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IBM SPSS Statistics vs IBM Watson Explorer 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 Statistics
Ranking in Data Mining
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
38
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (8th)
IBM Watson Explorer
Ranking in Data Mining
11th
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Statistics is 16.6%, up from 12.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM Watson Explorer is 0.8%, down from 0.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining
 

Featured Reviews

Laurence Moseley - PeerSpot reviewer
Delivers reliable results for academic research and keeps you close to your data.
SPSS is perfectly adequate if all you want are some results. If you only need the results, you do not require the trail of evidence on how you obtained those results. I mainly used it for cross tabs, correlation, regression, chi-squared tests, and similar analyses often seen in published papers; I used it for my papers as well. For wider uses I find Knime keeps me in touch with my data, however much I transform them.
it_user840897 - PeerSpot reviewer
Ingests, retrieves information from a range of sources; enables dissecting questions in context and answering them
WEX is more a platform, I believe, than it is the application. I could talk about what I'm looking for in the application. We've done visualizations and we can do basic analysis with the system as it stands. Where we're looking to take it is implementing it into workflows, so the workers on the line can actually understand the risks that they're exposing themselves to and then address them on the fly. So that's fantastic. And then the final one is, it's not prediction, but maybe anticipation. So when people are put at risk, we'll be implementing solutions shortly that will help people anticipate the risks and the dangers they're exposing themselves to so they can control them.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"They have many existing algorithms that we can use and use effectively to analyze and understand how to put our data to work to improve what we do."
"in terms of the simplicity, I think the SPSS basic can handle it."
"One feature I found very valuable was the analysis of variance (ANOVA)."
"The SPSS interface is very accessible and user-friendly. It's really easy to get information in it. I've shared it with experts and beginners, and everyone can navigate it."
"It has the ability to easily change any variable in our research."
"You can quickly build models because it does the work for you."
"Custom tables and macros: They allow us to create useful reports quickly for a broad audience."
"It has helped our analyst unit deliver work with more transparency and confidence, given that we can always view the dataset in totality, after each step of data transformation."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The product should provide more ways to import data and export results that are user-friendly for high-level executives."
"I'd like to see them use more artificial intelligence. It should be smart enough to do predictions and everything based on what you input."
"The solution could improve by providing a visual network for predictions and a self-organizing map for clustering."
"Perhaps in terms of visualization. It's not really easy to do some data visualization, just simple, descriptive analysis in SPSS. I think that could be an area for improvement."
"SPSS slows down the computer or the laptop if the data is huge; then you need a faster computer."
"The design of the experience can be improved."
"Needs more statistical modelling functions."
"Most of the package will give you the fixed value, or the p-value, without an explanation as to whether it it significant or not. Some beginners might need not just the results, but also some explanation for them."
"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"
"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."
"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"
"The solution is expensive."
"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 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."
"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."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We think that IBM SPSS is expensive for this function."
"While the pricing of the product may be higher, the accompanying service and features justify the investment."
"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."
"Our licence is on a yearly renewal basis. While pricing is not the primary concern in our evaluation, as products are assessed by whether they can meet our user needs and expertise, the cost can be a limiting factor in the number of licences we procure."
"If it requires lot of data processing, maybe switching to IBM SPSS Clementine would be better for the buyer."
"The price of this solution is a little bit high, which was a problem for my company."
"It's quite expensive, but they do a special deal for universities."
"More affordable training for new staff members."
"The solution is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
16%
Educational Organization
14%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
10%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about IBM SPSS Statistics?
The software offers consistency across multiple research projects helping us with predictive analytics capabilities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM SPSS Statistics?
SPSS is horrendously expensiver. On a laptop Knime is free of charge (Windows, Mac, Linux)
What needs improvement with IBM SPSS Statistics?
Better guidance both in producing programs and interpreting their output.
Ask a question
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Also Known As

SPSS Statistics
IBM WEX
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

LDB Group, RightShip, Tennessee Highway Patrol, Capgemini Consulting, TEAC Corporation, Ironside, nViso SA, Razorsight, Si.mobil, University Hospitals of Leicester, CROOZ Inc., GFS Fundraising Solutions, Nedbank Ltd., IDS-TILDA
RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SPSS Statistics vs. IBM Watson Explorer and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.