler product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

January 2026

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler

SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI

Overview

IBM SPSS Modeler is an extensive predictive analytics platform that is designed to bring predictive intelligence to decisions made by individuals, groups, systems and the enterprise. By providing a range of advanced algorithms and techniques that include text analytics, entity analytics, decision management and optimization, SPSS Modeler can help you consistently make the right decisions from the desktop or within operational systems.

Buy
https://www.ibm.com/products/spss-modeler/pricing

Sign up for the trial
https://www.ibm.com/account/reg/us-en/signup?formid=urx-19947

IBM

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft

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

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Find out what your peers are saying about Knime, IBM, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: January 2026.

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