IBM Watson Explorer vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

The compared IBM and Microsoft solutions aren't in the same category. IBM is ranked #10 in DM , and holds a 0.8% mindshare in the category. Microsoft is ranked #1 in BIT , with an average rating of 7.9, and holds a 23.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Microsoft users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM Watson Explorer and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Data Mining solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM Watson Explorer vs. Microsoft Power BI Report (Updated: March 2020).

Buyer's Guide

IBM Watson Explorer vs. Microsoft Power BI

March 2020

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Helped 816,406 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM SPSS Statistics

Mindshare comparison

Data Mining

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

AbakarAhmat

Software Engineer at a university with 10,001+ employees

Enhancing survey analysis that provides valued insightfulness

I used traditional tools where I would prepare data, click through menus, and use SQL Server for data visualization. We switched to IBM SPSS because it offers strong certification and aligns well with the standards we prioritize in our surveys. In terms of popularity, it stands out as the top choice in the market, especially in the research and university domains. Many different organizations and institutions use SPSS for statistical analytics. While there are other tools like MCLab and similar options available, SPSS is the most renowned and widely used among them.

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it_user840897

Head of Commercialization at Woodside Energy

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.

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Amol Rane

Solutions Architect M365 at Sogeti UK

Supports AI initiatives in terms of predictive analytics

The only issue is with permissions. Sometimes, despite granting granular permissions, dashboards are visible to people who shouldn't have access. It's difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. Sometimes dashboards are visible to stakeholders even though they should not have permission. It's a bit difficult to understand why the permissions slip out. The dashboards lack a user-friendly appearance, and the permissions should be easier to understand. At this point, we have to go through a lot of details. It takes a lot of time to understand the permissions, so if there were better options available within the Power BI setup, it would be quite beneficial, especially for admins. So, there should be a more user-friendly dashboard appearance and easier-to-understand permissions.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It offers very good visualization."

"The features that I have found most valuable are the Bayesian statistics and descriptive statistics."

"The most valuable feature is the user interface because you don't need to write code."

"The solution has numerous valuable features. We particularly like custom tabs. It's very useful. We end up analyzing a lot of software data, so features related to custom tabs are really helpful."

"It has the ability to easily change any variable in our research."

"Some of the most valuable features that we are using with some business models are machine learning algorithms, statistical models given to us by the business, and getting data from the database or text files."

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

"It is perfectly adequate if all you need are the results and not the trail of evidence."

More IBM SPSS Statistics pros

"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."

"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."

"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and to see the hidden insights from within unstructured data."

"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."

"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 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."

"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."

"The standard BI visualization capabilities are great."

"The product is user-friendly."

"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."

"The solution is easy to use."

"The best feature for me is Power Query. I know that probably sounds strange, but you can't do too much with visuals and reports if the backend stuff is horribly dirty and just bad. But for me, that is absolutely fantastic. I can load the data and do the transformation and be able to load it in a useful way. There are tons of connections, which is absolutely fantastic as well. It's been fairly easy, and it's intuitive."

"The best feature of this solution is the way you can plan, communicate, and visualize all the knowledge you extract from the data for the customers. I like the way you can show or visualize the information a client needs to answer a business question."

"What I like about Power BI is how fast you are able to create dashboards and how fast you are able to fetch the data. You can connect to the database or data source, and then you can design your dashboards very easily."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"The statistics should be more self-explanatory with detailed automated reports."

"The solution needs more planning tools and capabilities."

"It could provide even more in the way of automation as there are many opportunities."

"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."

"One of the areas that should be similar to Minitabs is the use of blogs. The Minitabs blog helps users understand the tools and gives lots of practical examples. Following the SPSS manual is cumbersome. It's a good, exhaustive manual, but it's not practical to use. With Minitabs, you can go to the blogs and find specific articles written about various components and it's very helpful. Without blogs, we find SPSS more complicated."

"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."

"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."

"Needs more statistical modelling functions."

More IBM SPSS Statistics cons

"The solution is expensive."

"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."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"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"

"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."

"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 doesn't integrate well with third-party tools."

"Drill-down in dashboards needs to improved. The capability only works in Power BI Desktop today. We need to have an alternative approach today."

"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."

"Microsoft Power BI was born native on the cloud, however, it's quite difficult when it has to connect to on-premise data sources."

"I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity."

"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."

"The Microsoft BI interface should be simpler and more user-friendly. I find it very difficult to move between their data sources and their analytics section."

"I'm looking for something that can make it much easier to incorporate Power BI visuals or dashboards into, let's say, Power Apps – custom Power Apps or anything like that. The most important thing would be to seamlessly embed reports in applications. For example, to have buttons that can be navigated through multiple solutions – from Power Apps to Power BI to SharePoint – via links or something like that."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If it requires lot of data processing, maybe switching to IBM SPSS Clementine would be better for the buyer."

"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."

"More affordable training for new staff members."

"The price of IBM SPSS Statistics could improve."

"I rate the tool's pricing a five out of ten."

"The price of this solution is a little bit high, which was a problem for my company."

"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."

More IBM SPSS Statistics pricing and cost advice

"The solution is expensive."

"The solution is priced well for what they offer. However, the premium version is very expensive."

"The costs are small and the benefits are high."

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

"There is a license for this solution and we purchase them annually."

"You don't need a license for development, but if you want to publish to external users, you need a license. The licensing is very costly, but I think that since the advantages and benefits of Power BI are so high, people are willing to pay. I can't blame them."

"The license is on a yearly basis."

"The price of the solution can be expensive if you want to synchronize your data more."

"If it has to be applied on the cloud, then it costs around $10 per month per user. For a pro license and for a premium license it's around $20 per month per user. If it has to be applied on-premises then, depending on the course of your server, you have to buy a software assurance version of the database."

More Microsoft Power BI pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user79932

Senior Manager - BI Head at NVidia

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

17%

University

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

18%

Educational Organization

13%

Outsourcing Company

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Educational Organization

41%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

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.

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for IBM SPSS Statistics?

The cost of IBM SPSS Statistics is managed by organizations, not individual researchers. It is a very expensive produ...

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What needs improvement with IBM SPSS Statistics?

IBM SPSS Statistics does not keep you close to your data like KNIME. In KNIME, at every stage, you can see the result...

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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 wou...

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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 info...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

IBM SPSS Modeler vs IBM SPSS Statistics

Compared 14% of the time

Alteryx vs IBM SPSS Statistics

Compared 14% of the time

TIBCO Statistica vs IBM SPSS Statistics

Compared 13% of the time

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio vs IBM SPSS Statistics

Compared 12% of the time

Weka vs IBM SPSS Statistics

Compared 11% of the time

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Salesforce Einstein Analytics vs IBM Watson Explorer

Compared 36% of the time

Tableau vs IBM Watson Explorer

Compared 28% of the time

More IBM Watson Explorer Competitors

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 17% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 10% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 6% of the time

Databricks vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 5% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Statistics

November 2024

Download IBM SPSS Statistics product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM Watson Explorer

November 2024

Download IBM Watson Explorer product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

November 2024

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

SPSS Statistics

IBM WEX

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

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IBM

Microsoft

Overview

IBM SPSS Statistics is a powerful data mining solution that is designed to aid business leaders in making important business decisions. It is designed so that it can be effectively utilized by organizations across a wide range of fields. SPSS Statistics allows users to leverage machine learning algorithms so that they can mine and analyze data in the most effective way possible.

IBM SPSS Statistics Benefits

Some of the ways that organizations can benefit by choosing to deploy IBM SPSS Statistics include:

Ease of use. SPSS Statistics enables users to simply and intuitively take control of their statistical needs. The solution is designed so that analysts who do not know how to code can easily make full use of the various tools and capabilities that SPSS Statistics has to offer. Its command language is so straightforward that it does not require users to undergo special training before they use it.

Comprehensive and flexible build. SPSS Statistics is designed to be both a comprehensive and highly flexible analytics solution. It enables users to utilize a variety of integrations that make it easy for users to add features that they might feel they are missing.

Automation. SPSS Statistics makes it simple for users to automate basic tasks that they might otherwise devote too much time worrying about. Tasks like calculation or data gathering can be delegated to the system while more conceptual tasks like data analysis are given to an organization’s analysts to handle.

IBM SPSS Statistics Features

Intuitive user interface. SPSS Statistics enables users to deploy an intuitive interface that makes the process of system management simple. Among the other components of this interface is a drag-and-drop feature that makes analysis and management possible for anyone who wants to use it.

Advanced data visualizations. Analysts that employ SPSS Statistics gain access to tools that empower them to create and export data visualizations. These visualizations can be formatted in many different ways depending on what the user needs.

Local data storage. SPSS Statistics has the ability to securely store data on a user’s computer. This enables them to add layers of security that would not necessarily be present if the data was stored in the cloud.

Reviews from Real Users

IBM SPSS Statistics is a highly effective solution that stands out when compared to many of its competitors. Two major advantages it offers are the wealth of functionalities that it provides and its high level of accessibility.

An Emeritus Professor of Health Services Research at a university writes, "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 in a multidimensional setup space. It's the multidimensional space facility that is most useful."

A Director of Systems Management & MIS Operations at a university, says, “The SPSS interface is very accessible and user-friendly. It's really easy to get information from it. I've shared it with experts and beginners, and everyone can navigate it.”

IBM Watson Explorer is a cognitive exploration and content analysis platform that lets you listen to your data for advice. Explore and analyze structured, unstructured, internal, external and public content to uncover trends and patterns that improve decision-making, customer service and ROI. Leverage built-in cognitive capabilities powered by machine learning models, natural language processing and next-generation APIs to unlock hidden value in all your data. Gain a secure 360-degree view of customers, in context, to deliver better experiences for your clients.

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.

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

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

IBM Watson Explorer vs. Microsoft Power BI

March 2020

Free Report: IBM Watson Explorer vs. Microsoft Power BI

Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Watson Explorer vs. Microsoft Power BI and other solutions. Updated: March 2020.

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