IBM SPSS Modeler vs Starburst Galaxy comparison

IBM and Starburst are both solutions in the Data Science Platforms category. IBM is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0, while Starburst is ranked #9 with an average rating of 9.8. IBM holds a 3.5% mindshare in Data Science Platforms, compared to Starburst’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Starburst users who would recommend it.

IBM SPSS Modeler

Read 40 IBM SPSS Modeler reviews

2,814 Views
2,082 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Starburst Galaxy

Read 9 Starburst Galaxy reviews

1,011 Views
809 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM SPSS Modeler

Starburst Galaxy

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM SPSS Modeler and Starburst Galaxy based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Science Platforms solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM SPSS Modeler vs. Starburst Galaxy Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Modeler vs. Starburst Galaxy

March 2026

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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 Science Platforms

12th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Data Mining (3rd)

Starburst Galaxy

Ranking in Data Science Platforms

9th

Average Rating

9.8

Reviews Sentiment

1.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Streaming Analytics (12th)

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 3.5%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Starburst Galaxy is 1.2%, up from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Data Science Platforms Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Starburst Galaxy	1.2%
IBM SPSS Modeler	3.5%
Other	95.3%

Data Science Platforms

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.

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reviewer2750097

VP, Business Intelligence at a outsourcing company with 501-1,000 employees

Unified data access improves analytics and simplifies complex processes

I would like to see better alerting integrations for failures and errors in scheduled tasks and maintenance jobs. I also want support for more connectors such as Kinesis and Firehose, support for more file types such as Avro and JSON, and object storage message queue integration for object storage integrations. A single view of query execution and optimization details, rather than needing to toggle between the Galaxy and Trino UI, would be helpful. Additionally, enhanced control over account and environment variables that would be available in the Enterprise edition would be beneficial.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It’s definitely scalable, it’s all on the same platform, it’s well integrated. I think the integration is important in terms of scalablility because essentially, having the entire suite helps a lot to scale it"

"I was familiar with using IBM SPSS Modeler separately in the private sector before that. It's a good tool for extracting data from data warehouses, creating streams, and manipulating logic to extract final data."

"At the end of the day, you will be highly impressed with SPSS capabilities and the capability to get models into production."

"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."

"It will scale up to anything we need."

"It is pretty scalable."

"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 ease of use in the user interface is the best part of it. The ability to customize some of my streams with R and Python has been very useful to me, I've automated a few things with that."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pros

"I am now able to answer questions in a couple of minutes that would otherwise take hours or days of time for my data engineering teams."

"I use Starburst as a cost-efficient hosted option for Trino for data integration and ad-hoc analysis across a broad range of data sources."

"The most fundamental feature is the query engine, which is much faster than any of the competitors; Starburst is able to finish most queries within 10 seconds, which is especially important for many non-technical employees."

"Starburst Galaxy is becoming a cornerstone of our data platform, empowering us to make smarter and faster decisions across the organization."

"Starburst has provided us with virtually guaranteed performance on complex queries across datasets that are in the tens of gigabytes which complete in seconds."

"Starburst Galaxy has improved our organization by unifying access to all major data sources, reducing the need for complex ETL processes."

"Starburst on Trino, combined with our SQL-native data transformation tool SQLMesh, has delivered anywhere from a two to five times improvement in compute performance across our transformation DAG."

"Starburst Galaxy serves as our primary SQL-based data processing engine, a strategic decision driven by its seamless integration with our AWS cloud infrastructure and its ability to deliver high performance with low-latency responses."

More Starburst Galaxy pros

Cons

"I would not rate the technical support very well. The technicians have accents. When you do find someone, it is very hard to get somebody able to answer the technical questions."

"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 performance issue seems to be related to the server. We design streams on the client and submit them to the server, which generates a large SQL statement. There are two potential bottlenecks: one in the server and another in data extraction. I'm unsure about the exact mechanics of data splitting when fetching from the database."

"Dimension reduction should be classified separately."

"I understand that it takes some time to incorporate some of the new algorithms that have come out in the last few months in the literature."

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

"The scalability was kind of limited by our ability to get other people licenses, and that was usually more of a financial constraint."

"We have run into a few problems doing some entity matching/analytics using this portion of the software."

"The forecasting could be a bit easier."

More IBM SPSS Modeler cons

"Cluster startup time can be slow, sometimes taking over a minute."

"Cluster startup time is another pain point, typically 3 to 5 minutes, which is not the worst with proper planning but can be annoying for ad-hoc work."

"The most persistent issue is the cluster spin-up time."

"I would like Starburst to leverage AI to improve usability. Data lakes are complicated and difficult for users to explore."

"Multi-tenancy could be improved. In order to have multiple environments for SSO, we maintain multiple tenants that are connected to different AWS accounts via the Marketplace."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat 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."

"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."

"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."

"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."

"$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."

"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pricing and cost advice

Information not available

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Outsourcing Company

Financial Services Firm

25%

Computer Software Company

14%

Government

University

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	4
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	1

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

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Starburst Galaxy?

I recommend experimenting with different cluster sizes to determine what works best for your particular use case.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Starburst Galaxy?

Multi-tenancy could be improved. In order to have multiple environments for SSO, we maintain multiple tenants that are connected to different AWS accounts via the Marketplace. On the AWS side this ...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Starburst Galaxy?

I use the solution for processing large simulation datasets into aggregated datasets that can either be used for real-time data analysis or stored for later analysis.

See all answers

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Modeler

March 2026

Download IBM SPSS Modeler product report

Buyer's Guide

Starburst Galaxy

February 2026

Download Starburst Galaxy product report

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler

No data available

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.

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

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IBM

Starburst Galaxy offers rapid query speeds and robust cluster management, enhancing data engineering efficiency while supporting AWS integrations and cross-database functionality. Users benefit from its advanced data integration and federated querying capabilities.

Starburst Galaxy stands out with a compute-focused architecture that excels in facilitating seamless data integration. Technological innovations like autoscaling clusters and automated metadata management optimize operations in multi-tenant environments. With a keen emphasis on compatibility, the platform provides support for AWS Glue and enables federated querying across S3, Snowflake, and Redshift. This adaptability ensures comprehensive ETL processes and enhances analytics through querying SQL Server, Google Sheets, and blob stores. While noted for its robust capabilities, users seek improvements in cluster startup times, Tableau and AI support, and desire infrastructure-as-code enhancements.

What are Starburst Galaxy's key features?

Rapid Query Speeds: Enhances data processing with quick responses.
Cluster Autoscaling: Optimizes resource allocation for varying workloads.
Federated Querying: Cross-database functionality for seamless integration.
Compute-Focused Architecture: Ensures efficiency and scalability.
Automated Metadata Management: Streamlines data handling processes.
AWS Integration: Broad compatibility with AWS services.

What benefits should users evaluate in reviews?

Data Engineering Efficiency: Reduces operating expenses and improves productivity.
Cost Reduction: Highlights lower storage costs with efficient data handling.
Seamless Integration: Enables robust data integration across various platforms.
Cluster Management: Supports diverse workloads with advanced management tools.

In industries focusing on large-scale data efforts, Starburst Galaxy plays an essential role in connecting data sources like Amazon S3 and RDS, streamlining tasks in data engineering and ad-hoc analysis across complex environments. Teams leverage its cross-database querying to boost AWS analytics, with features tailored for sectors needing agile data solutions, from ETL pipelines to secure data federation.

Starburst

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

Information Not Available

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Modeler vs. Starburst Galaxy

March 2026

Free Report: IBM SPSS Modeler vs. Starburst Galaxy

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