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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 May 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 16.5%, down from 17.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Weka is 7.3%, down from 18.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler16.5%
Weka7.3%
Other76.2%
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

"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."
"I would recommend SPSS to someone who has just started trying to run a lot of modeling, it's a good starting point."
"It will scale up to anything we need."
"We are creating models and putting them into production much faster than we would if we had just gone with a strict, code-based solution, like R or Python."
"It gives you a GUI interface, which is a lot more user-friendly and easier to use compared to writing R scripts or Python."
"The most valuable features of the IBM SPSS Modeler are visual programming, you don't have to write any code, and it is easy to use. 90 to 95 percent of the use cases, you don't have to fine-tune anything. If you want to do something deeper, for example, create a better neural network, then you have to go into the features and try to fine-tune them. However, the default selection which is made by the tool, it's very practical and works well."
"It is just a lot faster. So you do not have to write a bunch of code, you can throw that stuff on there pretty quickly and do prototyping quickly."
"We are primarily interested in the supply chain data analytics, focusing mainly on procurement, because we believe that there is a lot of value in spend analytics in understanding and identifying opportunities, reducing prices, improving negotiations, and better understanding the categories."
"I mainly use this solution for the regression tree, and for its association rules. I run these two methodologies for Weka."
"Weka's best features are its user-friendly graphic interface interpretation of data sets and the ease of analyzing data."
"There are many options where you can fill all of the data pre-processing options that you can implement when you're importing the data. You can also normalize the data and standardize it in an easier way."
"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 easy to use Data Mining solution, great for learning and for doing small experiments before exploring the data deeper, with a large number and diversity of algorithms that make it an excellent solution for rapid testing."
"Weka is just much better for the classification path and clustering path; if you are going with some predictions that a procedure recalls, it's better than any other tool like R Programming and Python."
"Weka eliminates the need for coding, allowing you to easily set parameters and complete the majority of the machine learning task with just a few clicks."
 

Cons

"When I do clustering, I want to try a different stream, but currently the only thing that I can really pick is averaging."
"It's not as user friendly as it could be."
"Unstructured data is not appropriate for SPSS Modeler."
"I would like see more programming languages added, like MATLAB. That would be better."
"Easier coding language that is more flexible with other platforms."
"The platform that you can deploy it on needs improvement because I think it is Windows only."
"The time series is a very important issue, however, it is not given its value in the package as it should be."
"It would be beneficial if the tool would include more well-known machine learning algorithms."
"A few people said it became slow after a while."
"Weka is a little complicated and not necessarily suited for users who aren't skilled and experienced in data science."
"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."
"Within the basic Weka tool, I don't see many tools that are available where we can analyze and visualize the data that well."
"Help documentation could be more user friendly."
"The product is good, but I would like it to work with big data. I know it has a Spark integration they could use to do analysis in clusters, but it's not so clear how to use it."
"The filter section lacks some specific transformation tools."
"If you have one missing value in your dataset and this missing value belongs to a specific attribute and the attribute is a numeric attribute and there is only one missing data, whenever you import this data, the problem is that Weka cannot understand that this is a numeric field. It converts everything into a string, and there is no way to convert the string into numerical math. It's really very complicated."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"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."
"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."
"Currently, I am using an open-source version so I don't know much about the price of this solution."
"The solution is free and open-source."
"We use the free version now. My faculty is very small."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Educational Organization
19%
University
14%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
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 Enterprise3
 

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
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SPSS Modeler vs. Weka and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,221 professionals have used our research since 2012.