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IBM SPSS Modeler vs SAS Visual Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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
6.6
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (4th), Data Science Platforms (13th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (7th)
 

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 17.6%, up 16.3% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.2% mindshare, down 6.0% since last year.
Data Mining
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Levi Dovillaire - PeerSpot reviewer
The solution provides insights into the users’ data, but it is outdated and slow
I work with many data and tags. The product does not have a search function for tags. I cannot search for the name of the tag. I need to go through a list to find it. The software is old. The solution must be updated. It should also be a little bit faster. If we change the name of a field, the change should reflect in all the nodes we use later.
Renato Vazamin - PeerSpot reviewer
Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations
We had that solution installed previously in another solution, Selvaya, but I don't think we used it at the time. We are now using SAS Detect Investigation as a complementary solution, in which we have part of the process, use a gene, SAS collects information and identifies some business situations, and the business guys use Visual Analytics to explore the results of the process. We previously used the FICO platform, but we switched because FICO's pricing was not scalable. Bringing more data or workloads to the platform required a significant investment in order to scale. We needed to change because we have a lot of data to process every day. FICO was also a little more complicated than SAS Visual Analytics.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Automated modelling, classification, or clustering are very useful."
"It makes pretty good use of memory. There are algorithms take a long time to run in R, and somehow they run more efficiently in Modeler."
"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."
"It is pretty scalable."
"The supervised models are valuable. It is also very organized and easy to use."
"Extremely easy to use, it offers a generous selection of proprietary machine learning algorithms."
"We have integration where you can write third-party apps. This sort of feature opens it up to being able to do anything you want."
"We had an IBM Guardium service contract where we used one of their resources to help us develop our prototype. It was a good experience, but they were helpful and responsive."
"The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me."
"Simplifies report designs and quickly displays tables and graphs."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps with quality assurance processes."
"I believe that the possibilities for exploring data and formulating visual results are quite good because it allows the business analyst to have different perspectives on the data."
"The tool's most valuable features are its ease of use and advanced data visualization capabilities."
"We've found the product to be stable and reliable."
"The technical support services are good."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"The forecasting could be a bit easier."
"The integration with sources and visualisation needs some improvement. The scalability needs improvement."
"I would like see more programming languages added, like MATLAB. That would be better."
"It's not as user friendly as it could be."
"​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.​"
"The biggest issue with the visual modeling capability is that we can't extract the SQL code under the hood."
"The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy."
"A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful."
"SAS Visual Analytics could improve by making it more accessible for users outside the organization."
"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."
"The solution is a little weak at the front end."
"There is room for improvement in anti-money laundering prevention and operation monitoring, as well as operation monitoring surveillance."
"The installation process can be a bit complex."
"The product is expensive and needs the integration of more languages."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"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."
"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."
"It is an expensive product."
"$5,000 annually."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"Visual Analytics is expensive for a small company like mine. You also need to deploy it on a server or cloud, so you pay for the license as well as the cost of the cloud or the server that you will deploy on."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"The product is expensive."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
11%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM SPSS Modeler?
Compared to other tools, the product works much easier to analyze data without coding.
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?
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 performanc...
What do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?
The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps w...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI. It may be that our current subscription does not include AI-enabled features, but I wo...
 

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler
SAS BI
 

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
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
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