Databricks vs IBM SPSS Modeler vs Microsoft Power BI comparison

The compared Databricks and IBM solutions aren't in the same category. Databricks is ranked #8 in CDW , with an average rating of 8.3, and holds a 9.0% mindshare in the category. IBM is ranked #4 in DM , with an average rating of 7.0, and holds a 17.9% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Databricks users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 86% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Databricks

Read 91 Databricks reviews

25,542 Views
2,043 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

IBM SPSS Modeler

Read 39 IBM SPSS Modeler reviews

2,280 Views
935 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 321 Microsoft Power BI reviews

26,806 Views
16,352 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Databricks

IBM SPSS Modeler

Microsoft Power BI

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Databricks, IBM SPSS Modeler, and Microsoft Power BI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloud Data Warehouse Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Data Warehouse

June 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Mindshare comparison

Cloud Data Warehouse

Data Mining

BI (Business Intelligence) Tools

Featured Reviews

ShubhamSharma7

Data Engineer at a engineering company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Capability to integrate diverse coding languages in a single notebook greatly enhances workflow

Databricks offers various courses that I can use, whether it's PySpark, Scala, or R. I can leverage all these courses in a single notebook, which is beneficial for clients as they can access various tools in one place whenever needed. This is quite significant. I usually work with PySpark based on client requirements. After coding, I feed the Databricks notebooks into the ADF pipeline for updates. Databricks' capability to process data in parallel enhances data processing speed. Furthermore, I can connect our Databricks notebook directly with Power BI and other visualization tools like Qlik. Once we develop code, it allows us to transform raw data into visualizations for clients using analysis diagrams, which is very helpful.

Read full review

PeterHuo

Application Architect at Canada Border Services Agency

Good tool for extracting data from data warehouses, creating streams, and manipulating logic to extract final data

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. When streams become larger, performance bottlenecks may occur in the IBM SPSS Modeler server or the database. Sometimes the server crashes and needs to be restarted to release memory on both sides. I'm not sure exactly where the problem is caused, as I focus on stream design rather than server issues. The problem could be on the IBM SPSS Modeler server and database.

Read full review

Shoury Priyanshu

Senior Manager, Strategy & Consulting at Viacom18 Media Pvt Ltd

Facilitates seamless data aggregation with some outdated visual elements hindering user appeal

Real-time data integration is an area for improvement. Although I've worked on several solutions involving real-time integration, it's not very user-friendly and often lags, especially with over a million data rows. This makes Power BI difficult to manage as loading times can reach one or two minutes, which is problematic today. There are challenges with scalability, requiring multiple pages in dashboards to manage these issues. Visualization could be improved as it appears outdated. Users, especially newcomers, find it unappealing and not user-friendly.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Ability to work collaboratively without having to worry about the infrastructure."

"The simplicity of development is the most valuable feature."

"Databricks helps crunch petabytes of data in a very short period of time."

"In the manufacturing industry, Databricks can be beneficial to use because of machine learning. It is useful for tasks, such as product analysis or predictive maintenance."

"It is a cost-effective solution."

"I like how easy it is to share your notebook with others. You can give people permission to read or edit. I think that's a great feature. You can also pull in code from GitHub pretty easily. I didn't use it that often, but I think that's a cool feature."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to use SQL directly with Databricks."

"One of the features provides nice interactive clusters, or compute instances that you don't really need to manage often."

More Databricks pros

"We have a local representative who specializes in SPSS. He will help us do the PoC."

"Very good data aggregation."

"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."

"New algorithms are added into every version of Modeler, e.g., SMOTE, random forest, etc. The Derive node is used for the syntax code to derive the data."

"Our go live process has been slightly enhanced compared to the previous programmatic process. There is now a faster time to production from the business end."

"It works fine. I have not had any stability issues; it is always up."

"It will scale up to anything we need."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pros

"The virtualization of Microsoft BI is very good."

"The drill-down capabilities and automatic charts are the best ones. The visualization is also very good. In terms of visualization, no competing product, such as IBM Cognos or any other product, has the same capabilities."

"It's a powerful platform."

"The product is intuitive and user-friendly."

"There is a lot of help and documentation on the Internet, so no special training is needed to use the source code."

"One of the most valuable features of Power BI is the ease of use. It is comfortable and there is not a steep learning curve for this solution. If you have some idea of the data and basic visualization ideas, you can use this solution comfortably."

"The standard BI visualization capabilities are great."

"The most valuable feature is integration with Python."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"I would love an integration in my desktop IDE. For now, I have to code on their webpage."

"The product could be improved by offering an expansion of their visualization capabilities, which currently assists in development in their notebook environment."

"The product needs samples and templates to help invite users to see results and understand what the product can do."

"I would like to see more documentation in terms of how an end-user could use it, and users like me can easily try it and implement use cases."

"I have seen better user interfaces, so that is something that can be improved."

"CI/CD needs additional leverage and support."

"Databricks would have more collaborative features than it has. It should have some more customization for the jobs."

"Databricks can improve by making the documentation better."

More Databricks cons

"Time Series or forecasting needs to be easier. It is a very important feature, and it should be made easier and more automated to use. For instance, for logistic regression, binary or multinomial is used automatically based on the type of the target variable. I wish they can make Time Series easier to use in a similar way."

"I understand that it takes some time to incorporate some of the new algorithms that have come out in the last few months, in the literature. For example, there is an algorithm based on how ants search for food. And there are some algorithms that have now been developed to complement rules. So that's one of the things that we need to have incorporated into it."

"The standard package (personal) is not supported for database connection."

"If IBM could add some of the popular models into the SPSS for further analysis, like popular regression models, I think that would be a helpful improvement."

"I think mapping for geographic data would also be a really great thing to be able to use."

"When you are not using the product, such as during the pandemic where we had worldwide lockdowns, you still have to pay for the licensing."

"It would be beneficial if the tool would include more well-known machine learning algorithms."

"The platform's cloud version needs improvements."

More IBM SPSS Modeler cons

"The initial installation is difficult."

"It is too slow. I hope in future it will be a comparable big data tool, such as, for example, Data Lake."

"It should be easier to use when there are multiple system sources."

"The solution's documentation needs improvement."

"They are improving it all the time. What would be nice is if they could respond to feature requests more quickly. They can provide faster support for new features."

"BI is scalable, but there are some problems with limited online storage."

"Power BI could be improved by implementing more options for data integration. Nowadays, the cloud takes care of scalability and security. As we all know, data sources are increasing, so we get data from a variety of streams. But if we could get the downstream data into the database and update the reports more easily, Power BI would be better."

"The solution could benefit by allowing deeper data analytics."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would rate Databricks' pricing seven out of ten."

"We only pay for the Azure compute behind the solution."

"My smallest project is around a hundred euros, and my most expensive is just under a thousand euros a week. That is based on terabytes of data processed each month."

"The pricing depends on the usage itself."

"We're charged on what the data throughput is and also what the compute time is."

"The billing of Databricks can be difficult and should improve."

"The product pricing is moderate."

"Databricks uses a price-per-use model, where you can use as much compute as you need."

More Databricks pricing and cost advice

"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."

"It is a huge increase to time savings."

"It is an expensive product."

"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."

"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."

"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."

"$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."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pricing and cost advice

"Its cost seems to be unreasonable if you have many users, but for a lesser number of users, it is reasonable. It is $10 per month. Clients easily accept this option, so they must think it is reasonable. It is quite cheap as compared to other tools, such as Tableau. One of the best things about this solution is that it has a trial version."

"Make it low in cost. It is a no-brainer!"

"We have enterprise licenses and some of the other tools or features come as a package and others you have to purchase separately."

"The cost of licensing depends on the number of people that are going to be using the reports, and we are satisfied with it at $10 per user."

"There is room for at least 45% discount as compared to the initial price."

"Compared to others, I think it is reasonable."

"MS BI comes with all the tools and it is, to the best of my knowledge, the most affordable solution."

"It is somewhere in the middle in terms of price. Licensing is quite clear."

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

18%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

11%

Educational Organization

11%

Government

10%

University

Financial Services Firm

12%

Educational Organization

10%

Computer Software Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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 ...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What do you like most about IBM SPSS Modeler?

Compared to other tools, the product works much easier to analyze data without coding.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

What needs improvement with IBM SPSS Modeler?

There are performance issues. Extracting data from many combined tables can take hours and occasionally crash the ser...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

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Tableau vs Databricks

Compared 5% of the time

Apache Flink vs Databricks

Compared 4% of the time

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Compared 22% of the time

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Compared 15% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 6% of the time

Amazon SageMaker vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 2% of the time

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Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 13% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 7% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Databricks

July 2025

Download Databricks product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Modeler

July 2025

Download IBM SPSS Modeler product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

July 2025

Download Microsoft Power BI product report

Also Known As

Databricks Unified Analytics, Databricks Unified Analytics Platform, Redash

SPSS Modeler

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

Overview

Databricks is utilized for advanced analytics, big data processing, machine learning models, ETL operations, data engineering, streaming analytics, and integrating multiple data sources.

Organizations leverage Databricks for predictive analysis, data pipelines, data science, and unifying data architectures. It is also used for consulting projects, financial reporting, and creating APIs. Industries like insurance, retail, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals use Databricks for data management and analytics due to its user-friendly interface, built-in machine learning libraries, support for multiple programming languages, scalability, and fast processing.

What are the key features of Databricks?

User-friendly interface: Simplifies operations and usability.
Built-in machine learning libraries: Facilitates machine learning tasks.
Support for multiple programming languages: Enhances flexibility.
Scalability: Efficiently handles growing data needs.
Fast processing: Improves performance and speed.
Automated optimization: Reduces manual efforts.
Data visualization: Provides insightful visuals.
Collaborative features: Enhances teamwork.
Delta Lake performance: Boosts data management.
Seamless cluster management: Simplifies system operations.

What are the benefits or ROI to look for in Databricks reviews?

Efficiency in handling large datasets: Ensures smooth processing.
Interactive workspace environment: Improves user collaboration.
Integration with platforms: Provides connectivity benefits.
Performance optimization: Enhances overall system performance.
Support for data governance and security: Ensures data integrity and protection.

Databricks is implemented in insurance for risk analysis and claims processing; in retail for customer analytics and inventory management; in manufacturing for predictive maintenance and supply chain optimization; and in pharmaceuticals for drug discovery and patient data analysis. Users value its scalability, machine learning support, collaboration tools, and Delta Lake performance but seek improvements in visualization, pricing, and integration with BI tools.

Databricks

IBM SPSS Modeler is an extensive predictive analytics platform that is designed to bring predictive intelligence to decisions made by individuals, groups, systems and the enterprise. By providing a range of advanced algorithms and techniques that include text analytics, entity analytics, decision management and optimization, SPSS Modeler can help you consistently make the right decisions from the desktop or within operational systems.

Buy
https://www.ibm.com/products/spss-modeler/pricing

Sign up for the trial
https://www.ibm.com/account/reg/us-en/signup?formid=urx-19947

IBM

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.

Microsoft

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

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

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Microsoft, Google and others in Cloud Data Warehouse. Updated: June 2025.

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