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IBM SPSS Modeler vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

The compared IBM and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. IBM is ranked #4 in DM , with an average rating of 7.5, and holds a 15.7% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 8.0, and holds a 14.5% mindshare. Additionally, 86% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.
IBM SPSS Modeler
Read 40 IBM SPSS Modeler reviews
  • 2,148 Views
  • 902 Comparison Views
86% willing to recommend
Microsoft Power BI
Read 326 Microsoft Power BI reviews
  • 23,400 Views
  • 14,274 Comparison Views
93% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary
We performed a comparison between IBM SPSS Modeler and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Knime, IBM, Weka and others in Data Mining.

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Buyer's Guide
Data Mining
August 2025
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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
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (4th), Data Science Platforms (17th)
Microsoft Power BI
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
326
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (1st), Reporting (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM SPSS Modeler is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 15.7%, down 16.7% compared to last year.
Microsoft Power BI, on the other hand, focuses on BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, holds 14.5% mindshare, down 21.9% since last year.
Data Mining Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler15.7%
KNIME Business Hub22.1%
Weka15.0%
Other47.2%
Data Mining
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
Microsoft Power BI14.5%
Tableau Enterprise11.0%
Amazon QuickSight4.9%
Other69.6%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

PeterHuo - PeerSpot reviewer
Good tool for extracting data from data warehouses, creating streams, and manipulating logic to extract final data
There are performance issues. Extracting data from many combined tables can take hours and occasionally crash the server due to memory leaks. This performance problem bothers people. The performance issue seems to be related to the server. We design streams on the client and submit them to the server, which generates a large SQL statement. There are two potential bottlenecks: one in the server and another in data extraction. I'm unsure about the exact mechanics of data splitting when fetching from the database. When streams become larger, performance bottlenecks may occur in the IBM SPSS Modeler server or the database. Sometimes the server crashes and needs to be restarted to release memory on both sides. I'm not sure exactly where the problem is caused, as I focus on stream design rather than server issues. The problem could be on the IBM SPSS Modeler server and database.
Read full review
Shoury Priyanshu - PeerSpot reviewer
Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal
Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.
Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are using it either for workforce deployment or to improve our operations."
"Extremely easy to use, it offers a generous selection of proprietary machine learning algorithms."
"We have integration where you can write third-party apps. This sort of feature opens it up to being able to do anything you want."
"It's a very organized product. It's easy to use."
"The supervised models are valuable. It is also very organized and easy to use."
"We had an IBM Guardium service contract where we used one of their resources to help us develop our prototype. It was a good experience, but they were helpful and responsive."
"The ease of use in the user interface is the best part of it. The ability to customize some of my streams with R and Python has been very useful to me, I've automated a few things with that."
"We have full control of the data handling process."
More IBM SPSS Modeler pros
"In my opinion, Microsoft BI is a low-cost solution, and it could be an interesting solution for a tourism company."
"It works well with SSAS, which we use to generate all different kinds of trending and analytics reports. Sometimes we use Power Query and DAX to build some aggregations on the Power BI side as well."
"I like the fact that Power BI lets me use Excel data. At least 90% of my state data is in Excel spreadsheets. Having the ability to just attach a spreadsheet as a data source is very, very important. It's also good for training and teaching. Sometimes you don't always have access to a live production database, so having a spreadsheet with sample data is always nice."
"The product can go easily go and extract data and it can put it into any format."
"The drag and drop facility to easily change the data correctly is the most valuable feature. I am happy to see visualizations. It's easier to talk about and make people understand what is going on."
"What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."
"Microsoft Power BI is an easy tool for data analysis."
"This product has a lot of features and most of them are user-friendly."
More Microsoft Power BI pros
 

Cons

"The integration with sources and visualisation needs some improvement. The scalability needs improvement."
"We have run into a few problems doing some entity matching/analytics."
"The challenge for the very technical data scientists: It is constraining for them.​"
"I can say the solution is outdated."
"Formula writing is not straightforward for an Excel user. Totally new set of functions, which takes time to learn and teach."
"It is very good, but slow. The slowness may be because we have not finalized all the background information in SPSS. It still needs some tweaking."
"There are performance issues. Extracting data from many combined tables can take hours and occasionally crash the server due to memory leaks. This performance problem bothers people. The performance issue seems to be related to the server. We design streams on the client and submit them to the server, which generates a large SQL statement. There are two potential bottlenecks: one in the server and another in data extraction. I'm unsure about the exact mechanics of data splitting when fetching from the database."
"Expensive to deploy solutions. You need to buy an extra deployment unit."
More IBM SPSS Modeler cons
"When you go to the cloud, its licensing is not intuitive. It is a little bit complex. When you have to purchase a new license, it is difficult to understand on their website what exactly you need to pay and how you can group. It is something that is applicable to all Microsoft products. They're not always so simple and clear when it comes to licensing. Their support can also be better in terms of explaining how they resolved an issue and what steps they took to resolve it. They are able to resolve the issue, but they can be better at explaining the approach they took to resolve the issue. It could have something in the direction of machine learning. It can have some kind of integration with machine learning where you can ask for some reports with natural language."
"From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT."
"The on-premises version lacks some technical features that are available with the Cloud version."
"It should be more user-friendly and simple."
"I have observed issues regarding stability."
"Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great."
"As Copilot and further integrations continue to develop, they will enhance Power BI's functionality."
"Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions."
More Microsoft Power BI cons
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 users use the server with ten licenses, it runs faster. But if forty users use the same appliance, everything slows down. People then think it's not easy to do things and prefer using remote tools like Python to extract data from the database. It's not about being expensive or cheap, but about people's knowledge and experience in how to do the work."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
More IBM SPSS Modeler pricing and cost advice
"The premium licensing is approximately $5,000 per month which is pretty expensive."
"There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."
"MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."
"The solution is affordable."
"Their price is good."
"The price of the license can be better."
"I have not had a customer suggest the solution is too expensive. There are licenses to use the solution."
"The premium capacity is very costly in respect of the market in Egypt, amounting to $5,000 monthly."
More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice
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Comparison Review

it_user79932 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2015
Comparison of SAP BO, Tableau, QlikView, Cognos, Microsoft, OBIEE and Pentaho
1. SAP BO/BI Enterprise scalability Security Ease of use Semantic layer 2. Tableau Visualization Data discovery Turnaround time 3. IBM Cognos Enterprise scalability Security In-memory feature 4. MS BI - Flexibility 5. Pentaho - Open source but still enterprise grade 6. QlikView Data…
Read full review
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Educational Organization
11%
Government
10%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
9%
 

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 Business134
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise165
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM SPSS Modeler?
Compared to other tools, the product works much easier to analyze data without coding.
See all answers
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...
See all answers
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 ...
See all answers
Seeking lightweight open source BI software
There are many...It would rather depend what System BI architecture or Enterprise legacy you have at your end...I would recommend as follows: 1) If you have legacies of SAP, Oracle - look for SAP...
See all answers
Is Power BI a complete platform or only a visualization tool?
Power BI is an advanced visualization tool oriented to big data with a very complete set of widgets to visualize information, control users accessing information, the configuration of governance po...
See all answers
How does Oracle OBIEE compare with Microsoft BI?
Oracle OBIEE is great in allowing design and creativity per the individual needs of the organization. Dashboards are fully customizable and very user-friendly. This solution is very stable. Oracle ...
See all answers
 

Comparisons

IBM SPSS Statistics vs IBM SPSS Modeler Logo
IBM SPSS Statistics vs IBM SPSS Modeler
Compared 32% of the time
KNIME Business Hub vs IBM SPSS Modeler Logo
KNIME Business Hub vs IBM SPSS Modeler
Compared 14% of the time
Altair RapidMiner vs IBM SPSS Modeler Logo
Altair RapidMiner vs IBM SPSS Modeler
Compared 6% of the time
Alteryx vs IBM SPSS Modeler Logo
Alteryx vs IBM SPSS Modeler
Compared 5% of the time
Weka vs IBM SPSS Modeler Logo
Weka vs IBM SPSS Modeler
Compared 5% of the time
More IBM SPSS Modeler Competitors
Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Tableau Enterprise vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 13% of the time
Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 9% of the time
Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 7% of the time
Domo vs Microsoft Power BI Logo
Domo vs Microsoft Power BI
Compared 7% of the time
More Microsoft Power BI Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
IBM SPSS Modeler
September 2025
IBM SPSS Modeler reportDownload IBM SPSS Modeler product report
Buyer's Guide
Microsoft Power BI
August 2025
Microsoft Power BI reportDownload Microsoft Power BI product report
 

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler
SSRS, SSAS, MSBI, MS Reporting Services, Microsoft BI Tools, Microsoft Big Data, Power BI Pro, MS BI
 

Overview

IBM SPSS Modeler is an extensive predictive analytics platform that is designed to bring predictive intelligence to decisions made by individuals, groups, systems and the enterprise. By providing a range of advanced algorithms and techniques that include text analytics, entity analytics, decision management and optimization, SPSS Modeler can help you consistently make the right decisions from the desktop or within operational systems.

Buy
https://www.ibm.com/products/spss-modeler/pricing
 
Sign up for the trial
https://www.ibm.com/account/reg/us-en/signup?formid=urx-19947


IBM

Microsoft Power BI is a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. This tool stands out for its ability to merge and analyze data from various sources. Widely adopted across different industries and departments, Power BI is instrumental in creating visually appealing dashboards and generating insightful business intelligence reports. Its intuitive interface, robust visualization capabilities, and seamless integration with other Microsoft applications empower users to easily create interactive reports and gain valuable insights.

Microsoft
 

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
Accenture Adidas Aetna AIG Airbus Alibaba Allstate Amazon American Express Aon AT&T Audi Bank of America BASF Bayer Berkshire Hathaway Boeing Coca-Cola Comcast Cisco Coca-Cola Dell Disney Emirates Equinix FedEx Ford GE Google H&M Home Depot Honda IBM Intel JPMorgan Chase Kellogg's Kroger L'Oréal McDonald's Merck MetLife Microsoft Nike Oracle P&G PepsiCo Procter & Gamble Prudential Financial SAP Siemens Snapchat Spotify Starbucks Target Toyota T-Mobile Unilever Visa Walmart WeWork World Bank Xerox
Buyer's Guide
Data Mining
August 2025
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We monitor all Data Mining reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.