No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM Watson Explorer 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 Watson Explorer
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (9th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM Watson Explorer is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 3.5%, up 1.5% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 1.6% mindshare, down 3.4% since last year.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Watson Explorer3.5%
IBM SPSS Statistics15.6%
IBM SPSS Modeler15.5%
Other65.4%
Data Mining
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAS Visual Analytics1.6%
Tableau Enterprise9.5%
Qlik Sense4.9%
Other84.0%
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1319820 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
A data analysis tool that is scalable and includes keyword search functionality
The solution is used for a government company for data collection and analysis I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer. I have been using the solution for five…
Namanjbaraiya Baru - PeerSpot reviewer
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
Interactive dashboards have transformed clinical reporting and now support real time decisions
The best features of SAS Visual Analytics include performing data manipulation. I would characterize this as making data ready, transforming data, and making new variables through code while utilizing low-code and no-code facilities. In my experience, low-code features in SAS Visual Analytics help when I need to create a new variable. For instance, I can extract a date through the data roll step, and with no-code features, I can perform report creation by simply using drag and drop functionality. After implementing SAS Visual Analytics, we have generated a new way to generate revenue by providing live data visuals to our clients and making our team aware of data in real time, which has had a significant positive impact.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"Ease of use is pretty good as is the standardization of not actually having to have my own natural learning algorithms, just to use the Watson APIs."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"IBM has been working with Bradesco since 1968, I think, and the support is very good, with a team of 10 IBM employees working every day, 24 hours, inside the bank in Sao Paolo."
"The ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"I really can't talk enough about the team."
"For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and being able to see hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"The best feature is that SAS is not a single BI tool; rather, it is part of an ecosystem of tools, such as tools that help a user to develop artificial intelligence, algorithms, and so on."
"Users from the most non-technical backgrounds can use this tool to pull out valuable insights from their data."
"Data handling is one of the best features of SAS Visual Analytics."
"The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed."
"After implementing SAS Visual Analytics, we have generated a new way to generate revenue by providing live data visuals to our clients and making our team aware of data in real time, which has had a significant positive impact."
"We have detected a high margin group of customers with very little work."
"Visual Analytics is very easy to use. I use Visual Analytics for all the typical use cases except text mining. I used it to analyze data and monitor statistics, not text mining. I also use it for data visualization as well as creating interactive dashboards and infographics."
"Since it is simply drag and drop it makes data inspection easy."
 

Cons

"No, it's not yet stable."
"The solution is expensive."
"We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this."
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"I think we'll get it to a 10, but I think at the moment it's got to be a good eight or nine out of 10 at least."
"Sometimes the service stops."
"There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data."
"The deployment isn't smooth. Deploying Visual Analytics on the cloud takes a lot of work, or you can use some providers that give you SAS as a service. For example, there is a provider called SaasNow. They host SAS Visual Analytics and the license. You can buy the license and deploy it there without the hassle of installation because deploying the software isn't easy."
"There is a need for coding when it comes to digital reporting which can be intimidating."
"In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool."
"Colours used on report objects"
"SAS Visual Analytics could be more user-friendly."
"The visualization should be better in SAS Visual Analytics. It is easy to use but when compared to other solutions it is lacking and the support is not very good."
"Better connectivity with other data origins, better visualization, and the ability to create KPIs directly would all help."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"The product is expensive."
"The product is quite expensive."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"Licensing is simple."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Mining solutions are best for your needs.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Healthcare Company
12%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
10%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was positive, and I am happy with it.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
SAS Visual Analytics offers many options, and new users unfamiliar with SAS might face some difficulties. Training on SAS Visual Analytics is required to help overcome these issues.
What is your primary use case for SAS Visual Analytics?
My main use case for SAS Visual Analytics is making visual reports such as graphs, gauge plots, outlier plots, geomaps, and presenting my clinical data into a report or an interactive dashboard whi...
 

Also Known As

IBM WEX
SAS BI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
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 IBM, Knime, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: July 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.