Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

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
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (3rd), Data Science Platforms (12th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (10th)
 

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.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 1.9% mindshare, down 4.7% since last year.
Data Mining Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler19.1%
IBM SPSS Statistics18.5%
KNIME Business Hub13.5%
Other48.9%
Data Mining
Data Visualization Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
SAS Visual Analytics1.9%
Tableau Enterprise10.1%
Qlik Sense5.3%
Other82.7%
Data Visualization
 

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.
AN
Senior Manager: ICT Compliance at DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SERVICE AND ADMINISTRATION
Enables effective data management and reporting with a straightforward setup
SAS Visual Analytics is helpful as it allows us to perform any queries we need. The ability to query information from our Excel data into SAS to view specific data is invaluable. In terms of reporting, it is easy to extract quick reports and provides graphical representations of the data, which is a great feature.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It will scale up to anything we need."
"It scales. I have not run into any challenges where it will not perform.​"
"It gives you a GUI interface, which is a lot more user-friendly and easier to use compared to writing R scripts or Python."
"Extremely easy to use, it offers a generous selection of proprietary machine learning algorithms."
"It is a great product for running statistical analysis."
"We are using it either for workforce deployment or to improve our operations."
"Some basic form of feature engineering for classification models. This really quickens the model development process."
"It is pretty scalable."
"It's a stable, reliable product."
"The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great."
"It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way."
"What I really love about the software is that I have never struggled in implementing it for complex business requirements. It is good for highly sophisticated and specialized statistics in the areas that some people tend to call artificial intelligence. It is used for everything that involves visual presentation and analysis of highly sophisticated statistics for forecasting and other purposes."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The tool's most valuable features are its ease of use and advanced data visualization capabilities."
"I would rate the overall solution a ten out of ten."
"The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me."
 

Cons

"We have run into a few problems doing some entity matching/analytics."
"Customer support is hard to contact."
"It would be good if IBM added help resources to the interface."
"The challenge for the very technical data scientists: It is constraining for them.​"
"It's not as user friendly as it could be."
"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."
"The standard package (personal) is not supported for database connection."
"The forecasting could be a bit easier."
"A bit more flexibility in the temperatization will be helpful."
"Colours used on report objects"
"There are certain shortcomings in the tool's support services, making it an area where improvements are required."
"There is room for improvement in anti-money laundering prevention and operation monitoring, as well as operation monitoring surveillance."
"SAS Visual Analytics could improve by making it more accessible for users outside the organization."
"There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else."
"Better connectivity with other data origins, better visualization, and the ability to create KPIs directly would all help."
"In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"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."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"Licensing is simple."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
"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."
"The product is expensive."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"The product is quite expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Mining solutions are best for your needs.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
University
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 Business13
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise19
 

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 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...
What is your primary use case for SAS Visual Analytics?
I started to work with SAS Visual Analytics ( /products/sas-visual-analytics-reviews ) in 2015. We use it for analysis on ICT expenditure information and ICT personnel information. The analytics ar...
 

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.
Find out what your peers are saying about Knime, IBM, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: January 2026.
881,707 professionals have used our research since 2012.