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IBM SPSS Modeler 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 SPSS Modeler
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
39
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (4th), Data Science Platforms (13th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (7th)
 

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 17.6%, up 16.3% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 4.2% mindshare, down 6.0% since last year.
Data Mining
Data Visualization
 

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.
Renato Vazamin - PeerSpot reviewer
Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations
We had that solution installed previously in another solution, Selvaya, but I don't think we used it at the time. We are now using SAS Detect Investigation as a complementary solution, in which we have part of the process, use a gene, SAS collects information and identifies some business situations, and the business guys use Visual Analytics to explore the results of the process. We previously used the FICO platform, but we switched because FICO's pricing was not scalable. Bringing more data or workloads to the platform required a significant investment in order to scale. We needed to change because we have a lot of data to process every day. FICO was also a little more complicated than SAS Visual Analytics.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We have been able to do some predictive modeling with it"
"It will scale up to anything we need."
"It is just a lot faster. So you do not have to write a bunch of code, you can throw that stuff on there pretty quickly and do prototyping quickly."
"Some basic form of feature engineering for classification models. This really quickens the model development process."
"It is very scalable for non-technical people."
"It gives you a GUI interface, which is a lot more user-friendly and easier to use compared to writing R scripts or Python."
"A lot of jobs that are stuck in Excel due to the huge numbers of rows are tackled pretty quickly."
"Extremely easy to use, it offers a generous selection of proprietary machine learning algorithms."
"The product is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"The alert generation feature also helps in sending out ad hoc messages to the business users if business thresholds have been crossed."
"The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great."
"I would rate the overall solution a ten out of ten."
"Simplifies report designs and quickly displays tables and graphs."
"I believe that the possibilities for exploring data and formulating visual results are quite good because it allows the business analyst to have different perspectives on the data."
"The technical support services are good."
"The tool's most valuable features are its ease of use and advanced data visualization capabilities."
 

Cons

"We have run into a few problems doing some entity matching/analytics."
"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."
"Unstructured data is not appropriate for SPSS Modeler."
"Requires more development."
"It is not integrated with Qlik, Tableau, and Power BI."
"I would like see more programming languages added, like MATLAB. That would be better."
"If IBM could add some of the popular models into the SPSS for further analysis, like popular regression models, I think that would be a helpful improvement."
"We would like to see better visualizations and easier integration with Cognos Analytics for reporting."
"The reason we haven't rolled it out across the board is due to the fact that the licensing is so expensive."
"It is not as mature as competitors such as Tableau and QlikView."
"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."
"I haven't come across any missing features."
"There is room for improvement in anti-money laundering prevention and operation monitoring, as well as operation monitoring surveillance."
"Colours used on report objects"
"In Brazil, there are few documents, courses, and other resources for studying and implementing the tool."
"The integration aspects of the solution could be improved."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"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."
"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."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"The product is quite expensive."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
"Licensing is simple."
"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."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"The product is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
13%
Educational Organization
11%
University
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

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.
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?
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 performanc...
What do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?
The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps w...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI. It may be that our current subscription does not include AI-enabled features, but I wo...
 

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler
SAS BI
 

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
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.
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