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Databricks vs IBM SPSS Modeler vs Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio 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:
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Data Science Platforms category, the mindshare of Databricks is 9.3%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 3.5%, up from 2.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is 3.3%, down from 5.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Science Platforms Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Databricks9.3%
Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio3.3%
IBM SPSS Modeler3.5%
Other83.9%
Data Science Platforms
 

Featured Reviews

SimonRobinson - PeerSpot reviewer
Governance And Engagement Lead
Improved data governance has enabled sensitive data tracking but cost management still needs work
I believe we could improve Databricks integration with cloud service providers. The impact of our current integration has not been particularly good, and it's becoming very expensive for us. The inefficiencies in our implementation, such as not shutting down warehouses when they're not in use or reserving the right number of credits, have led to increased costs. We made several beginner mistakes, such as not taking advantage of incremental loading and running overly complicated queries all the time. We should be using ETL tools to help us instead of doing it directly in Databricks. We need more experienced professionals to manage Databricks effectively, as it's not as forgiving as other platforms such as Snowflake. I think introducing customer repositories would facilitate easier implementation with Databricks.
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.
reviewer2722962 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Scientist
Platform accelerates model development, enhances collaboration, and offers efficient deployment
The best features Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio offers include deep integration with Python notebooks and Azure Data Lake, which allows me to import external data, and through the pipeline, I can build my models, performing what is called data injection for my model building, making that deep integration quite interesting to use. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is a powerful platform for those already in the Azure ecosystem because it allows for scalability and provides a good environment for reproducibility, as well as collaboration tools, all designed and packaged in one place, which makes it outstanding. Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio has positively impacted my organization by reducing our project delivery times and increasing the pace at which we work, allowing us to focus on other more important tasks. Using Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio has reduced our model development time from approximately four hours to about two hours.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I haven't heard about any major stability issues. At this time I feel like it's stable."
"Databricks is a one-stop shop for everything data related, and it can scale with you."
"It is fast, it's scalable, and it does the job it needs to do."
"The ease of use and its accessibility are valuable."
"One of the newest features brought into this solution provides you with a way to solve, deploy, and train models using the platform itself, or it can connect to your Azure Machine Learning in order to train, deploy, and productionalize some of the machine learning models."
"The simplicity of development is the most valuable feature."
"Data is open to everyone; they can access it through many channels, including notebooks or SQL."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"We have a local representative who specializes in SPSS. He will help us do the PoC."
"It scales. I have not run into any challenges where it will not perform.​"
"Our go live process has been slightly enhanced compared to the previous programmatic process, and there is now a faster time to production from the business end."
"We had an IBM Guardium service contract where we used one of their resources to help us develop our prototype."
"It's a very organized product. It's easy to use."
"We had an IBM Guardium service contract where we used one of their resources to help us develop our prototype. It was a good experience, but they were helpful and responsive."
"The most valuable features of the IBM SPSS Modeler are visual programming, you don't have to write any code, and it is easy to use. 90 to 95 percent of the use cases, you don't have to fine-tune anything. If you want to do something deeper, for example, create a better neural network, then you have to go into the features and try to fine-tune them. However, the default selection which is made by the tool, it's very practical and works well."
"Projecting models, forecasting, being able to incorporate things that we could only imagine, and coming into new, faster learning capabilities from it."
"I like that it's totally easy to use. They have an AutoML solution, and their machine learning model is highly accurate. They also have a feature that can explain the machine learning model. This makes it easy for me to understand that model."
"It's easy to deploy."
"Split dataset, variety of algorithms, visualizing the data, and drag and drop capability are the features I appreciate most."
"The solution is very fast and simple for a data science solution."
"The interface is very intuitive."
"The solution facilitates our production."
"ML Studio is very easy to maintain."
"Personally, I got interested in data science and machine learning due to using this product."
 

Cons

"There are no direct connectors — they are very limited."
"The solution could improve by providing better automation capabilities. For example, working together with more of a DevOps approach, such as continuous integration."
"I would like it if Databricks adopted an interface more like R Studio."
"The integration and query capabilities can be improved."
"We often use a single cluster to ingest Databricks, which Databricks doesn't recommend. They suggest using a no-cluster solution like job clusters. This can be overwhelming for us because we started smaller."
"The solution could be improved by adding a feature that would make it more user-friendly for our team. The feature is simple, but it would be useful. Currently, our team is more familiar with the language R, but Databricks requires the use of Jupyter Notebooks which primarily supports Python. We have tried using RStudio, but it is not a fully integrated solution. To fully utilize Databricks, we have to use the Jupyter interface. One feature that would make it easier for our team to adopt the Jupyter interface would be the ability to select a specific variable or line of code and execute it within a cell. This feature is available in other Jupyter Notebooks outside of Databricks and in our own IDE, but it is not currently available within Databricks. If this feature were added, it would make the transition to using Databricks much smoother for our team."
"Databricks would have more collaborative features than it has. It should have some more customization for the jobs."
"I have had some issues with some of the Spark clusters running on Databricks, where the Spark runtime and clusters go up and down, which is an area for improvement."
"The scalability was kind of limited by our ability to get other people licenses, and that was usually more of a financial constraint."
"It would be helpful if SPSS supported open-source features, for example, embedding R or Python scripts in SPSS Modeler."
"The standard package (personal) is not supported for database connection."
"​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.​"
"We would like to see better visualizations and easier integration with Cognos Analytics for reporting."
"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."
"It would be helpful if SPSS supported open-source features, for example, embedding R or Python scripts in SPSS Modeler."
"We have run into a few problems doing some entity matching/analytics using this portion of the software."
"A problem that I encountered was that I had a model that I wanted to deploy and use on Azure Machine Learning, but there wasn't any option that that model can be used in the designer."
"The initial setup of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio was rigorous for someone new like me, but mastering it made things simpler."
"The solution should be more customizable."
"The pricing policy should be improved. I find the pricing to be not a good story in this case, as it is not affordable for everyone."
"I think they should improve two things. They should make their user interface more user-friendly. Integration could also be better. Because Microsoft Machine Learning is a Microsoft product, it's fully integrated with Microsoft Azure but not fully supported for other platforms like IBM or AWS or something else."
"The stability is questionable, given that Microsoft will be retiring the classic version of this product in 2024, and it's unclear how this will affect projects created on the classic version."
"The interface is a bit overloaded."
"One area where Azure Machine Learning Studio could improve is its user interface structure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I do not exactly know the costs, but one of our clients pays between $100 USD and $200 USD monthly."
"The solution is a good value for batch processing and huge workloads."
"We pay as we go, so there isn't a fixed price. It's charged by the unit. I don't have any details detail about how they measure this, but it should be a mix between processing and quantity of data handled. We run a simulation based on our use cases, which gives us an estimate. We've been monitoring this, and the costs have met our expectations."
"I am based in South Africa, where it is expensive adapting to the cloud, and then there is the price for the tool itself."
"We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is."
"Databricks uses a price-per-use model, where you can use as much compute as you need."
"I would rate Databricks' pricing seven out of ten."
"Databricks are not costly when compared with other solutions' prices."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"It is an expensive product."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"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."
"It is a huge increase to time savings."
"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."
"$5,000 annually."
"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."
"When we got our first models and were ready for the user acceptance testing, our licensing fees were between €2,500 ($2,750 USD) and €3,000 ($3,300 USD) monthly."
"The pricing for Microsoft products can be complex due to changes and being cloud-based, so it's not straightforward. I've been familiar with it for years, but sometimes details about product licenses and distribution can be unclear. For Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio specifically, I would rate the price a six out of ten."
"The platform's price is low."
"It is less expensive than one of its competitors."
"ML Studio's pricing becomes a numbers game."
"We pay only the Azure costs for what we use, which involves some subscription costs. But essentially, you pay for what you use. There are no extra costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The product is not that expensive."
"I am paying for it following a pay-as-you-go. So, the more I use it, the more it costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Healthcare Company
6%
Government
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Computer Software Company
7%
Performing Arts
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business27
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise56
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business23
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise30
 

Questions from the Community

Which do you prefer - Databricks or Azure Machine Learning Studio?
Databricks gives you the option of working with several different languages, such as SQL, R, Scala, Apache Spark, or ...
How would you compare Databricks vs Amazon SageMaker?
We researched AWS SageMaker, but in the end, we chose Databricks. Databricks is a Unified Analytics Platform designe...
Which would you choose - Databricks or Azure Stream Analytics?
Databricks is an easy-to-set-up and versatile tool for data management, analysis, and business analytics. For analyti...
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 bud...
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 ...
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...
What do you like most about Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio?
The learning curve is very low. Operationalizing the model is also very easy within the Azure ecosystem.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio?
The pricing for Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio is reasonable since it's pay as you go, meaning it won't cost...
What needs improvement with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio?
The initial setup can be a bit challenging for someone new, as the learning curve can be steep, but once I master the...
 

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash
SPSS Modeler
Azure Machine Learning, MS Azure Machine Learning Studio
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Elsevier, MyFitnessPal, Sharethrough, Automatic Labs, Celtra, Radius Intelligence, Yesware
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
Walgreens Boots Alliance, Schneider Electric, BP
Find out what your peers are saying about Databricks, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Knime and others in Data Science Platforms. Updated: March 2026.
885,789 professionals have used our research since 2012.