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IBM Watson Explorer vs SAS Visual Analytics comparison

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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 (16th)
 

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 3.6%, up 2.1% 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 Explorer3.6%
IBM SPSS Statistics15.0%
IBM SPSS Modeler14.9%
Other66.5%
Data Mining
Data Visualization Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
SAS Visual Analytics1.6%
Tableau Enterprise9.3%
Qlik Sense4.7%
Other84.4%
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

"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."
"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."
"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 ability to easily pull together lots of different pieces of information and drill down in a smarter way than has been possible with other analytics tools is key. Watson is all based on a set of AI and deep learning, machine-learning capabilities, and it is looking behind the scenes at some relationships that you likely would not have spotted on your own. It's pulling things together, categorizing some things, that are not something that you might have seen on your own."
"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."
"We take natural language that was happening in our repositories and our application and then feed it to the Watson APIs. We receive JSON payloads as an API response to get cognitive feedback from the repository data."
"It's an easy to use solution, it's relatively simple to create basic dashboards and reports."
"The flexibility of the configuration is valuable to me."
"Since it is simply drag and drop it makes data inspection easy."
"The speed to display charts and react to users' choices is great."
"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."
"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."
"SAS Visual Analytics is an excellent platform; the user interface is good, it has a good look and feel, it is simple to use, it integrates well with SAS making it simple and quick for developers, does not require a high level of skill but rather a medium level, and it is very easy and fast to learn so that people who don't know the product can work in a very autonomous manner after one week."
"After implementation of SAS Visual Analytics, we overcome the prediction of future business and we were able to plan the future business, who are our premium customers, where we can cross-sell our products more, etc."
 

Cons

"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."
"Sometimes the service stops."
"It needs better language support, to include some other languages. Also, they should improve the user interface."
"No, it's not yet stable."
"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"
"It is a little bit tricky to get used to the workflow of knowing how to train Watson, what can be provided, what can't be, how to provide it, how to import, export, and what it means every time you have to add a new dictionary or something of the like."
"We haven't used it in production yet so I can't answer this."
"More cognitive feedback would be good. The natural language analysis is great, the sentiment analyzers are great. But I would just like to see more... innovation done with the Watson platform."
"The reason we haven't rolled it out across the board is due to the fact that the licensing is so expensive."
"The integration aspects of the solution could be improved."
"I don't think the return on investment is high when I factor in the cost of additional components like text mining and machine learning."
"The solution should improve its graphics."
"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."
"There are a few little things that are predefined and can be done out of the box immediately. There is no business intelligence application that is predefined, which is something some customers or prospects would love to have. Small and mid-sized companies would struggle with it because they prefer something standard that has been predefined by somebody else."
"Some capabilities are missing compared to Power BI, especially when working with spreadsheet types."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."
"SAS Visual Analytics is expensive, as is the rest of the platform."
"The cost of the solution can be expensive. There is an additional cost for users."
"I work with the tool's free version...The tool's corporate version is very expensive and requires a monthly hire."
"It was licensed for corporate use, and its licensing was on a yearly basis."
"It's approximately $114,000 US dollars per year."
"Visual Analytics is expensive for a small company like mine. You also need to deploy it on a server or cloud, so you pay for the license as well as the cost of the cloud or the server that you will deploy on."
"$10,000 per annum for an enterprise license."
"The product is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
16%
Healthcare Company
13%
Performing Arts
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Government
8%
 

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 Knime, IBM, Weka and others in Data Mining. Updated: September 2026.
913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.