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IBM SPSS Modeler vs IBM Smart Analytics 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

IBM Smart Analytics
Ranking in Data Mining
8th
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM SPSS Modeler
Ranking in Data Mining
3rd
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (13th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM Smart Analytics is 4.5%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 15.5%, down from 17.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler15.5%
IBM Smart Analytics4.5%
Other80.0%
Data Mining
 

Featured Reviews

RH
Program Manager - Enterprise Command Center at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Adding LA on top of a well deployed & working Tivoli Framework opens up a flood of native logged data points. The visual presentation layer of LA is less than cutting edge.
The IBM monitoring software products (Tivoli) are not easy to instrument and require many separate pieces of the total framework to be operationally functional and useable. That said, adding LA on top of a well deployed & working Tivoli Framework opens up a flood of native logged data points for unstructured search & query. My team had a special need to implement custom alerting on 10s of thousands of MQ channels in a short amount of time, and the traditional approach (also w a Tivoli product) would have been very costly (labor) and time consuming (requiring individual app review). As an alternative, we had a new event stream create to track all MQ channels to generate logs and then used LA to visualize the behavior trends for review, reporting and eventually alerting. The effort took longer than I hoped ~6 months, but the traditional approach would have taken 2+ yrs to review and implement app by app.
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

"Log Analytics (LA) allows a user to see patterns of behavior and isolate issues quickly, without the need to manually access individual systems and parse logs manually."
"A lot of jobs that are stuck in Excel due to the huge numbers of rows are tackled pretty quickly."
"At the end of the day, you will be highly impressed with SPSS capabilities and the capability to get models into production."
"The benefits are that this product makes us a more efficient sales staff, reducing the inefficiencies in the buying patterns of our customers by calling them when we know they're ready to order, instead of waiting for them to call us."
"It’s definitely scalable, it’s all on the same platform, it’s well integrated. I think the integration is important in terms of scalablility because essentially, having the entire suite helps a lot to scale it"
"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."
"I like the automation and that this product is very organized and easy to use."
"I think the code modeling features are the most valuable and without the need to write a code back with many different possibilities to choose from. And the second one is linked to the activity of the data preparation."
"Very good data aggregation."
 

Cons

"The indexing engine (proprietary build of LogStash) is well... very LogStash'ish... It requires more work to normalize the log feeds than competing products."
"It's very stable, although it is not as user friendly as it could be."
"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."
"The time series should be improved."
"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."
"There are issues, we try to mitigate them. There are always issues."
"It would be helpful if SPSS supported open-source features, for example, embedding R or Python scripts in SPSS Modeler."
"Dimension reduction should be classified separately."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

Information not available
"$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."
"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"It is an expensive product."
"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."
"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."
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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
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Smart Analytics
SPSS Modeler
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

WIdO AOK, EEKA Fashion, SSGC, GS Retail
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 IBM, Knime, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: July 2026.
908,834 professionals have used our research since 2012.