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SAS Enterprise Guide pros and cons

Vendor: SAS

4.1 out of 5

25 reviews
89% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

SAS Enterprise Guide improves data manipulation, analysis, and workflow efficiency with advanced scheduling and data integration capabilities. Its feature set facilitates data cleaning, transformation, and ETL processes, benefiting data science projects. However, lacking comprehensive machine learning features and complex project management tools, users face challenges in big data environments and integration with open-source tools, requiring additional resources. Slow technical support and insufficient error information further hinder troubleshooting efforts.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

SAS Enterprise Guide simplifies working with large datasets, enhancing the efficiency of data manipulation and analysis.

The platform provides advanced scheduling capabilities, optimizing workflow and eliminating downtime for program execution.

Its wide feature set supports extensive data integration from multiple sources, facilitating efficient data cleaning and transformation processes.

The tool's stability and performance improvements allow for effective risk management and customer retention strategies across various business domains.

SAS Enterprise Guide offers powerful capabilities for building and executing ETL processes, supporting data science projects and analytics tasks effectively.

CONS

SAS Enterprise Guide lacks a comprehensive machine learning feature set, requiring additional SAS products for full capabilities.

The slow response time from technical support and insufficient error information hinder troubleshooting.

Complex and large projects become unwieldy due to inadequate diagrammatic flow chart representation, causing difficulties in project management.

Integration with big data environments, like Apache Spark and Netezza, is challenging, impacting performance with very large datasets.

There is a need for bi-directional integration with SAS Studio suite and open-source tools like R and Python for enhanced functionality.

SAS Enterprise Guide Pros review quotes

reviewer2232579

Data Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jul 12, 2023

One of the features of the SAS Enterprise Guide is that it has a server, and we can access the server.

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OL

Data Engineer at Ministry of Health New Zealand

Oct 19, 2022

Enterprise Guide is much better at generating reports than many solutions. We often use it to generate reports, and people interpret them how they like. They often probably use Excel spreadsheets or something like that after they get our data.

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JR

IT Administrator with 1-10 employees

Jun 15, 2022

Similar to Microsoft Access, you can drag and drop. You can simply drag and drop objects onto the page and create various flows to establish your query within the project. You can extract those queries from the preview as needed.

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SAS Enterprise Guide

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Learn what your peers think about SAS Enterprise Guide. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2026.

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Karunakar Kankata

Data Scientist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 10, 2023

It streamlines our workflow involving multiple steps, from data extraction to modeling, and it is aimed at improving various aspects of banking operations, including customer retention and risk management.

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reviewer1640493

Senior Manager, Data Science and AI / ML Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jun 23, 2022

We are using SAS Enterprise Guide on a basic level and the Pro SQL and other procedures within it are the most useful right now. Additionally, it has a wide feature set and capabilities

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reviewer1734420

Head of Customer Intelligence & Research at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 4, 2022

The data cleaning part is valuable. SAS is a very powerful tool to work with and connect with different sources. We have several tables, and we are looking up tables from one place to another place. We are connecting with different data sources. The data is not coming from one source. There are several sources of data, and we have information coming from different sources. There are some flat files, and there is some information from the data warehouse.

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FA

Francisco Aparicio

Advisor at KPMG

Jun 17, 2021

The solution is user-friendly, the resource for the query builder is very useful, and the ability to explore the data is a benefit.

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GZ

Cenior Healthcare Economic Consultant at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

May 7, 2020

Areas where SAS EG does a better job than regular SAS are in the realm of importing and exporting data. For instance, exporting a SAS data set in Unix to an Excel spreadsheet on a PC is a simple task compared to doing the same task with Base SAS.

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Business analyst at BB seg

Dec 1, 2022

The query builder feature is the most valuable.

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MB

Monica Besleaga

SAS Application Architect at a computer software company

Apr 26, 2021

Filter and sort query builder is valuable. The ability to do advanced SAS programming is also a useful feature because we can do anything by using Enterprise Guide. It has a lot of functionalities. We can build ETL processes. There are clients who are using SAS Enterprise Guide to build ETL processes. They have a SAS-based program that is scheduled to run at a certain frequency to produce some reports for the business. It is a very useful tool for ETL unit tests and functional tests. You can also do data science projects in SAS Enterprise Guide by using different statistics. During my MBA, we used SAS Enterprise Guide for our statistic course. To query the data, there are many solutions such as SQL, but these tools are only a part of the integration. They are only useful for querying the data and require knowledge of SQL, so they are not suitable for business users. SAS Enterprise Guide can be very easily used by business users to filter and sort the data and build queries. It is not necessary to have coding skills to use SAS Enterprise Guide. For this reason, it is attractive for businesses.

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SAS Enterprise Guide Cons review quotes

reviewer2232579

Data Analyst at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

Jul 12, 2023

Recently, we realized that SAS Enterprise Guide is not so stable and gives us some outputs which are not suitable...Sometimes it's quite hard to report its stability issues.

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OL

Data Engineer at Ministry of Health New Zealand

Oct 19, 2022

Setting up SAS Enterprise Guide is somewhat messy and complex.

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JR

IT Administrator with 1-10 employees

Jun 15, 2022

I would like it to give more information rather than just a forever loop that forces you to shut down the system. Give you more error messages without stopping the entire project, or even the entire application. That it displays more error messages rather than terminating the application.

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SAS Enterprise Guide

Free Report: SAS Enterprise Guide Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about SAS Enterprise Guide. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: May 2026.

896,387 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Karunakar Kankata

Data Scientist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 10, 2023

The technical support response time has been consistently slow, and this has been a concern.

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reviewer1640493

Senior Manager, Data Science and AI / ML Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jun 23, 2022

We don't use SAS Enterprise Guide that much here because we haven't explored some of the statistical modeling capabilities. However, I do not think SAS Enterprise Guide provides all the machine learning features that we want. Those would be separate products from SAS, such as SAS Buyers or any of the other solutions, which will give us the capabilities that we are looking for.

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reviewer1734420

Head of Customer Intelligence & Research at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees

May 4, 2022

It is expensive.

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FA

Francisco Aparicio

Advisor at KPMG

Jun 17, 2021

There needs to be a community of SAS Enterprise Guide users for assistance. For example, as they do for Python or SQL.

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GZ

Cenior Healthcare Economic Consultant at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

May 7, 2020

I had difficulty with the diagrammatic flow chart style representation of projects. When projects got too large and complex (which was basically every project, except the most trivial). There just wasn't enough real estate to display the flow chart and dependencies without a lot of scrolling, even when a flow was down to minimum tasks. My recourse was making the flow less "atomic". E.g., rather than use the various subset, etc., tasks as program nodes to display the details, I would write chunks of code that did a few things and use them as SAS program nodes.

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Business analyst at BB seg

Dec 1, 2022

The stability is not very reliable.

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MB

Monica Besleaga

SAS Application Architect at a computer software company

Apr 26, 2021

Our data warehouse is built on the Netezza database. We have SAS BI, and we populate the Netezza database. When we have tables with, for example, a hundred million rows in Netezza, SAS Enterprise Guide doesn't work. It doesn't return any results. It works for around 30 to 40 million rows, but it is not working for anything more than that. This issue is only with the Netezza database. With Oracle, it is quite good. They can improve its performance with the Netezza database. There should be one unique tool that includes SAS Data Integration Studio and SAS Enterprise Guide for more integration capabilities. With SAS Enterprise Guide, it is not possible to create connections and libraries and build transformations that can be used for other projects. This tool should have all capabilities that SAS Enterprise Guide does not have. Such a tool would be perfect because it will be used by developers and business users at the same time. In addition to the integration capabilities, they should also provide more deployment capabilities. There should be an option to easily create SAS packages and export them from one environment to another. There could also be a possibility to connect with R and Python. Open-source tools are hot in the market nowadays, and it would be good to extend its capabilities.

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