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Azure Databricks vs IBM SPSS Modeler 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

Azure Databricks
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
4.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SPSS Modeler
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
13th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (3rd)
 

Featured Reviews

SK
Sr. Technical Specialist at Softcell Technologies Limited
Data pipelines have accelerated and support reliable analytics collaboration across teams
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We would also like richer governance features, better debugging for distributed Spark jobs, and more granular controls for workload optimization over and across multiple teams, which we have at multiple customer environments and within our organization. In day-to-day operations, troubleshooting failed Spark jobs can still be time-consuming, especially in complex distributed workloads. We would like clearer root cause diagnostics and more actionable performance recommendations within Azure Databricks. Better cost optimization insights at the job and cluster level would also help us manage large multiple team environments more efficiently.
RB
Business Owner at SASS GmbH
Support and flexibility enable effective project initiation and meet customer needs but deployment requires enhancement
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 solution, and then I convert my MATLAB solution to C programming language. This I can deploy, and I can check it, and it is MISRA compatible. It is very easy to deploy it, to go from MATLAB to C or C++, which is actually needed in the car industry. In the car industry, they want to have it in the hardware. You cannot put MATLAB or IBM SPSS Modeler in the hardware of a car, but with C, there is no problem with a microcontroller. They can shoot it into the microcontroller, and I can check it with Polyspace, and it is MISRA compatible, which is an industrial standard. There is nothing similar in IBM SPSS Modeler. I made solutions with IBM SPSS Modeler, and then the customer said they wanted to make a production out of it, and it was not possible. I stopped with IBM SPSS Modeler 18. It is now 18.6 from what I know at the moment. I do not believe that there is a possibility to design a graphic user interface with it. It is itself a graphic user interface, where you put all sorts of little icons into the display.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The concept of Azure Databricks is a very good one, especially for the data products concept and idea."
"The best features in Azure Databricks for me are that it's easy to use, flexible, and has fast processing, and you can use multiple data types."
"Regarding the learning curve, it is a good technology; it is the first time I am working on a cloud platform, and before that, I have not worked on any data engineering tool that is on cloud, so it is good learning."
"My pipelines are now significantly faster compared to older ETL tools, as what used to take over 12 to 14 hours to process 2 GB of source data in Synapse Analytics now completes within 5 hours using the Azure Databricks framework for the transformation part, illustrating a substantial improvement in performance."
"Azure Databricks gives the capability to handle a lot of big data use cases and machine learning use cases, but machine learning use cases need quite a lot of compute power, and that is where the cost spikes up."
"Azure Databricks has significantly improved our ability to process data and large data sets, and deliver analytics projects faster for our customers."
"We have a local representative who specializes in SPSS. He will help us do the PoC."
"It handles large data better than the previous system that we were using, which was basically Excel and Access. We serve upwards of 300,000 parts over a 150 regions and we need to crunch a lot of numbers."
"It gives you a GUI interface, which is a lot more user-friendly and easier to use compared to writing R scripts or Python."
"We use analytics with the visual modeling capability to leverage productivity improvements."
"It continues to be a very flexible platform, so that it handles R and Python and other types of technology. It seems to be growing with additional open-source movement out there on different platforms."
"It is a great tool even for an individual with no or basic predictive modeling experience."
"It will scale up to anything we need."
"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
 

Cons

"The only concern is perhaps related to the pricing and cost that Azure Databricks incurs."
"Lower pricing is currently my only focus and I'm still exploring Azure Databricks, so it's too early to say something, but overall, I'm saying that it is the future."
"From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments."
"At this point, I cannot comment on the cost being ideal; it is on the higher side, but in the cloud-based environment, compared to on-premise, it could be far lesser in cost."
"The biggest friction point I have experienced with Azure Databricks is its cost-effectiveness; for projects with less data volume, it is advisable to use Azure Fabric services instead, as Azure Databricks may not be suitable for low volume processing."
"I have given the product a rating of six out of ten just because I do not use all of the functionalities, and I see some direction for improvement as well; also, every product has something to improve, and I have not used many features in this product."
"When I used it in the office, back in the day, we did have some stability issues. Sometimes it just randomly crashed and we couldn't get good feedback. But when I use it for my own stuff now I don't have any problems."
"​I would like better integration into the Weather Company solution. I have raised a couple of concerns about this integration and having more time series capabilities.​"
"Weak documentation and user guide."
"The time series is a very important issue, however, it is not given its value in the package as it should be."
"I would not rate the technical support very well. The technicians have accents, and when you do find someone, it is very hard to get somebody able to answer the technical questions."
"The forecasting could be a bit easier."
"The software is quite expensive and IBM is currently marketing its other digital dashboard tools such as IBM cognos, now we aren't sure on the plans of IBM integrating these two softwares."
"It would be beneficial if the tool would include more well-known machine learning algorithms."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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."
"It is a huge increase to time savings."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Databricks?
Regarding the licensing cost of Azure Databricks, it has evolved quite a lot. The compute is the biggest cost, as with any other big data solutions. The storage cost is almost minimal or negligible...
What needs improvement with Azure Databricks?
From our experience, Azure Databricks could be improved with simpler cluster management and more predictable cost visibility and enhanced native monitoring for large enterprise environments. We wou...
What is your primary use case for Azure Databricks?
Azure Databricks is our primary platform for building scalable data engineering and analytics pipelines for enterprise customers. We use it to inject, transform, and process large volumes of struct...
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?
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 ...
What is your primary use case for IBM SPSS Modeler?
I have been using IBM SPSS Modeler for a long time. I am using IBM SPSS Modeler mainly for ETL. Sometimes I use it to compare the results of the modeling as compared to MATLAB. MATLAB is the main t...
 

Also Known As

No data available
SPSS Modeler
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Databricks vs. IBM SPSS Modeler and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.