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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
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
14
Ranking in other categories
Anomaly Detection Tools (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 18.9%, up from 17.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Weka is 8.8%, down from 21.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler18.9%
Weka8.8%
Other72.3%
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.
AwaisAnwar - PeerSpot reviewer
Treasury Management in Finance Department at National University of Pakistan
Open source, good for basic data mining use cases except for the visualization results
I haven't found it particularly useful. It lacks state-of-the-art algorithms and impressive outcomes. While it might offer insights for basic warehouse tasks, it falls short of deeper understanding and results. Moreover, a new user interface would be great, especially for beginners. Something that guides them through the available tools and helps them achieve their goals. I haven't seen anything like that myself, though maybe it's there and I missed it.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have a local representative who specializes in SPSS. He will help us do the PoC."
"It's very easy to use. The drag and drop feature makes it very easy when you are building and testing the streams. That's very useful."
"Stability is good."
"It continues to be a very flexible platform, so that it handles R and Python and other types of technology. It seems to be growing with additional open-source movement out there on different platforms."
"The visual modeling capability is one of its attractive features."
"We have full control of the data handling process."
"The software is robust with advance statistical tools in hand from time series analysis to logistic regression, it can be used by banks for fraud detection, by convenience stores for market basket analysis, for cluster analysis on customer segmentation."
"In the solution, I like the virtualization of data flow since it shows what goes where, which is mostly the strength of the tool."
"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."
"I mainly use this solution for the regression tree, and for its association rules. I run these two methodologies for Weka."
"The path of machine learning in classification and clustering is useful. The GUI can get you results. No programming is needed. No need to write down your script first or send to your model or input your data."
"Weka's best features are its user-friendly graphic interface interpretation of data sets and the ease of analyzing data."
"Weka is a very nice tool, it needs very small requirements. If I want to implement something in Python, I need a lot of memory and space but Weka is very lightweight. Anyone can implement any kind of algorithm, and we can show the results immediately to the client using the one-page feature. The client always wants to know the story. They want the result."
"The interface is very good, and the algorithms are the very best."
"In Weka, anyone can access the program without being a programmer, which is a good feature since the entry cost is very low."
"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."
 

Cons

"Unstructured data is not appropriate for SPSS Modeler."
"Dimension reduction should be classified separately."
"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."
"Expensive to deploy solutions. You need to buy an extra deployment unit."
"It would be good if IBM added help resources to the interface."
"The time series should be improved."
"Regarding visual modeling, it is not the biggest strength of the product, although from what I hear in the latest release it's going to be a lot stronger. That, to me, has always been the biggest flaw in using this. It's very difficult to get good visualization."
"The integration with sources and visualisation needs some improvement. The scalability needs improvement."
"Within the basic Weka tool, I don't see many tools that are available where we can analyze and visualize the data that well."
"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."
"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."
"Weka is a little complicated and not necessarily suited for users who aren't skilled and experienced in data science."
"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."
"In terms of scalability, I think Weka is not prepared to handle a large number of users."
"While it might offer insights for basic warehouse tasks, it falls short of deeper understanding and results."
"Not particularly user friendly."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a huge increase to time savings."
"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."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"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 is an expensive product."
"$5,000 annually."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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."
"We use the free version now. My faculty is very small."
"The solution is free and open-source."
"Currently, I am using an open-source version so I don't know much about the price of this solution."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Educational Organization
15%
University
13%
Computer Software Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
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 Business7
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
 

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...
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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: March 2026.
884,873 professionals have used our research since 2012.