IBM SPSS Statistics Reviews

I am using IBM SPSS Statistics mainly for analyzing pieces of research and taking simple cross-tabulations, and then on through the multi-variant analysis. It's most useful with multi-variant. There is so much simplistic nonsense produced by people who always do it by social class and nothing else.

The most valuable feature of IBM SPSS Statistics is all the functionality it provides. Additionally, it is simple to do the five-way analysis that you can into multidimensional setup space. It's the multidimensional space facility that is most useful.

IBM SPSS Statistics could improve the visual outputs where you are producing, for example, a graph for a company board of directors, or an advert.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics since the late 70s or early 80s.

IBM SPSS Statistics is a stable solution.

I have used IBM SPSS Statistics for hundreds of thousands of cases, but not into the millions. It's worked very well. It is scalable.

There are approximately 100 people are using this solution in the university.

I did not set up the solution. I only need to log in to the universities servers page and download it from there.

The price of IBM SPSS Statistics could improve.

The price is a reason one of the reasons why the university chose IBM SPSS Statistics.

My advice to others is they should get a very small data set, a few hundred cases perhaps, and start off with some frequencies and some cross tabs and build out from there.

I rate IBM SPSS Statistics a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for analytics. 

The analytics on offer are very good.

It offers very good visualization. 

The dashboards are excellent. 

It's stable. 

The reports could be better. Usually, when we make reports, we use Microsoft of PowerPoint. Editing in PowerPoint is not so easy. You should be able to edit things a bit more. We can't edit the graphs or tables. It does auto-sync there. If I change something in Excel, it will be reflected in Word. The same should be possible with this solution. 

We'd like more engagement and advice. We need more integrations to help make analysis more powerful. 

The pricing is a bit expensive. 

I've been using the solution for about 15 years. 

The solution is stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

I'd rate the solution's reliability between seven to nine out of ten. 

We have about 30 to 40 users leveraging it in our organization. In my department, seven to nine people are using it. The users are mostly in IT.

From my side, I have never reached out to support. 

I have used many different solutions previously. I like solutions that offer the minimal amount of coding possible. 

The initial setup was quite complex for organizations. For individuals or students, however, doing a small setup, it's not too difficult. 

I had some help with the initial setup in order to navigate the complexities. I have done some trial versions by myself, however, as there aren't cybersecurity restrictions for a small setup like that. 

My understanding is the solution is expensive. I don't know the exact price.

There is a 30-day trial and discounts for students. 

I'm an end-user.

I'm working with version 26 or 27.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

With this product, you do need to have a good coding background. 

I'd recommend the product to others. It is quite useful. However, the challenge is always the price. Often, when people hear the cost, they show less interest.

I use it to analyze social and medical data.

I've found the descriptive statistics and cross-tabs valuable. The very simple correlations and regressions are as well.

The automated statistics testing and principle components analysis are very useful as well.

I've also found the decision tree elements pretty useful too.

IBM SPSS Statistics could be cheaper.

There is a learning curve; it's not very steep, but there is one.

I've been using this solution for about 30 or 40 years.

It's been stable for 40 years.

I've never found a dataset that it couldn't handle, but then, my datasets are mainly, perhaps, about a 100,000 cases. Within that range SPSS Statistics does it very easily.

Technical support staff have been very quick and very good.

Before IBM SPSS Statistics became available, I wrote the code myself in ALGOL, FORTRAN, and BASIC, which were the languages at that time. There was no such thing as a statistics package available then.

For me, the initial setup was completely straightforward. I just downloaded it from the university website.

I was done in under two hours.

We have seen enormous ROI.

It's quite expensive, but they do a special deal for universities. So, I use it through the university.

I looked at SAS and Stata. They just seemed much more cumbersome and difficult to use.

I've used PSPP, the freeware version of SPSS, which is clumsy. However, it still does much the same job, at least, for elementary tasks.

If you do it using the graphical user interface, always click on the save button or paste button, not just the save. For example, if I need to analyze some data before I run it, I set it up using the GUI, I click on paste, and then I run it and save it. When I click paste, it follows all the instructions I've given it in the GUI, but it writes the underlying code. I can save the code, on my disc, and I can get it back later.

This means that you can make your analysis completely replicable. You don't have to redo it, you can just rerun the same program.

I would rate this solution at nine on a scale from one to ten.

Our primary use case is to generally survey results and basic cross-tabulation for any ad hoc requests from key stakeholders. At times, it's a high amount of data but when we run on SPSS, it slows down the computer or the laptop, because if the data is huge, then we need a faster computer. But the corporate computers that we get from our company might not take too much of data load.

The solution is quite robust. I wouldn't pick one most valuable feature, but everything is quite handy. If you want to do a quick analysis, SPSS is quite robust and quicker in terms of providing the output. Python does take large sets of data, and it has more functionalities, but in terms of quick turnaround, I think SPSS is quite good.

From an improvement standpoint, I could compare to PyCharm and see how many other things you can automate things. In PyCharm you use Python and have a lot of packages. SPSS is missing out on some of the packages. In upcoming releases, the solution could be more automated. It should have automation of the packages such as being used in R software and Python packages. They use a tremendous amount of packages. If SPSS can follow that suit, I think it would be very beneficial for SPSS.

I've been working with the solution for more than ten years.

Stability is very good if you have a laptop that has good RAM and a good, powerful laptop, then SPSS can take up really huge amount of data. Otherwise, it slows down the laptop. The limitation is processor issues.

Scalability is also limited, but if you have a high-speed computer, then scalability will be better. But compared to PyCharm and Python and R, it's very limited.

The initial deployment is quite straightforward for SPSS.

I use the solution daily. I use quantitative software for both SPSS and NVivo. I use a lot of functions from SPSS: chi-square, regression analysis, linear regression, multiple regression, cross-tabulation.

SPSS is quicker than comparable software. It starts immediately. For basic and intermediate functions, SPSS is quite good. But once it gets advanced, it's better to use open-source software, like Python and R.

I would rate the solution a seven out of ten, and I would recommend the solution to somebody looking to implement SPSS for statistics for their own organization.

SPSS is a statistical dashboard that gives you a quick view of your data. We're a community college, so we use SPSS for analyzing all kinds of data. It's things like enrollments, transfers, new students, returning students, dropped classes, etc.

The SPSS interface is very accessible and user-friendly. It's really easy to get information in it. I've shared it with experts and beginners, and everyone can navigate it. It's a dashboard where they can get more information. And then, if they want to do a deeper dive into some things, they tell us, and we will work with the research department. We can either add or point to the field or fields and give them some more details. 

Say, for example, you wanted to see things like class registration broken down by area of study. So instead of just looking at enrollment, you can dive into specifics about which courses students are taking and what popular disciplines. We can do all that with SPSS. 

It's also customizable. You can add or remove features as needed to make it fit what you're looking for. Instructions for how to do this are all over our website. For example, on the research page, you see a default report, but you can pretty much create your own version that highlights what you want to show.

I'd like to see them use more artificial intelligence. It should be smart enough to do predictions and everything based on what you input. Right now, that mostly depends on the know-how of the user. But if it had some AI, maybe it could guess what you're looking for based on what you're clicking. So it might make a suggestion like, "I think you're looking for this because you've been hovering on this, this and that" 

For example, say you're clicking on a bunch of data related to enrollment, it might ask if you'd like to see enrollment projections. Or you're looking at diversity and want to break it down by race, religion, gender, and age so you can look for patterns. It should be smart enough.

I've been using IBM SPSS since 2002. 

SPSS is very reliable. So once it's up and running, there's little maintenance unless your network goes down. It's pretty much like Microsoft Office or those standalone programs. They keep running. And I haven't hit a wall where there are so many transactions that it breaks or pauses. You can connect a 2 kilobyte database to a terabyte database. It's just a matter of processing time, but it processes nonetheless. There are no hiccups or anything.

It's running on-premises, so you're only limited by your resources, not theirs. SPSS is a product that sits on the server or your PC, and it works. So if your PC is very old, of course, everything else won't work correctly there.

We haven't had to call IBM tech support. I called IBM once for a discount but never for support. When we switched from a single user to a tiered license a few years back, I recommended adopting special pricing for schools. IBM could verify this easily by looking at the users' school email addresses. Customer service was pretty smooth. Once we opened a ticket, they connected us to their sales, and we got the pricing we were looking for. 

It's like Excel. You connect your input to it, and there you go. Dive in.

You can download it for free, but if you want to enable the professional features, you can buy one license if that's all you need. But if you have many collaborators and want to add more contributors to your site or dashboard, you should think about tiers or a site license, depending on what you need. They have all flavors of licensing.

I rate IBM SPSS Statistics eight out of 10. It's a good starting point if you have a modest budget because you can start for free. Unfortunately, SPSS does not have AI capabilities. And when I say AI capabilities, I mean something similar to what you see on a stock trading platform. Based on the stocks and index funds you've been browsing, it will suggest similar things that you might be looking for. I want SPSS to have that kind of capability because it engages users and saves a lot of time by showing you exactly what you want to see. This could be in newer versions that I haven't used, and maybe I'm missing out. But to my knowledge, they don't have this yet. That's why I rate it an eight. Nowadays, a lot of people are putting AI in their products. Some of it is good, some bad. But if it's good AI, it can be helpful.

I have wide experience with SPSS Statistics. I have even written books about it.  

Statistics is part of analysis, but SPSS Statistics has some differences from just straight analysis. It is also a modeler, has some automation, and can build models like linear regression. It is completely different when you use a modeler for your analysis. A modeler is designed specifically for building models of data in an automated way and using the models for prediction, and forecasting. It can help you see the data and the meaning in different ways.  

Because I am a statistician, originally I am trained for both modeling and non-parametric analysis. Most modeling tools are completely different. They have no non-parametric analysis because they are used for large sample data or big data analysis.  

The primary use for SPSS Statistics for me is, of course, data analysis.  

IBM SPSS Modeler is a set of data mining tools that enable us to develop predictive models. It has both statistical techniques (like regression techniques) or non statistical techniques (like Classification trees , Neural networks etc.). It doesn’t contain mainly the Nonparametric tests, may be because it depends on small samples.

It has automation nodes that helps non-experts to pick the best technique.

On the other hand, IBM SPSS Statistics is used mainly to analyze data, weather it is a small or large sample. If it is small (and drawn from non-normal population), then we must use the non-parametric tests. It has “automated” non-parametric tests to be use by both experts and non-experts.

Beside its main use for data analysis, it has also some modeling techniques like automatic linear modeling, Classification trees and Neural networks.

This product provides the opportunity to better explore data and provide complete data analysis because it works both with modeling and non-parametric analysis.  

I like SPSS too much to want to make changes to the product in a major way. There are some minor things. The one thing I can think of that will be useful in a broader sense is that it may be nice to be able to add color to some of the data in sheets or reports. Sometimes it is easier for you to visualize results if you can use color inside the datasheets.  

The original concern or intent of products like this is to analyze data, not to manipulate the data. But there are times when you need to manipulate data. This is something that would help more in data entry because there should be ways to fix errors in manual entry, et cetera. Addition of some data manipulation capabilities may be good for some things, but often you would do that outside of SPSS as it is not the purpose of the tool.  

SPSS Statistics will be more efficient if it starts to use additional automation. The advantage of automation in SPSS automation is obvious and exemplified in regards to the modeler, the non-parametrics, and the linear regression. But if they can add more automation in other areas, I think it will be more powerful. For example, the data science can have additional automation, for serious data science or something like EMA (Ecological Momentary Assessments). This would be a very interesting addition to SPSS Statistics.  

They can also add some automation with regression itself. Like logistic regression and alternate regression. Some people do not know the difference between binary, logistic, and the multinomial logistic analysis. It is an advantage in the SPSS Modeler. It is automatic. It can detect what type of modeling to choose. If a part of the variable is binary, it will use binary logistics. If it is appropriate it will use multiple logistic regression. It can detect this and do it automatically.

So, if SPSS Statistics starts to use some additional automation, it will be a step between the statistics and more serious data science. Those powers would be remarkable. Data science currently is the future in my estimation. More of the world of business and finance and other areas are starting to think about the applications of data science. And data science needs some data engineering, which is possible to realize through automation. This is especially true in some things like data tracing.  

If they take those steps to add some automation to the SPSS Statistics, it will push more people to understand the importance of analytics and advanced data science.  

But if it can achieve automation, I believe that SPSS Statistics has to do more within the application and the company to stress the importance of learning statistics before learning SPSS itself. If SPSS can add in its development or integration some short notes about how to use statistics, that would help users. It is not enough to be able to push buttons to get an analysis. This would give you a result that you will not understnd.  

SPSS could include an advantage of statistical analysis that goes beyond just the analysis itself. For instance, if you pick to do a logistic regression, you would find a short note about what logistical evaluation is and then how to use it within SPSS. It should not be integrated with the menu itself. It should be inside the statistical analysis area. Most of the people using the SPSS Statistic know which modeling they should use. But it is not always the case. It could be more of a learning tool as well as a productive one.  

A few years ago, SPSS made something that could be useful. It is called the Statistical Coach. It asks you some questions, and based on your answer, the coach guides you as to what to use. It was a good statistical coach. But if they can summarize the most important tests, I believe it is not too hard to make something that would be very useful inside the application and modeler itself.  

If you have the experience with data science, you will know how to do what you want to do using different tools — even competing products with SPSS. I can understand if somebody has to ask me how to do two-way ANOVA in SPSS, for example, as it is not an obvious thing. I will guide him through that if they needed to do it. SPSS can clarify how to do things in their application especially analysis that is common usage. In a way, the tool itself could provide more training for the people using it.  

I have been working with IBM SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) since its name was Clementine. I think that was version 11. Now it is version 18. I think I have been working with it for eight years approximately.  

I have not used the IBM technical support for SPSS Statistics directly. I am working with SPSS since version eight back in the eighties or early nineties. So it is now version 27 and I have been working with the product for 20 versions. I have become very familiar with this product and all its changes over that period of time. Because of that, it is not necessary for me to contact the customer support.  

I believe that the initial setup is simple. The problem of SPSS Statistics, it is not to click the icon to do the installation. The problem of Statistics is to know which statistical analysis you have to use.  

Some people used to say that they know how to use SPSS Statistics, but they do not know which type of analysis to use. The manufacturer of the tool may want to do something to include training in the initial setup so that the users know more about the tool that they are using.  

In comparing the price of other products, SPSS Statistics is too expensive. Even when most of the universities in the Middle East have licenses for SPSS Statistics, they do not have licenses for the Modeler because of its price. This reduces the utility of the product.  

I have had the opportunity to evaluate some tools. The differences are not always obvious in casual use.  

For example, there are some little differences between SPSS and Minitab. If you want to make something called two-way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance), you can find it directly, and clearly in the Minitab interface. It is right in the menu and you can pick two-way ANOVA. But if you are thinking of two-way ANOVA using SPSS, you will not find it. You will find only one-way ANOVA. To make two-way ANOVA, you have to go to the general linear model, pick the univariate to use to obtain the two-way ANOVA. It is there and done a different way, it is just not called a two-way ANOVA. It is known as general linear model. The only problem is that the type of analysis is not known as two-way ANOVA in SPSS.  

So the difference is not that this type of analysis is impossible in one product and not the other.  

On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate IBM SPSS Statistics between eight and nine. If they add some automation with time series and regression analysis exactly as they did with the linear regression, it would be a much better tool. If you open the regression modeling, the first item you will find is an automatic linear model. It uses the best technique, which is either is forward analysis or is stepwise. It can anticipate the user's needs and train at the same time. Some additional capabilities of this sort will push the tool forward as well as empowering the users.  

We do data collection. We have a data collection plan, and we analyze the data and estimate how we can create capacity within the processes. Afterward, we just hand it out to our development team.

Capability analysis is one of the main and valuable functions. We also do some hypothesis testing in Minitab and summary stats. These are the functions that we find very useful.

If there is any self-generation data collection plan (DCP), it would be helpful in gathering data. It would also be useful if there is a function to scale it up to, let's say, UiPath and have it consolidate and integrate into a UiPath solution.

I have been using this solution for more than 15 years. 

It has some bugs off and on, but nothing has been a roadblock for us.

We have 500 users of this solution. I'm coming from an organization with 40,000 people.

I have not dealt with tech support.

We don't deal with that. The IT guys install it on our computers, and we just run it. That's it.

I would rate IBM SPSS Statistics an eight out of ten.

We use IBM SPSS Statistics as well as the Modeler. I would say 70% of our work is on Statistics and 30% is on the Modeler.

I'm an independent consultant and my clients have lots of clinical level laboratories. Clinical companies, pharma companies, like Cipla, Biocon, etc. And also logistic companies, like Maersk and Blue Dot. I do the clinical analysis of their data. These companies provide the data and I give them the results. The customer gets the results in whatever format they want. All these companies that I work with also have software other than IBM SPSS. For example, Visual Analytics, SAP Discovery, and solutions like that. So I have to do a liaison with all these other software to fetch the data and present it to the client in whichever format they prefer because there are some features which IBM SPSS statistics has which SAS doesn't have. And there are a lot of features that SAS Visual Analytics has that IBM SPSS doesn't have. So it's a trade-off between these two. I do the liaising with all the partners.

The features that I have found most valuable are the Bayesian statistics and descriptive statistics. I use these more often because in pharma companies and clinical hospitals they make the medicines by taking the feedback from different patients. For example, there could be a neuro-disorder patient or a normal IT employee who may be an introvert, confined to his own space and doesn't want to mingle with people or more inclined towards reading books and stuff like that. You have a cross-section of the community. If a patient comes to the doctors with a little bit of mental depression because of the work pressure or anything else, we collect this data, put up a questionnaire to him about his personality traits, why he's feeling depressed, what are the factors affecting his mental attitude and those kinds of questions and we collect that kind of data. Depending on the data we draw a graph and we give a statistical analysis to the doctors, as well.

Then simultaneously, we give this feedback to the pharma companies, so that depending on the data, they determine which medicine they have and what medicine they could develop. That is the kind of work that we do.

I understand that we're talking about IBM SPSS Statistics, it's a mathematical tool. Fine. Everybody knows that. It is a statistical tool. Having said that, if they could make it a little bit graphical then people who work on IBM SPSS need not depend on other software, like SAP Lumira or something like that, for the regeneration and graphical image of the entire data. That graphical GUI content should be encapsulated in the SPSS package. That's what I mean. 

I know that SPSS is a statistical tool but it should also include a little bit of analytical behavior. You can call it augmented analysis or predictive analysis. The bottom line is it should have more graphical and analytical capabilities.

There are so many formulas which you can encapsulate in this IBM statistical tool. I don't have all the formulas off the top of my head right now, but for any statistical tool for that matter, regardless of the company, it should encapsulate these to the maximum. All the statistical tools and formulae which are taught. I expect that SPSS encapsulates all those formulas, it has a good amount of descriptors, chi-square distribution, ANOVA, etc... you have all the things, but if anything, any theory or formula is missing, I would suggest to SPSS to include that also and market it accordingly so that they can be a front runner in this market, in this segment.

I have been using IBM SPSS Statistics for three years.

It is a stable solution. There's no doubt. But you know, the stability has to be evolving every day. It's not that today I'm stable. Stability is not static. It is dynamic. My effective operative stability will not be carried forward to future generations without any hassles. No, it's not like that. Every day you have to evolve in the technologies to meet the demands.

As I told you earlier, SPSS still has to mature in terms of fetching data from the high volume data databases, like SAP HANA can. 

SAP HANA is a column level database, a columnar database, it's not a low level database. So SPSS has to show that kind of maturity. I assume that they'll scale up because IBM knows how to tackle the market.

In terms of scalbility, it is scalable. There is a scalability fee for this kind of package. The business package can be measured only with the amount of data it can analyze. 

Because if I talk about the Oracle database or the RNC database, the measure of scalability depends on the number of notes I can add to the RSE cluster, how much data will my database be able to handle, and what kind of hardware requirements I need. The IBM package is just a normal package. It doesn't have a SPSS package to measure the scalability. There's only one factor, how much volume of data it can analyze at any point of time. Take an example of its competitor, SAS. SAS analytical software has a server called Laser Server, an ASR server, which is capable of handling around 120 terabytes of data at a time.

That kind of thing should be here. I can't assume that SPSS as a front-end tool can assess that much volume of data. Having said that, it should have some kind of work around or a bigger version, just like SAP has given three versions of Lumira Discovery, Lumira designer and business studio. So on the same lines SPSS should have options for a normal user or for an advanced user which can take more amount of data.

Their customer service is pretty good. IBM is always customer oriented. I worked at IBM earlier, I know what kind of customer service they have. I worked in IBM at a prior date in India. They're very customer oriented, very customer focused. They don't let their customers down, even if the customer is bad, they'll politely try to resolve the issue. They focus on resolving the issue rather than getting into egos and all that stuff. I rate nine out of 10 on tech support. It's awesome.

I'm a pure IT consultant. And in addition to IBM SPSS, I'm also a SAP consultant. I work on SAP Lumira, I work on SAP HANA. I work on SAP S400 material management, logistical management, which includes the SCM MM, PP and the SV modules. I'm also a SAS consultant. I'm a sales, regional medical consultant. I have done the codes in SAS breakthrough modeling. I'm also an Oracle DBA. I worked on almost all the versions of Oracle right from 7.3 to Oracle 18 C. 19 C also, but 18 C is the stable one. So I'm an Oracle Meraki consultant RSE, real application, cluster consultants, and a golden gate expert.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. Although I'm not an SPSS admin, per se, I was part of the SPSS installation. Basically what happens when you install any SPSS statistics package is a company involves both the admin guy and also the technical consultant who will be working on it so that they can work in tandem and make the installation perfect.

I was involved with the installation team, as well. It is pretty simple. It's not that complex. I think the versatility of IBM SPSS Statistics tool is very evident, it's good. You have the ability to fetch and analyze the different sets of data, whether it is a CSV from a separated value, or other data from the Oracle database, or other older database such as Dbase or redundant spreadsheets like Lotus 1,2,3 or Excel. You have everything. On that count, I gave IBM a nine out of 10. But there are drawbacks too, because IBM SPSS is not able to fetch the data from new databases like SAP HANA or SAP BW HANA. SAP HANA got introduced in 2011, but it became famous more in 2015.

The same is the case with BW HANA, the business warehouse for HANA, and any statistical tool which is not capable of fetching data from this volume, this database. SAP HANA is a numerary database. So any statistical tool which is not able to fetch data from these databases will not be able to sustain itself in the market for long. But yeah, there are some workarounds where people fetch the data from HANA into some of the data sets and transfer the same data set into SPSS to work through the indirect path. But SPSS has to pull up its socks to fetch data from heterogeneous environments, whether it be SAP, HANA or whether it is a MongoDB or anything, any RDBMS, or DBMS on this earth. That kind of flexibility should be there in SPSS.

I would recommend this product. I teach statistics at a college in Bangalore, and I use the IBM statistics, which my students have bought for $29 per month. We use IBM Statistics to learn statistical analysis of data because visualization data is different than statistical analysis. I totally recommend IBM SPSS, even in top business schools, like IAM in India. I went on a guest lecture there and I recommended IBM SPSS to IAM.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate IBM SPSS Statistics a nine.

I absolutely like the product. That's the reason I recommend all of my students buy SPSS.