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IBM SPSS Modeler vs Weka comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

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
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (12th)
Weka
Ranking in Data Mining
4th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
16
Ranking in other categories
Anomaly Detection Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 16.0%, down from 18.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Weka is 7.1%, down from 18.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler16.0%
Weka7.1%
Other76.9%
Data Mining
 

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.
SC
Student at Rochester Institute of Technology
Data mining projects have become faster and visualization now guides our pattern discovery
Weka can be improved in some areas. As a one-year user, I can share my experiences. I have tried installing other packages into Weka using the inbuilt package manager or adding modern algorithms that I wish to apply to my data sets or data processing. I think Weka needs to improve in that and also in integrating Python into Weka, which would help users much more. I chose eight out of ten because we need improvements in Weka, such as installing inbuilt packages. Weka uses skips such as N+2 or N+4 and eight-node, which makes sense basically, but I think it should improve in the package attribute, such as configuring Python easily and adding modern algorithms into Weka more easily.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"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’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"
"At the end of the day, you will be highly impressed with SPSS capabilities and the capability to get models into production."
"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."
"It scales. I have not run into any challenges where it will not perform.​"
"We have full control of the data handling process."
"It is very scalable for non-technical people."
"It’s pretty straightforward, it's user-friendly, it’s free, and with YouTube videos, online guides, and e-books on machine learning using Weka, you can quickly learn to use its good interface for data visualization, filtering, and creating different scenarios and instances."
"Working with complicated algorithms in huge datasets is really easy in Weka."
"Weka is a very nice tool and it helped me to solve any machine learning problem in one minute."
"With clustering, if it's a yes, it's a yes, if it's a no, it's a no. It gives you a 100% level of accuracy of a model that has been trained, and that is in most cases, usually misleading. Classification is highly valuable when done as opposed to clustering."
"It is a stable product."
"I mainly use this solution for the regression tree, and for its association rules. I run these two methodologies for Weka."
"It doesn’t cost anything to use the product."
"Using Weka has positively impacted my studies and projects because it has saved my time firstly."
 

Cons

"The integration with sources and visualisation needs some improvement. The scalability needs improvement."
"Time Series or forecasting needs to be easier. It is a very important feature, and it should be made easier and more automated to use. For instance, for logistic regression, binary or multinomial is used automatically based on the type of the target variable. I wish they can make Time Series easier to use in a similar way."
"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."
"The platform that you can deploy it on needs improvement because I think it is Windows only. I do not think it can run off a Red Hat, like the server products. I am pretty sure it is Windows and AIX only."
"It is very good, but slow. The slowness may be because we have not finalized all the background information in SPSS. It still needs some tweaking."
"Expensive to deploy solutions. You need to buy an extra deployment unit."
"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. For example, there is an algorithm based on how ants search for food. And there are some algorithms that have now been developed to complement rules. So that's one of the things that we need to have incorporated into it."
"It is not integrated with Qlik, Tableau, and Power BI."
"For production, it's not the best option."
"Weka is not horizontally scalable. If I had to run a large dataset over Weka I would have to have a very large usage."
"I'm not sure if it's reliable. It's a little difficult to get results, especially if you are on some other programs like Tableau."
"The filter section lacks some specific transformation tools. If you want to change a variable from a numeric variable to a categorical variable, you don't have a feature that can enable you to change a variable from a numeric variable to a categorical variable."
"With Python and R, you can do anything — you have that confidence, but with Weka, I don't have that confidence."
"The visualization of Weka is subpar and could improve. Machine learning and visualization do not work well together. For example, we want to know how we can we delete empty cells or how can we fill in the empty cells without cleaning the data system and putting it together."
"A few people said it became slow after a while."
"While it might offer insights for basic warehouse tasks, it falls short of deeper understanding and results."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"$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."
"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."
"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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."
"We use the free version now. My faculty is very small."
"Currently, I am using an open-source version so I don't know much about the price of this solution."
"As far as I know, Weka is a freeware tool, and I am not aware if they have an online solution or if it is a commercial product."
"The solution is free and open-source."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Educational Organization
19%
University
13%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Construction Company
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 Business11
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise4
 

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 Weka?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Weka is that I think it's a fair price since we are using it academically, so it is completely free to download and use. The license is als...
What needs improvement with Weka?
Weka can be improved in some areas. As a one-year user, I can share my experiences. I have tried installing other packages into Weka using the inbuilt package manager or adding modern algorithms th...
What is your primary use case for Weka?
My main use case for Weka is data exploration and data processing and data mining. I can give a quick, specific example of how I've used Weka for data exploration or data processing: we have a subj...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler
No data available
 

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
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Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SPSS Modeler vs. Weka and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
900,644 professionals have used our research since 2012.