No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM SPSS Modeler vs SAS Analytics comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on May 21, 2025

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
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Science Platforms (13th)
SAS Analytics
Ranking in Data Mining
5th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Data Mining category, the mindshare of IBM SPSS Modeler is 15.5%, down from 17.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAS Analytics is 7.8%, up from 7.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM SPSS Modeler15.5%
SAS Analytics7.8%
Other76.7%
Data Mining
 

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.
SC
Student at Rochester Institute of Technology
Data management has become faster and clearer but integration and large data handling still need work
SAS Analytics needs to improve for entry-level people in my college because buying licenses is somewhat costly for small businesses. SAS Analytics is also somewhat complex for students who are entering the data field. Additionally, SAS Analytics is not good at integration with other environments, so it should improve on that, and some syntaxes are not good. SAS Analytics has an older architecture in some areas, so it should enhance the UX side and performance in some aspects. SAS Analytics documentation should improve to be clearer for students who are currently using or trying to use SAS Analytics, so the documentation should be simplified. Customer service is pretty good as of now, as they respond in two to four hours on business days, but faster response times may solve many problems and attract more users. I rate SAS Analytics seven or eight out of ten. SAS Analytics should improve in massive data handling, as I mentioned earlier. SAS Analytics struggles when it handles massive data, and it should also get top-tier support. The support should improve from two to four hours down to one hour or even thirty minutes. SAS Analytics should also offer more low-code options for those who do not know how to code or to save more time, and they should consider reducing their pricing. Currently, SAS Analytics has limited flexibility and very limited integration, so improvements in those areas are necessary. SAS Analytics student version does not handle long or lengthy data well right now, so it should improve on that point. As I have mentioned, it struggles with larger data sets, but for current small or medium data sets, it is very good. Customer support should improve to fifteen to thirty minutes or immediate live agents during business hours. The two to four hours wait can sometimes take more than one day, and that does not make sense. We have to stop all our work until they reply if we encounter critical problems, so they should improve for certain.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"We are creating models and putting them into production much faster than we would if we had just gone with a strict, code-based solution, like R or Python."
"It is pretty scalable."
"I think it is the point and drag features that are the most valuable. You can simply click at the windows, and then pull up the functions."
"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."
"I would recommend SPSS to someone who has just started trying to run a lot of modeling, it's a good starting point."
"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."
"It scales. I have not run into any challenges where it will not perform.​"
"It is just a lot faster. So you do not have to write a bunch of code, you can throw that stuff on there pretty quickly and do prototyping quickly."
"It has also been around for an extremely long time, has a strong history, and good market penetration."
"SAS Analytics is a very versatile and comfortable tool and it is powerful because I can work with data from many millions of records, big data with SAS Analytics in a short time versus other software."
"This solution has helped us materially grow multiple business categories."
"The technical support is okay."
"I use SAS daily to analyze data, produce reports, and other outputs."
"All of the data analytics features in SAS Analytics are valuable to us since we're using them daily across our entire analytics team."
"SAS Business Intelligence is well-suited for our large corporation, as we have demand for scalable and reliable insights into information which is housed in our large systems."
"They have provided virtually everything we have needed to accomplish our task, as well as continuously improving our accuracy."
 

Cons

"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."
"Setup is a little problematic for desktop. A nightmare for server."
"The software is quite expensive and IBM is currently marketing its other digital dashboard tools such as IBM cognos, now we aren't sure on the plans of IBM integrating these two softwares."
"Formula writing is not straightforward for an Excel user. Totally new set of functions, which takes time to learn and teach."
"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 beneficial if the tool would include more well-known machine learning algorithms."
"There are issues, we try to mitigate them. There are always issues."
"We would like to see better visualizations and easier integration with Cognos Analytics for reporting."
"In the graphical area much more improvement is still needed."
"SAS Analytics struggles when it handles massive data, and it should also get top-tier support."
"One of the things that can be simplified is self-service analytics, especially for a citizen developer or a citizen data scientist."
"This solution should be made more user-friendly."
"It is relatively expensive."
"SAS Analytics could improve in areas such as handling stress tests and workloads, as well as predicting financial movements, specifically profit and loss movements."
"The graphing and visualization features could be enhanced, in my opinion. I would especially stress improving the visualization capabilities."
"This solution should be made more user-friendly. It needs a better visual output to explain logic to senior executives."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"It got us a good amount of money with quick and efficient modeling."
"I am using the free version of IBM SPSS Modeler, it is the educational edition version."
"It is an expensive product."
"Its price is okay for a company, but for personal use, it is considered somewhat expensive."
"This tool, being an IBM product, is pretty expensive."
"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 is a huge increase to time savings."
"I think that the cost-benefit ratio is okay."
"​Setup costs were quite reasonable."
"Prices were comparable with alternative solutions."
"Licensing was rather straightforward."
"It is relatively expensive. It is not an easy software to afford."
"​The cost for SAS Business Intelligence can prove to be a little prohibitive.​"
"Our licensing covers the usage for around 50 data analysts."
"SAS is very expensive."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Data Mining solutions are best for your needs.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
10%
Government
9%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Financial Services Firm
27%
University
12%
Construction Company
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
 

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 Business4
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise11
 

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 needs improvement with SAS Analytics?
With SAS Analytics, I find that the graphs are very poor, and since I use Power BI, I think SAS Analytics needs to enhance the visualization options to do better visualizations. Many other software...
What is your primary use case for SAS Analytics?
I work with SAS Analytics solutions, specifically with SAS Data Mining, because I extract information from the core system of the bank via ODBC connections and use SAS Base on the servers. I am the...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Analytics?
As a student, I do not pay anything for pricing; my college gives me credentials, and SAS Analytics is free for students, so the licensing is also free. Thus, SAS Analytics for students is very good.
 

Also Known As

SPSS Modeler
No data available
 

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
Aegon, Alberta Parks, Amway China, Axel Springer, Bank of America, Belgium Special Tax, CAP Index, CareSource, CBE Group, Cemig, Center for Responsible Lending, CESCE, Ceska sporitelna, Chantecler, Chico's, Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, CIGNA Thailand, City of Wiesbaden, Germany, Confused.com, Creditreform, Des Moines Area Community College, Deutsche Lufthansa, Directorate of Economics and Statistics, DIRECTV, Dow Chemical Company, Dow Chemical Company, Dun & Bradstreet, EDF Energy, Electrabel GDF SUEZ, ERGO Insurance Group, Erste Bank Croatia, Farmers Mutual Group, Finnair, Florida Department of Corrections, Geneia, Generali Hellas, Genting Malaysia Berhad, Grameenphone, Grandi Salumifici Italiani, HealthPartners, Highmark, Hong Kong Efficiency Unit, HP, Hyundai Securities, Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family ServicesInc Research, ING-DiBa, Institut Pertanian Bogor, InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), IOM, Kelley Blue Book, Lenovo, Lillebaelt Hospital, Los Angeles County, Maspex Wadowice Group, National Bank of Greece, New Zealand Ministry of Health, New Zealand Ministry of Social Development, Nippon Paper, NMIMS, North Carolina Department of Transportation, North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services, Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative (NOVEC), Oberweis Dairy, ODEC, Ohio Mutual Insurance Group, Oklahoma State University, OneBeacon, Orange Business Services, Orange County Child Support Services, Organic, Orlando Magic, OTP Bank, Plano Independent School District, Project Odyssey, Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, RSA Canada, SCAD, Scotiabank, Singapore National Library Board, Sobeys Inc., SRA International, Staples, Statistics Estonia, Swisscom, SymphonyIRI Group, Telecom Italia, Telef‹nica O2, Town of Cary, Transitions Optical, TrueCar, Turkcell Superonline, UniCredit Bank Serbia, University of Alabama, University of Missouri, USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM SPSS Modeler vs. SAS Analytics and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,858 professionals have used our research since 2012.