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 8.9% mindshare in the category. IBM is ranked #4 in DM , with an average rating of 6.8, and holds a 18.1% 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

2,200 Views
88 Comparison Views

96% willing to recommend

IBM SPSS Modeler

Read 39 IBM SPSS Modeler reviews

968 Views
781 Comparison Views

86% willing to recommend

Microsoft Power BI

Read 321 Microsoft Power BI reviews

18,413 Views
14,752 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: May 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Data Warehouse

May 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

"Databricks integrates well with other solutions."

"Its lightweight and fast processing are valuable."

"I would rate them ten out of ten."

"It's very simple to use Databricks Apache Spark."

"The notebooks and the ability to share them with collaborators are valuable, as multiple developers can use a single cluster."

"The ease of use and its accessibility are valuable."

"We are completely satisfied with the ease of connecting to different sources of data or pocket files in the search"

"The capacity of use of the different types of coding is valuable. Databricks also has good performance because it is running in spark extra storage, meaning the performance and the capacity use different kinds of codes."

More Databricks pros

"Extremely easy to use, it offers a generous selection of proprietary machine learning algorithms."

"The quality is very good."

"Some basic form of feature engineering for classification models. This really quickens the model development process."

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

"The visual modeling capability is one of its attractive features."

"You take two quarters and compare them and this tool is ideal because it gives you a lot of visibility on the before and after."

"So far, the stability has been rock solid."

"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."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pros

"Reports, dashboards, and visualizations are most valuable."

"Microsoft BI allows us to connect to any database or any dataset."

"Data integration is very useful in Power BI. It lets me collect data from many sources. For example, I can get data from Oracle databases and SQL Server databases at the same time."

"The most valuable feature is that it's easy to use. It's very useful for non-engineers and it is the ultimate solution for providing information and insights. Power BI is the best visualization tool I have ever worked with."

"The product is scalable."

"The main feature I find valuable is the possibility to work with an extensive amount of data."

"ou can pull reports, visualize them in real-time, and connect them to a variety of other data sources."

"Initial setup was very straightforward. Users can get up and running reporting on databases within minutes."

More Microsoft Power BI pros

Cons

"The biggest problem associated with the product is that it is quite pricey."

"Scalability is an area with certain shortcomings. The solution's scalability needs improvement."

"The data visualization for this solution could be improved. They have started to roll out a data visualization tool inside Databricks but it is in the early stages. It's not comparable to a solution like Power BI, Luca, or Tableau."

"The tool should improve its integration with other products."

"The ability to customize our own pipelines would enhance the product, similar to what's possible using ML files in Microsoft Azure DevOps."

"The API deployment and model deployment are not easy on the Databricks side."

"Databricks can improve by making the documentation better."

"I'm not the guy that I'm working with Databricks on a daily basis. I'm on the management team. However, my team tells me there are limitations with streaming events. The connectors work with a small set of platforms. For example, we can work with Kafka, but if we want to move to an event-driven solution from AWS, we cannot do it. We cannot connect to all the streaming analytics platforms, so we are limited in choosing the best one."

More Databricks cons

"Customer support is hard to contact."

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

"Regarding visual modeling, it is not the biggest strength of the product, although from what I hear in the latest release it's going to be a lot stronger. That, to me, has always been the biggest flaw in using this. It's very difficult to get good visualization."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Initial setup of the software was complex, because of our own problems within the government."

More IBM SPSS Modeler cons

"It would be better if they had some video tutorials. Most people from an Excel background may struggle with measures in Microsoft BI."

"The only challenge I have found is that they do not have a Mac version."

"It seems that the solution could use more analytics to help users draw more contextual business insights. Right now, you need other solutions for that."

"I have found using Microsoft BI is not easy. For example, trying to use the auto-refresh feature is not simple."

"They can improve the user interface a little bit to make it more user-friendly. When creating a dashboard, it is not very user-friendly. You have to click on a certain style and use your keyboard keys to move it. You cannot drag and drop it."

"Integration with products that are not Microsoft could be more improved."

"Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution."

"Real-time data integration is an area for improvement."

More Microsoft Power BI cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Whenever we want to find the actual costing, we have to send an email to Databricks, so having the information available on the internet would be helpful."

"The solution is affordable."

"We have only incurred the cost of our AWS cloud services. This is because during this period, Databricks provided us with an extended evaluation period, and we have not spent much money yet. We are just starting to incur costs this month, I will know more later on the full cost perspective."

"I would rate the tool’s pricing an eight out of ten."

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

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

"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."

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

More Databricks pricing and cost advice

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

"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty 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."

"It is an expensive product."

"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."

More IBM SPSS Modeler pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is very reasonable compared to any other tool."

"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."

"Its licensing cost is very high. It is $20 per user, which is very high, but it is a good product, so you pay for it."

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

"Its pricing is reasonable for the desktop stuff, but for enterprise-level, it is a little expensive."

"The Report Server is pretty expensive on-premise. But as long companies are happy to use the cloud version, that's very cost effective."

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

"Downloading Power BI Desktop is free."

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%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Healthcare Company

Financial Services Firm

13%

Educational Organization

11%

University

Computer Software Company

Educational Organization

34%

Financial Services Firm

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

Comparisons

Dataiku vs Databricks

Compared 11% of the time

Informatica PowerCenter vs Databricks

Compared 7% of the time

Dremio vs Databricks

Compared 7% of the time

Tableau vs Databricks

Compared 5% of the time

Amazon SageMaker vs Databricks

Compared 4% of the time

More Databricks Competitors

IBM SPSS Statistics vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 21% of the time

KNIME vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 16% of the time

Altair RapidMiner vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 8% of the time

Alteryx vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 5% of the time

IBM Watson Studio vs IBM SPSS Modeler

Compared 2% of the time

More IBM SPSS Modeler Competitors

Tableau vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 13% of the time

Domo vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 8% of the time

Amazon QuickSight vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 7% of the time

KNIME vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 5% of the time

SAS Visual Analytics vs Microsoft Power BI

Compared 2% of the time

More Microsoft Power BI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Databricks

May 2025

Download Databricks product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM SPSS Modeler

May 2025

Download IBM SPSS Modeler product report

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Power BI

May 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: May 2025.

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