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IBM Watson Explorer vs SAS Visual 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 Watson Explorer
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Data Mining (9th)
SAS Visual Analytics
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
41
Ranking in other categories
Data Visualization (12th)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Business Intelligence solutions, they serve different purposes. IBM Watson Explorer is designed for Data Mining and holds a mindshare of 3.5%, up 1.5% compared to last year.
SAS Visual Analytics, on the other hand, focuses on Data Visualization, holds 1.6% mindshare, down 3.4% since last year.
Data Mining Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM Watson Explorer3.5%
IBM SPSS Statistics15.6%
IBM SPSS Modeler15.5%
Other65.4%
Data Mining
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAS Visual Analytics1.6%
Tableau Enterprise9.5%
Qlik Sense4.9%
Other84.0%
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

it_user1319820 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
A data analysis tool that is scalable and includes keyword search functionality
The solution is used for a government company for data collection and analysis I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer. I have been using the solution for five…
Namanjbaraiya Baru - PeerSpot reviewer
Biostatistician at Lambda Therapeutic Research Ltd.
Interactive dashboards have transformed clinical reporting and now support real time decisions
The best features of SAS Visual Analytics include performing data manipulation. I would characterize this as making data ready, transforming data, and making new variables through code while utilizing low-code and no-code facilities. In my experience, low-code features in SAS Visual Analytics help when I need to create a new variable. For instance, I can extract a date through the data roll step, and with no-code features, I can perform report creation by simply using drag and drop functionality. After implementing SAS Visual Analytics, we have generated a new way to generate revenue by providing live data visuals to our clients and making our team aware of data in real time, which has had a significant positive impact.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"What impressed me more about Watson is that it is easy to use it, not for the technical people, but for business people."
"The valuable feature of Watson Explorer for us is data entities, and being able to see hidden insights from within unstructured data."
"I really can't talk enough about the team."
"I have found the auto-generated document very useful as well as the main keywords that are highlighted, which are used for the search functionality within IBM Watson Explorer."
"For me, as a user, the most valuable feature is the ability to ingest and then retrieve information from a range of separate sources; the ability to dissect questions in context and actually answer them."
"IBM has been working with Bradesco since 1968, I think, and the support is very good, with a team of 10 IBM employees working every day, 24 hours, inside the bank in Sao Paolo."
"Previously we'd have a set of health and safety analysts who would be the key focal points for doing work to understand health and safety risks; so a very small number of people, but through WEX and through our Watson HSEQ solution, we've managed to get engagement across at least one-third of our workforce, so over 1,300 people, and a 25% reduction in health and safety incidents."
"Implementing the solution really helped with manual labor, it takes care of a lot of FT work."
"The features I found most valuable were the quick visualizations and the ease with which one could explore data sets."
"Quick deployment to dashboards and analytics features (using SAS Visual Statistics and Enterprise Guide). Easy to create a simple forecast and discover business insights using segmentation tools."
"It provided the capability to visualize a bunch of data in an organized way."
"Go ahead and do it! It’s the best tool for insightful and analytical dashboard development and reporting."
"I believe that the possibilities for exploring data and formulating visual results are quite good because it allows the business analyst to have different perspectives on the data."
"The product is stable, reliable, and scalable."
"Exposure of full population transactional data to customer facing roles with ability to analyse trends and patterns empowers our citizen data scientists to answer their own business questions regarding customer trends and to forecast future trends."
"We have detected a high margin group of customers with very little work."
 

Cons

"We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this."
"Stability is actually one of the areas that could use improvement. Setting it up is always tough. Setting Explorer requires experts, but also the underlying platform is not that stable. So it really needs a good expert to keep it running."
"Much of IBM operates this way, where they have sets of tools that are in the middleware space, and it becomes the customer's responsibility or the business partner's responsibility to develop full solutions that take advantage of that middleware. I think IBM's finding itself in that spot with Watson-related technologies as well, where the capabilities to do really interesting and useful things for customers is there, but somebody still has to build it. Is that going to be the customer? Are they going to be willing to take on that responsibility themselves"
"Sometimes the service stops."
"The solution is expensive."
"No, it's not yet stable."
"I would say, give some kind of a community edition, a free edition. A lot of companies do, even Amazon gives you some kind of trial and error opportunities. If they could provide something like that, it would be good."
"Small businesses will probably have a little harder time getting into it, just because of the amount of resources that they have available, both financial and time, but it really is a solution that should work for them."
"There are certain shortcomings in the tool's support services, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The integration aspects of the solution could be improved."
"There are scalability issues. It depends on the data volume and number of end-users. VA requires a lot of hardware resources to move volumes of data."
"Some capabilities are missing compared to Power BI, especially when working with spreadsheet types."
"I haven't come across any missing features."
"There are a lot of technicalities in setting up the product."
"SAS Visual Analytics could improve by making it more accessible for users outside the organization."
"In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"Licensing is simple."
"The product is expensive."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
15%
Healthcare Company
12%
Performing Arts
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Financial Services Firm
14%
Construction Company
10%
Government
10%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business2
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise7
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise19
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing was positive, and I am happy with it.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
SAS Visual Analytics offers many options, and new users unfamiliar with SAS might face some difficulties. Training on SAS Visual Analytics is required to help overcome these issues.
What is your primary use case for SAS Visual Analytics?
My main use case for SAS Visual Analytics is making visual reports such as graphs, gauge plots, outlier plots, geomaps, and presenting my clinical data into a report or an interactive dashboard whi...
 

Also Known As

IBM WEX
SAS BI
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

RIMAC, Westpac New Zealand, Toyota Financial Services, Swiss Re, Akershus University Hospital, Korean Air Lines, Mizuho Bank, Honda
Staples, Ausgrid, Scotiabank, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, Oklahoma Gas & Electric, Xcel Energy, and Triad Analytics Solutions.
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM, Knime, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: July 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.