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SAS Visual Analytics vs ThoughtSpot comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
6.3
Organizations saw varied ROI from SAS Visual Analytics, noting improved efficiency and financial tracking despite initial cost challenges.
Sentiment score
7.2
ThoughtSpot enhances value with time savings, ease of use, and reduced costs, but user adoption affects ROI.
The enterprise subscription offers more benefits, ensuring valuable outcomes.
Using ThoughtSpot has resulted in significant time savings and improved business sales by allowing us to identify sellers and buyers across regions, facilitating targeted marketing.
ThoughtSpot saves a significant amount of time compared to other tools and is very user-friendly.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.8
SAS Visual Analytics customer service is mixed, with praise for technical support but noted gaps in business needs and regional availability.
Sentiment score
6.8
ThoughtSpot's customer support is praised for responsiveness but critiqued for depth, with mixed ratings on problem resolution.
They provide callbacks to ensure clarity and resolution of any queries.
ThoughtSpot provides a dedicated customer success person and the ability to submit tickets online, with a response time of no more than a day.
I stopped opening tickets due to insufficient and untimely responses.
We have dedicated support contacts for our company, but pushing through features we need requires long processes and upvotes on their website despite the support.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
SAS Visual Analytics effectively scales for large datasets and users, though high resource demands and expenses may concern some.
Sentiment score
7.2
ThoughtSpot offers effective scalability and growth, but may require improvements in role management and advanced preparation tools.
The platform does not have technical problems with scaling data or connections.
As our data has grown, I have validated huge datasets and complex models without significant issues.
Tableau, Power BI, or Looker have separate tools for preparation, customization, and storytelling.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.1
SAS Visual Analytics is generally reliable but can face performance issues with large data, often due to user practices.
Sentiment score
7.1
ThoughtSpot is stable and fast for large datasets but faces occasional downtime, feature gaps, and integration challenges.
SAS Visual Analytics is stable and manages data effectively without crashing.
I use it primarily for large datasets, and it performs faster than regular data visualization tools such as Power BI, which has limits on dataset size.
This workaround consumed a lot of resources and led to reduced performance, with pinboards loading for approximately two minutes for each filter criterion.
The responsiveness of accessing live data is exceptional and faster than most other BI tools.
 

Room For Improvement

SAS Visual Analytics is complex and costly, with challenges in integration, performance, user-friendliness, and external language support.
ThoughtSpot lacks visualization flexibility, geospatial options, customization, integration tools, and better organization, lagging behind Power BI and Tableau.
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI.
The platform also has fewer formulas and functions compared to Power BI and Qlik, limiting the creation of complex functions directly within ThoughtSpot.
Currently, it is not as customizable as the options available on Power BI or Tableau.
A crucial feature we needed is missing, which involves restricting views of certain KPIs when users select conflicting parameters.
 

Setup Cost

SAS Visual Analytics is costly for small enterprises, but offers strong analytics and simplicity, though consulting and scaling add expenses.
ThoughtSpot offers competitive, flexible pricing between Tableau and Power BI, with options suited to various organizational needs.
ThoughtSpot's pricing is reasonable and in line with other BI tools.
HubSpot is expensive.
 

Valuable Features

SAS Visual Analytics excels in data visualization, advanced analytics, and user-friendly interface with rapid processing and seamless integration.
ThoughtSpot's search-based functionality enables intuitive data exploration, empowering non-technical users to create reports and improve business efficiency.
The ability to query information from our Excel data into SAS to view specific data is invaluable.
Its compatibility with most databases, including the latest from FlexMovely and Redshift, allows users to create joins and worksheets easily.
This alerting feature is very beneficial for our company at the moment, and we use it extensively.
When I upload a data dump, AI analytics suggest possible data visualizations and insights, which I can pin to dashboards or live boards for modification.
 

Categories and Ranking

SAS Visual Analytics
Ranking in Data Visualization
7th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.0
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
ThoughtSpot
Ranking in Data Visualization
14th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools (18th), Embedded BI (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Visualization category, the mindshare of SAS Visual Analytics is 4.2%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of ThoughtSpot is 2.0%, down from 2.8% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Visualization
 

Featured Reviews

Renato Vazamin - PeerSpot reviewer
Single environment for multiple phases saves us time, and has good visualizations
We had that solution installed previously in another solution, Selvaya, but I don't think we used it at the time. We are now using SAS Detect Investigation as a complementary solution, in which we have part of the process, use a gene, SAS collects information and identifies some business situations, and the business guys use Visual Analytics to explore the results of the process. We previously used the FICO platform, but we switched because FICO's pricing was not scalable. Bringing more data or workloads to the platform required a significant investment in order to scale. We needed to change because we have a lot of data to process every day. FICO was also a little more complicated than SAS Visual Analytics.
Sushma Polavarapu - PeerSpot reviewer
Creates user-friendly analysis environments for large datasets
The tool is user-friendly for the end users. It is primarily a search-based tool. Users do not need a technical background to work directly on the dataset. Its compatibility with most databases, including the latest from FlexMovely and Redshift, allows users to create joins and worksheets easily. ThoughtSpot is fast, even with one to ten terabytes of data.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
21%
Government
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
8%
Financial Services Firm
23%
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about SAS Visual Analytics?
The most solution's notable aspect, in my view, is the ability to integrate various data sources and harness advanced technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. This helps w...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAS Visual Analytics?
It's about an average of five. It's easy to scale, but it comes with cost.
What needs improvement with SAS Visual Analytics?
In terms of configuration, I would like to see AI capabilities since many applications are now integrating AI. It may be that our current subscription does not include AI-enabled features, but I wo...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for ThoughtSpot?
The pricing is on the higher end but reasonable for what ThoughtSpot offers.
What needs improvement with ThoughtSpot?
There are a few areas where ThoughtSpot could improve. A crucial feature we needed is missing, which involves restricting views of certain KPIs when users select conflicting parameters. We had to c...
What is your primary use case for ThoughtSpot?
Currently, our company is using ThoughtSpot ( /products/thoughtspot-reviews ) for marketing reporting. We build reports based on the tables in the cloud, utilizing the outlet views for ThoughtSpot ...
 

Also Known As

SAS BI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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.
Primary Capital Mortgage, Sterling Backcheck, RichRelevance, Rambus, Batteries Plus Bulbs
Find out what your peers are saying about SAS Visual Analytics vs. ThoughtSpot and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.