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IBM SPSS Modeler vs KNIME Business Hub comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Feb 8, 2026

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 SPSS Modeler
Ranking in Data Mining
3rd
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
KNIME Business Hub
Ranking in Data Mining
1st
Ranking in Data Science Platforms
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
63
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 16.5%, down from 17.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of KNIME Business Hub is 11.4%, down from 25.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
KNIME Business Hub11.4%
IBM SPSS Modeler16.5%
Other72.1%
Data Mining
 

Q&A Highlights

EzzAbdelfattah - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Professor Of Statistics at a university with 10,001+ employees
Dec 30, 2019
 

Featured Reviews

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.
NataliaRaffo - PeerSpot reviewer
Co Founder & Chief Data Officer Cdo at NTT DATA
Workflow automation has accelerated advanced analytics and machine learning delivery
Sometimes it is a little bit difficult to use some nodes when we have many large-scale data, for example, CSV files with a large amount of data. It is sometimes difficult to try to import the data in KNIME Business Hub nodes because I think that some features that are in the CSV in text, for example, large text, is difficult for KNIME Business Hub to import these fields. I don't know why, but it is very difficult. We need to try to use different nodes for importing the data, such as File Reader and CSV Reader. However, I think that it is always the features that have much text, it is difficult for KNIME Business Hub to understand and import this information. I don't know why, or maybe I don't know if we don't know what the better option is to configure the node to import all the CSV or the data set. However, we have always had this problem. In some nodes, sometimes it is the same because sometimes, for example, I have a CSV and in my CSV, I have a feature that is, for example, a date. When I import this data set in the File Reader node, I have problems with this field because it is a date, but the problem is that it imports it as text, for example. We try to use their nodes that convert text to date, but sometimes it is difficult, and it is not immediate to transform the text into a date. So we needed to convert the text into a date in the CSV, and then import it again in the KNIME Business Hub node and try to have a good read of this field. I know that KNIME Business Hub has some nodes to convert text to date and others, but sometimes it is difficult to use these nodes. I don't know why. Maybe it needs a specific format for the date and we need to transform our feature in this option. So sometimes it is a large process to convert these features. However, sometimes we need to investigate and search for other nodes, and try with other nodes to import these cases.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are primarily interested in the supply chain data analytics, focusing mainly on procurement, because we believe that there is a lot of value in spend analytics in understanding and identifying opportunities, reducing prices, improving negotiations, and better understanding the categories."
"It's a very good and reasonably priced solution."
"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"
"In the solution, I like the virtualization of data flow since it shows what goes where, which is mostly the strength of the tool."
"​It works fine. I have not had any stability issues; it is always up.​"
"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."
"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."
"We are using it either for workforce deployment or to improve our operations."
"It is possible to configure the system to effectively manage memory and space requirements."
"Stability is excellent. I would give it a nine out of ten."
"I think that KNIME Business Hub is very robust and is a leading solution for analytics and advanced analytics."
"KNIME is easy to learn."
"It is a complete data science platform and especially good at scaling up data preparation and wrapping."
"Easy to connect with every database: We use queries from SQL, Redshift, Oracle."
"We can deploy the solution in a cluster as well."
"The tool's analytic capabilities are good."
 

Cons

"This tool has a lot of bugs."
"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."
"Setup is a little problematic for desktop. A nightmare for server."
"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."
"The product does not have a search function for tags."
"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.​"
"The current UI is primarily in English. Analyzing data in local languages might present challenges or issues."
"The program is not fit for handling very large files or databases (greater than 1GB); it gets too slow and has a tendency to crash easily."
"KNIME needs to provide more documentation and training materials, including webinars or online seminars."
"It's very general in terms of architecture, and as a result, it doesn't support efficient running. That is, the speed needs to be improved."
"KNIME can improve by adding more automation tools in the query, similar to UiPath or Blue Prism. It would make the data collection and cleanup duties more versatile."
"When deploying models on a regular system, it works fine. However, when accuracy is a priority, hyperparameter tuning is necessary. Currently, KNIME doesn't have the best tools for this which they could improve in this area."
"The overall user experience feels unpolished. In particular: Data field type conversion is a real hassle, and date fields are a hassle; documentation is pretty poor; user community is average at best."
"I'd like something that would make it easier to connect/parse websites, although I will fully admit that I'm not as proficient in KNIME as I would like to be, so it could be I'm just missing something."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"It is a huge increase to time savings."
"$5,000 annually."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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."
"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."
"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"Scaling to the on-premises version requires a licensing fee per user that is a bit expensive in comparison to R, Python, and SAS."
"KNIME is a cost-effective solution because it’s free of cost."
"There is a Community Edition and paid versions available."
"KNIME is an open-source tool, so it's free to use."
"At this time, I am using the free version of Knime."
"They have different versions, but I am using the open-source one."
"The client versions are mostly free, and we pay only for the KNIME server version. It's not a cheap solution."
"KNIME is a cheap product. I currently use KNIME's open-source version."
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Answers from the Community

EzzAbdelfattah - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Professor Of Statistics at a university with 10,001+ employees
Dec 30, 2019
Dec 30, 2019
The main difference lies in the community that has KNIME because the additional modules serve a multitude of different jobs from image processing, management of ssh file systems to chemical molecule calculations.
2 out of 4 answers
ZW
Robotics Club President at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Dec 27, 2019
KNIME. It free, open-source, and you can plug in Java, Python, R, and Matlab. The community is awesome.
Dec 28, 2019
The main difference lies in the community that has KNIME because the additional modules serve a multitude of different jobs from image processing, management of ssh file systems to chemical molecule calculations.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
10%
University
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
9%
University
8%
Educational Organization
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business9
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise32
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business21
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise32
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for KNIME?
I rate the product’s pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive.
What needs improvement with KNIME?
In my previous PeerSpot review from March 2024, I mentioned that KNIME was not very strong in visualization and that I wanted to see NLQ (Natural Language Query) and automated visualization capabil...
What is your primary use case for KNIME?
I mainly use KNIME for ETL and data integration projects, followed by clustering and customer segmentation, process mining, AI and machine learning preprocessing pipelines, and recently GenAI orche...
 

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler
KNIME Analytics Platform
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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
Infocom Corporation, Dymatrix Consulting Group, Soluzione Informatiche, MMI Agency, Estanislao Training and Solutions, Vialis AG
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SPSS Modeler vs. KNIME Business Hub and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,438 professionals have used our research since 2012.