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IBM Watson Explorer vs SAS Visual Analytics comparison

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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 (16th)
 

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 3.6%, up 2.1% 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 Explorer3.6%
IBM SPSS Statistics15.0%
IBM SPSS Modeler14.9%
Other66.5%
Data Mining
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAS Visual Analytics1.6%
Tableau Enterprise9.3%
Qlik Sense4.7%
Other84.4%
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

"Previously we'd have a set of health and safety analysts who would be the key focal points for doing work to understand health and safety risks; so a very small number of people, but through WEX and through our Watson HSEQ solution, we've managed to get engagement across at least one-third of our workforce, so over 1,300 people, and a 25% reduction in health and safety incidents."
"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 really can't talk enough about the team."
"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."
"What impressed me more about Watson is that it is easy to use it, not for the technical people, but for business people."
"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."
"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."
"The main use case is FAQ for the user; it works for almost 80% of the use case coverage."
"I use Visual Analytics for enterprise reporting."
"We have detected a high margin group of customers with very little work."
"I would rate the overall solution a ten out of ten."
"Go ahead and do it! It’s the best tool for insightful and analytical dashboard development and reporting."
"It integrates well with SAS, making it simple and quick for developers."
"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."
"In short it is a powerful analytical tool display, which is an interesting option for companies without having to make a large initial investment, want to start making analytical, with the ability to scale and grow into other tools."
"It's an easy to use solution, it's relatively simple to create basic dashboards and reports."
 

Cons

"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"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."
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"No, it's not yet stable."
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary or something of the like."
"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."
"The solution is expensive."
"SAS Visual Analytics was often prone to crashing. Modules with barely 20 to 30 GB datasets took a lot of time to load even after satisfying necessary software specifications (RAM, etc.)."
"SAS Visual Analytics could be more user-friendly."
"The LAZR server did not like some datasets being uploaded which was perfectly fine to visualise in something as simple as Excel."
"The integration aspects of the solution could be improved."
"The solution should improve its graphics."
"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."
"It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView."
"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's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"The product is expensive."
"Visual Analytics is expensive for a small company like mine. You also need to deploy it on a server or cloud, so you pay for the license as well as the cost of the cloud or the server that you will deploy on."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
"The product is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Healthcare Company
13%
Performing Arts
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

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 Knime, IBM, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.