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IBM SPSS Modeler vs KNIME Business Hub comparison

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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
13th
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
6.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 14.9%, down from 15.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of KNIME Business Hub is 10.4%, down from 22.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
KNIME Business Hub10.4%
IBM SPSS Modeler14.9%
Other74.7%
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

"IBM was chosen because of usability. It's point and click, whereas the other out-of-the box-solution, or open-source solutions, require full-on programming and a much higher skill level."
"It continues to be a very flexible platform, so that it handles R and Python and other types of technology. It seems to be growing with additional open-source movement out there on different platforms."
"I was familiar with using IBM SPSS Modeler separately in the private sector before that. It's a good tool for extracting data from data warehouses, creating streams, and manipulating logic to extract final data."
"I still use it because when I got the latest version it had all those things that I wish I would've had when I was working at the office."
"It will scale up to anything we need."
"It is a pretty stable solution, the end-users and other people with hands-on experience are very happy with this tool, it has not let us down in the past, and we have not really experienced any downtime."
"IBM SPSS Modeler is the easiest solution."
"To date, working with IBM SPSS Modeler has been very good, our installers and trainers have been excellent."
"Valuable features include visual workflow creation, workflow variables (parameterisation), automatic caching of all intermediate data sets in the workflow, scheduling with the server."
"From a user-friendliness perspective, it's a great tool."
"It is possible to configure the system to effectively manage memory and space requirements."
"The solution is very easy to use"
"We have achieved more data-driven decisions since using KNIME Business Hub, for example, we collected and created workflows to analyze the energy consumption of our headquarters building, which helped significantly improve our energy efficiency."
"It allows for a user-friendly approach where you can simply drag and drop elements to create your model, which is a convenient and effective idea."
"I know I don't use it to its full capacity, but I love the Rule Engine feature. It has allowed me to create lookup tables on the fly and break down text fields into quantifiable data."
"We have been using these features extensively and we find them to be very valuable in achieving what we hoped to achieve with the tool."
 

Cons

"It is very good, but slow. The slowness may be because we have not finalized all the background information in SPSS. It still needs some tweaking."
"It's very stable, although it is not as user friendly as it could be."
"This tool has a lot of bugs."
"The platform that you can deploy it on needs improvement because I think it is Windows only. I do not think it can run off a Red Hat, like the server products. I am pretty sure it is Windows and AIX only."
"It would be good if IBM added help resources to the interface."
"We would like to see better visualizations and easier integration with Cognos Analytics for reporting."
"When I do clustering, I want to try a different stream, but currently the only thing that I can really pick is averaging."
"The challenge for the very technical data scientists: It is constraining for them.​"
"There are some parameters that I would like to have at a bigger scale. The upper limit of one node that tries to find spots or areas in photos was too small for us. It would need to be bigger."
"The current UI is primarily in English. Analyzing data in local languages might present challenges or issues."
"System resource usage. Knime will occupy total system RAM size and other applications will hang."
"They could add more detailed examples of the functionality of every node, how it works and how we can use it, to make things easier at the beginning."
"The documentation needs a proper rework. ​"
"The pricing needs improvement."
"I would like it to have data visualitation capabilities. Today I'm still creating my own data visualtions tools to present my reports."
"If they had a more structured training model it would be very helpful."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"It is a huge increase to time savings."
"It is an expensive product."
"If you are in a university and the license is free then you can use the tool without any charges, which is good."
"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."
"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"$5,000 annually."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"It is free of cost. It is GNU licensed."
"There is no cost for using KNIME because it is an open-source solution, but you have to pay if you need a server."
"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 desktop is free, which is great for analytics teams. Server is well priced, depending on how much support is required."
"They have different versions, but I am using the open-source one."
"With KNIME, you can use the desktop version free of charge as much as you like. I've yet to hit its limits. If I did, I'd have to go to the server version, and for that you have to pay. Fortunately, I don't have to at the moment."
"It is expensive to procure the license."
"KNIME Business Hub is expensive for small companies."
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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
Outsourcing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
Construction Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
11%
University
8%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
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 Business22
Midsize Enterprise16
Large Enterprise35
 

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?
KNIME Business Hub could be improved by making the user experience more intuitive, especially for users who are new to data analytics. More guided features and documentation would be beneficial.
What is your primary use case for KNIME?
I automated the processing of paper-based data by digitalizing scanned documents and creating a KNIME Business Hub workflow that transforms the data into an analysis-ready format, reducing a manual...
 

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: September 2026.
914,109 professionals have used our research since 2012.