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SAS Enterprise Guide pros and cons

Vendor: SAS
4.1 out of 5

Pros & Cons summary

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

SAS Enterprise Guide facilitates statistical functionality and basic database operations for business users without SQL or data analysis skills.
It supports robust data operations such as joining tables, creating columns, and analyzing data for purposes like fraud detection.
SAS Enterprise Guide excels in importing and exporting data, making tasks like exporting datasets from Unix to Excel simpler compared to Base SAS.
The tool enables effective collaboration, allowing users to work on servers, copy datasets, and easily share them with team members.
It is versatile, supporting various tasks including ETL processes, unit testing, functional testing, and data science projects.

CONS

Users experience challenges with performance, particularly with large datasets in the Netezza database.
There is a need for improved integration and deployment capabilities, including easier creation and export of SAS packages, and connections with R and Python.
Integration with schedulers in hosted environments like Citrix is desired.
Advanced functions often require learning SAS code, making it less user-friendly for some users.
The stability and technical support response times have been concerns for users.
 

SAS Enterprise Guide Pros review quotes

it_user816771 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Enterprise Data Management, Analytics CoE at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Feb 8, 2018
Enabled us to remove PC SAS, which reduced risk.
it_user824046 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Risk and Fraud Analyst at a financial services firm
Feb 21, 2018
An excellent tool for data manipulation and analysis.
MG
Consultant BI senior - spécialité SAS at a financial services firm
Feb 21, 2018
Brought better performance by having people work on a powerful server instead of a workstation.
Learn what your peers think about SAS Enterprise Guide. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.
879,889 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user824175 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Feb 21, 2018
Scheduling downtime of some programs has been eliminated.
EL
Economist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feb 22, 2018
It has definitely improved our communication with senior management.
GF
Sr Manager - Reporting, Analytics and Quality Control (Business Transformation) at Golden 1 Credit Union
Aug 29, 2019
This solution allows for simplified working with large datasets.
reviewer1219965 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Dec 2, 2019
Statistical functionality and basic database interaction can become very straightforward for business users that don't have a background in SQL and data analysis.
it_user1156740 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Manager at NMC Healthcare
Nov 27, 2019
In Daman, I had used the data module, where you can join the table and take whatever data we require for our work. You join tables and create columns as you wish, then analyze data in various ways depending on what the problem is. We used it to detect fraud, abnormalities, anomalies, abnormal trends, etc. It's also good for exporting and importing tables.
reviewer1314771 - PeerSpot reviewer
Finance System & Process Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Apr 8, 2020
The Query Builder is very valuable.
GZ
Cenior Healthcare Economic Consultant at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
May 7, 2020
Areas where SAS EG does a better job than regular SAS are in the realm of importing and exporting data. For instance, exporting a SAS data set in Unix to an Excel spreadsheet on a PC is a simple task compared to doing the same task with Base SAS.
 

SAS Enterprise Guide Cons review quotes

it_user816771 - PeerSpot reviewer
Vice President, Enterprise Data Management, Analytics CoE at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Feb 8, 2018
More bi-directional integration with the SAS Studio suite of tools is needed.
it_user824046 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Risk and Fraud Analyst at a financial services firm
Feb 21, 2018
It would be very useful if EG could be enhanced to automatically file and clear the project log to ensure non-stop running of the project.
MG
Consultant BI senior - spécialité SAS at a financial services firm
Feb 21, 2018
I feel that the performance could be increased by leveraging multi-thread with any SAS BI platform, not just the high performance ones.
Learn what your peers think about SAS Enterprise Guide. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: December 2025.
879,889 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user824175 - PeerSpot reviewer
Business Intelligence Analyst at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Feb 21, 2018
A log belongs to each program. I have experienced a situation where when I run just the exec files, it replaces the whole log and I wanted to see the earlier log, then this was not possible.
EL
Economist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
Feb 22, 2018
Sentiment analytics would be a great feature to add into EG.
GF
Sr Manager - Reporting, Analytics and Quality Control (Business Transformation) at Golden 1 Credit Union
Aug 29, 2019
I would like to see better Charting in this solution.
reviewer1219965 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Architect at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Dec 2, 2019
I would like to see integration with schedulers when run from hosting environments such as Citrix.
it_user1156740 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Manager at NMC Healthcare
Nov 27, 2019
Now that I have experience with Tableau, I think the visualization part of SAS EG could be more user friendly and easier to use. Tableau is very easy to use. It's just does a lot of work by itself, including color schemes. I think that could be incorporated easily into SAS EG, which would make it a much better product. Then you would not need Tableau.
reviewer1314771 - PeerSpot reviewer
Finance System & Process Senior Manager at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Apr 8, 2020
For some of the advanced functions, you need to learn some SAS code to get what you want.
GZ
Cenior Healthcare Economic Consultant at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
May 7, 2020
I had difficulty with the diagrammatic flow chart style representation of projects. When projects got too large and complex (which was basically every project, except the most trivial). There just wasn't enough real estate to display the flow chart and dependencies without a lot of scrolling, even when a flow was down to minimum tasks. My recourse was making the flow less "atomic". E.g., rather than use the various subset, etc., tasks as program nodes to display the details, I would write chunks of code that did a few things and use them as SAS program nodes.