IBM SPSS Statistics Reviews

We use IBM SPSS Statistics as well as the Modeler. I would say 70% of our work is on Statistics and 30% is on the Modeler.

I'm an independent consultant and my clients have lots of clinical level laboratories. Clinical companies, pharma companies, like Cipla, Biocon, etc. And also logistic companies, like Maersk and Blue Dot. I do the clinical analysis of their data. These companies provide the data and I give them the results. The customer gets the results in whatever format they want. All these companies that I work with also have software other than IBM SPSS. For example, Visual Analytics, SAP Discovery, and solutions like that. So I have to do a liaison with all these other software to fetch the data and present it to the client in whichever format they prefer because there are some features which IBM SPSS statistics has which SAS doesn't have. And there are a lot of features that SAS Visual Analytics has that IBM SPSS doesn't have. So it's a trade-off between these two. I do the liaising with all the partners.

The features that I have found most valuable are the Bayesian statistics and descriptive statistics. I use these more often because in pharma companies and clinical hospitals they make the medicines by taking the feedback from different patients. For example, there could be a neuro-disorder patient or a normal IT employee who may be an introvert, confined to his own space and doesn't want to mingle with people or more inclined towards reading books and stuff like that. You have a cross-section of the community. If a patient comes to the doctors with a little bit of mental depression because of the work pressure or anything else, we collect this data, put up a questionnaire to him about his personality traits, why he's feeling depressed, what are the factors affecting his mental attitude and those kinds of questions and we collect that kind of data. Depending on the data we draw a graph and we give a statistical analysis to the doctors, as well.

Then simultaneously, we give this feedback to the pharma companies, so that depending on the data, they determine which medicine they have and what medicine they could develop. That is the kind of work that we do.

I understand that we're talking about IBM SPSS Statistics, it's a mathematical tool. Fine. Everybody knows that. It is a statistical tool. Having said that, if they could make it a little bit graphical then people who work on IBM SPSS need not depend on other software, like SAP Lumira or something like that, for the regeneration and graphical image of the entire data. That graphical GUI content should be encapsulated in the SPSS package. That's what I mean. 

I know that SPSS is a statistical tool but it should also include a little bit of analytical behavior. You can call it augmented analysis or predictive analysis. The bottom line is it should have more graphical and analytical capabilities.

There are so many formulas which you can encapsulate in this IBM statistical tool. I don't have all the formulas off the top of my head right now, but for any statistical tool for that matter, regardless of the company, it should encapsulate these to the maximum. All the statistical tools and formulae which are taught. I expect that SPSS encapsulates all those formulas, it has a good amount of descriptors, chi-square distribution, ANOVA, etc... you have all the things, but if anything, any theory or formula is missing, I would suggest to SPSS to include that also and market it accordingly so that they can be a front runner in this market, in this segment.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for three years.

It is a stable solution. There's no doubt. But you know, the stability has to be evolving every day. It's not that today I'm stable. Stability is not static. It is dynamic. My effective operative stability will not be carried forward to future generations without any hassles. No, it's not like that. Every day you have to evolve in the technologies to meet the demands.

As I told you earlier, SPSS still has to mature in terms of fetching data from the high volume data databases, like SAP HANA can. 

SAP HANA is a column level database, a columnar database, it's not a low level database. So SPSS has to show that kind of maturity. I assume that they'll scale up because IBM knows how to tackle the market.

In terms of scalbility, it is scalable. There is a scalability fee for this kind of package. The business package can be measured only with the amount of data it can analyze. 

Because if I talk about the Oracle database or the RNC database, the measure of scalability depends on the number of notes I can add to the RSE cluster, how much data will my database be able to handle, and what kind of hardware requirements I need. The IBM package is just a normal package. It doesn't have a SPSS package to measure the scalability. There's only one factor, how much volume of data it can analyze at any point of time. Take an example of its competitor, SAS. SAS analytical software has a server called Laser Server, an ASR server, which is capable of handling around 120 terabytes of data at a time.

That kind of thing should be here. I can't assume that SPSS as a front-end tool can assess that much volume of data. Having said that, it should have some kind of work around or a bigger version, just like SAP has given three versions of Lumira Discovery, Lumira designer and business studio. So on the same lines SPSS should have options for a normal user or for an advanced user which can take more amount of data.

Their customer service is pretty good. IBM is always customer oriented. I worked at IBM earlier, I know what kind of customer service they have. I worked in IBM at a prior date in India. They're very customer oriented, very customer focused. They don't let their customers down, even if the customer is bad, they'll politely try to resolve the issue. They focus on resolving the issue rather than getting into egos and all that stuff. I rate nine out of 10 on tech support. It's awesome.

I'm a pure IT consultant. And in addition to IBM SPSS, I'm also a SAP consultant. I work on SAP Lumira, I work on SAP HANA. I work on SAP S400 material management, logistical management, which includes the SCM MM, PP and the SV modules. I'm also a SAS consultant. I'm a sales, regional medical consultant. I have done the codes in SAS breakthrough modeling. I'm also an Oracle DBA. I worked on almost all the versions of Oracle right from 7.3 to Oracle 18 C. 19 C also, but 18 C is the stable one. So I'm an Oracle Meraki consultant RSE, real application, cluster consultants, and a golden gate expert.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Although I'm not an SPSS admin, per se, I was part of the SPSS installation. Basically what happens when you install any SPSS statistics package is a company involves both the admin guy and also the technical consultant who will be working on it so that they can work in tandem and make the installation perfect.

I was involved with the installation team, as well. It is pretty simple. It's not that complex. I think the versatility of IBM SPSS Statistics tool is very evident, it's good. You have the ability to fetch and analyze the different sets of data, whether it is a CSV from a separated value, or other data from the Oracle database, or other older database such as Dbase or redundant spreadsheets like Lotus 1,2,3 or Excel. You have everything. On that count, I gave IBM a nine out of 10. But there are drawbacks too, because IBM SPSS is not able to fetch the data from new databases like SAP HANA or SAP BW HANA. SAP HANA got introduced in 2011, but it became famous more in 2015.

The same is the case with BW HANA, the business warehouse for HANA, and any statistical tool which is not capable of fetching data from this volume, this database. SAP HANA is a numerary database. So any statistical tool which is not able to fetch data from these databases will not be able to sustain itself in the market for long. But yeah, there are some workarounds where people fetch the data from HANA into some of the data sets and transfer the same data set into SPSS to work through the indirect path. But SPSS has to pull up its socks to fetch data from heterogeneous environments, whether it be SAP, HANA or whether it is a MongoDB or anything, any RDBMS, or DBMS on this earth. That kind of flexibility should be there in SPSS.

I would recommend this product. I teach statistics at a college in Bangalore, and I use the IBM statistics, which my students have bought for $29 per month. We use IBM Statistics to learn statistical analysis of data because visualization data is different than statistical analysis. I totally recommend IBM SPSS, even in top business schools, like IAM in India. I went on a guest lecture there and I recommended IBM SPSS to IAM.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate IBM SPSS Statistics a nine.

I absolutely like the product. That's the reason I recommend all of my students buy SPSS.

I'm a senior statistical consultant. We mainly use IBM SPSS to find data and organize it. We have about 10 people in our company that use the product for analysis. The work is seasonal, sometimes we use the product daily and during other periods maybe weekly, monthly or quarterly. It really depends on when the work comes in. Our company uses many different types of software and it's really dependent on the individual situation and requirements of the company. 

Most of the product features are good but I particularly like the linear regression analysis. I also benefit from the import and export of data abilities. 

I believe the product could be improved. I think there is an issue with the charting and visualization, and I don't think it works as well as the competitive product. There is a lot of competition with other software, and I think the visualization and charting should be changed and made easier and more effective. They should also try to include better concepts for big data. I don't know if this can be matched or integrated with the flexibility of Python, because now Python is free. When I try to use another software such as JMP software, JMP makes managing, manipulating and changing the perspectives or the analysis points easier. When you compare or make any statistical search for two variables or more, one by one, X and Y and so on, you refer the variables to the original situation and change it. In JMP, you can just drag and drop and switch columns, rows to columns, and vice versa. It's really easy to use. 

I think the product license is expensive for some people who would be interested in using it, but there is a cheaper version for searches. I think reducing the cost or making a cheaper version for companies should not be a problem. 

In terms of additional features, I think some enhancement on the panel or the main menu would be helpful. Another thing I would hope to be able to do would be to facilitate the results for the user in one main window. There is a window for data and another window for output. I think maybe there could be an enhancement to make SPSS easier to manage and easier to move between data.

The product is very stable, no problems at all. 

The product is easily scalable.

I haven't had much need to contact technical support, only when they upgrade or update my version and something is required to activate it, but not for technical issues. I haven't needed them for that. 

The setup of the product was very simple. It doesn't take more than about 30 minutes. 

I can implement the product myself, particularly if it's for an individual. But for a company or in the corporate sector, that's another issue. I would need a team or an IT consultant.  

The price of the basic product is okay but if I need to take the advanced model then there is a cost for the different levels. For questionnaire purposes, for example, there is very limited use. You pay to install plugins or add-ons to that. There is another feature for that, I believe, that costs around $1,000, but for an advanced model and a lot of extra tools, you might reach around $6,000-7,000. 

I would rate this product an eight out of 10. 

We use the product to conduct multiple and diverse statistical analyses across various datasets.

The software offers consistency across multiple research projects helping us with predictive analytics capabilities.

The product’s most valuable capability is to handle large datasets and ensure robust analysis simultaneously. We can write, save, and reuse the scripts for further procedures. We do not have to run the program file again on the different datasets.

In some cases, the product takes time to load a large dataset. They could improve this particular area.

We have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for nine years. At present, we use the latest version.

It is a stable platform. We only encounter issues while working on a computer with low RAM. Otherwise, it works perfectly fine.

We have more than 100 IBM SPSS Statistics end users including the data processing team in our organization.

IBM SPSS’s website provides multiple documentation for technical support and guidance. It is easy for new users to learn because of user-friendly designs consisting of drop-down menus. The users can select if they want to run a statistical analysis or hypothesis testing easily. Additionally, we can write the script using the programming language.

The initial setup is easy. We download wizard installation through IBM’s website to conduct the process.

It requires some training or following a few tutorials on YouTube to understand the product functionality. If you are already interested in learning new languages, it offers more versatility and comprehensive data analysis.

It is an expensive tool. For individual users, especially non-students, there might not be a free option available. It has a subscription-based model without an option for one-stop payment. Certain areas need some guidance and learning for users to understand the functionality. However, it is a great tool in terms of versatility and types of analysis.

I rate it an eight out of ten.

I've used SPSS for my doctoral research and in my work as an academic and consultant. It's useful for getting reliable insights into survey data and performing quantitative data analysis. SPSS does the math for statistical research. 

In theory, I could take the same data set, plug it into an Excel spreadsheet, and eventually get the same result. However, it would be unbelievably messy and the chances of getting accurate and reliable results are next to nil. They're just too complex. For example, if you're trying to do multivariate analysis to find correlations between complex and diverse data sets, you can make a scatter plot in Excel, but it's unlikely to yield satisfactory results.

I use both the formula-based input side of it and the more user-friendly side of it, depending on the context. Both of them produce more accurate, reliable, and easy-to-generate results than any other tool that's around. At the same time, SPSS isn't a tool you should use for simple, descriptive analytics.

If you only need to create a bar chart, it's not worth spending the time to clean your data set and go through all the work required to import it into SCSS. While it can obviously do all those functions, it's not designed to make pretty charts. In other words, it's the hardest way to do the simplest of tasks, but it is the easiest way to do the hardest of tasks.

SPSS is the way to go if you have data amenable to quantitative analysis, and you need high-accuracy results. 

SPSS is a tool that's been around since the late 60s, and it's the universal worldwide standard for quantitative social science data analysis. That said, it does seem a bit strange to me that the graphical output functions are so clunky after all these years. The output of charts and graphs that SPSS produces is hideous. 

I'll typically take the output data and recreate the chart in Excel. My consultants expect glossy, readable charts, graphs, tables, etc. SPSS has functions to edit and change color, font, spacing, etc., but it's unbelievably fiddly, and I gave up. It just wasn't worth the time. It was way too time-consuming and difficult. 

Generally, it's a challenging piece of software to use. IBM claims it is easy to learn, use, and apply, but it's not. There is a steep learning curve, but it's worth the time. You can't just plug any data into SPSS and say "Go." It has to be properly formatted and cleaned before it will be used. I guess it's a professional tool.

In the future, I would like to see some a template tool or a data-screening tool that would assist with identifying where and how a data set needs to be cleaned. It wouldn't have to tell you exactly what you need to do, but it would be helpful to have something that points you to what needs to be done in order to make the data more compatible with SPSS.

I used SPSS Statistics extensively from 2016 until 2019, and then I started using it again in 2021.

I can't think of a time when SPSS ever crashed on me.

SPSS can handle whatever you throw at it, whether your data set contains 10,000, 100,000, or a million objects. It's like the heavy artillery of analytical tools. 

SPSS is incredibly easy to set up.

SPSS is an expensive piece of software because it's incredibly complex and has been refined over decades, but I would say it's fairly priced.

I rate IBM SPSS Statistics nine out of 10. There's a steep learning curve, and you need to take the time to develop the required skills and give yourself enough time to start the process of learning on your own. When IBM advertises how easy it is for you to learn, use and apply, that's true in a sense. However, that's only after you pass the first extremely steep learning curve. Once you understand the basics and get used to it, you can do practically anything with it.

I am using IBM SPSS Statistics mainly for analyzing pieces of research and taking simple cross-tabulations, and then on through the multi-variant analysis. It's most useful with multi-variant. There is so much simplistic nonsense produced by people who always do it by social class and nothing else.

The most valuable feature of IBM SPSS Statistics is all the functionality it provides. Additionally, it is simple to do the five-way analysis that you can into multidimensional setup space. It's the multidimensional space facility that is most useful.

IBM SPSS Statistics could improve the visual outputs where you are producing, for example, a graph for a company board of directors, or an advert.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics since the late 70s or early 80s.

IBM SPSS Statistics is a stable solution.

I have used IBM SPSS Statistics for hundreds of thousands of cases, but not into the millions. It's worked very well. It is scalable.

There are approximately 100 people are using this solution in the university.

I did not set up the solution. I only need to log in to the universities servers page and download it from there.

The price of IBM SPSS Statistics could improve.

The price is a reason one of the reasons why the university chose IBM SPSS Statistics.

My advice to others is they should get a very small data set, a few hundred cases perhaps, and start off with some frequencies and some cross tabs and build out from there.

I rate IBM SPSS Statistics a nine out of ten.

I use it to analyze social and medical data.

I've found the descriptive statistics and cross-tabs valuable. The very simple correlations and regressions are as well.

The automated statistics testing and principle components analysis are very useful as well.

I've also found the decision tree elements pretty useful too.

IBM SPSS Statistics could be cheaper.

There is a learning curve; it's not very steep, but there is one.

I've been using this solution for about 30 or 40 years.

It's been stable for 40 years.

I've never found a dataset that it couldn't handle, but then, my datasets are mainly, perhaps, about a 100,000 cases. Within that range SPSS Statistics does it very easily.

Technical support staff have been very quick and very good.

Before IBM SPSS Statistics became available, I wrote the code myself in ALGOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC, which were the languages at that time. There was no such thing as a statistics package available then.

For me, the initial setup was completely straightforward. I just downloaded it from the university website.

I was done in under two hours.

We have seen enormous ROI.

It's quite expensive, but they do a special deal for universities. So, I use it through the university.

I looked at SAS and Stata. They just seemed much more cumbersome and difficult to use.

I've used PSPP, the freeware version of SPSS, which is clumsy. However, it still does much the same job, at least, for elementary tasks.

If you do it using the graphical user interface, always click on the save button or paste button, not just the save. For example, if I need to analyze some data before I run it, I set it up using the GUI, I click on paste, and then I run it and save it. When I click paste, it follows all the instructions I've given it in the GUI, but it writes the underlying code. I can save the code, on my disc, and I can get it back later.

This means that you can make your analysis completely replicable. You don't have to redo it, you can just rerun the same program.

I would rate this solution at nine on a scale from one to ten.

Our primary use case is to generally survey results and basic cross-tabulation for any ad hoc requests from key stakeholders. At times, it's a high amount of data but when we run on SPSS, it slows down the computer or the laptop, because if the data is huge, then we need a faster computer. But the corporate computers that we get from our company might not take too much of data load.

The solution is quite robust. I wouldn't pick one most valuable feature, but everything is quite handy. If you want to do a quick analysis, SPSS is quite robust and quicker in terms of providing the output. Python does take large sets of data, and it has more functionalities, but in terms of quick turnaround, I think SPSS is quite good.

From an improvement standpoint, I could compare to PyCharm and see how many other things you can automate things. In PyCharm you use Python and have a lot of packages. SPSS is missing out on some of the packages. In upcoming releases, the solution could be more automated. It should have automation of the packages such as being used in R software and Python packages. They use a tremendous amount of packages. If SPSS can follow that suit, I think it would be very beneficial for SPSS.

I've been working with the solution for more than ten years.

Stability is very good if you have a laptop that has good RAM and a good, powerful laptop, then SPSS can take up really huge amount of data. Otherwise, it slows down the laptop. The limitation is processor issues.

Scalability is also limited, but if you have a high-speed computer, then scalability will be better. But compared to PyCharm and Python and R, it's very limited.

The initial deployment is quite straightforward for SPSS.

I use the solution daily. I use quantitative software for both SPSS and NVivo. I use a lot of functions from SPSS: chi-square, regression analysis, linear regression, multiple regression, cross-tabulation.

SPSS is quicker than comparable software. It starts immediately. For basic and intermediate functions, SPSS is quite good. But once it gets advanced, it's better to use open-source software, like Python and R.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten, and I would recommend the solution to somebody looking to implement SPSS for statistics for their own organization.

We primarily use the solution for analytics. 

The analytics on offer are very good.

It offers very good visualization. 

The dashboards are excellent. 

It's stable. 

The reports could be better. Usually, when we make reports, we use Microsoft of PowerPoint. Editing in PowerPoint is not so easy. You should be able to edit things a bit more. We can't edit the graphs or tables. It does auto-sync there. If I change something in Excel, it will be reflected in Word. The same should be possible with this solution. 

We'd like more engagement and advice. We need more integrations to help make analysis more powerful. 

The pricing is a bit expensive. 

I've been using the solution for about 15 years. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'd rate the solution's reliability between seven to nine out of ten. 

We have about 30 to 40 users leveraging it in our organization. In my department, seven to nine people are using it. The users are mostly in IT.

From my side, I have never reached out to support. 

I have used many different solutions previously. I like solutions that offer the minimal amount of coding possible. 

The initial setup was quite complex for organizations. For individuals or students, however, doing a small setup, it's not too difficult. 

I had some help with the initial setup in order to navigate the complexities. I have done some trial versions by myself, however, as there aren't cybersecurity restrictions for a small setup like that. 

My understanding is the solution is expensive. I don't know the exact price.

There is a 30-day trial and discounts for students. 

I'm an end-user.

I'm working with version 26 or 27.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

With this product, you do need to have a good coding background. 

I'd recommend the product to others. It is quite useful. However, the challenge is always the price. Often, when people hear the cost, they show less interest.