IBM SPSS Statistics vs. SAS Enterprise Guide

SPSS is well-suited for the following: 1) User Behavior Analysis: SPSS handles large datasets to analyze user behavior data. 2) Customer Satisfaction / Foundational Surveys: SPSS facilitates analysis of quant data from satisfaction surveys, keeping us informed about customer needs and preferences. 3) A/B test analysis: SPSS statistical tools for A/B test analysis, which helps optimize user experience of our products. Scenarios where SPSS are less appropriate: 1) Qualitative Data Analysis: I do not use SPSS for open-ended survey responses/qual data. 2) Live/in-vivo data analysis: SPSS is not ideal for real-time data processing. 3) Complex Data Integration: SPSS isn’t the best fit for complex data integration tasks

Incentivized

For writing out longer code creation for shaping data on complicated reports, the clean UI is helpful. If exploring data though, SAS Studio would be better suited given its easier interface for GUI graph building.

Incentivized

• SPSS has been around for quite a while and has amassed a large suite of functionality. One of its longest-running features is the ability to automate SPSS via scripting, AKA "syntax." There is a very large community of practice on the internet who can help newbies to quickly scale up their automation abilities with SPSS. And SPSS allows users to save syntax scripting directly from GUI wizards and configuration windows, which can be a real life-saver if one is not an experienced coder.
• Many statistics package users are doing scientific research with an eye to publish reproducible results. SPSS allows you to save datasets and syntax scripting in a common format, facilitating attempts by peer reviewers and other researchers to quickly and easily attempt to reproduce your results. It's very portable!
• SPSS has both legacy and modern visualization suites baked into the base software, giving users an easily mountable learning curve when it comes to outputting charts and graphs. It's very easy to start with a canned look and feel of an exported chart, and then you can tweak a saved copy to change just about everything, from colors, legends, and axis scaling, to orientation, labels, and grid lines. And when you've got a chart or graph set up the way you like, you can export it as an image file, or create a template syntax to apply to new visualizations going forward.
• SPSS makes it easy for even beginner-level users to create statistical coding fields to support multidimensional analysis, ensuring that you never need to destructively modify your dataset.
• In closing, SPSS's long and successful tenure ensures that just about any question a new user may have about it can be answered with a modicum of Google-fu. There are even several fully-fledged tutorial websites out there for newbie perusal.

Incentivized

• It can load a huge amount of data as compared to R Studio and Excel.
• Data processing speed is very fast, millions of records are loaded into this software very easily and data manipulation is also very easy.
• Inbuilt Statistical functions and procedures make it very comfortable to use for non analytics professionals as well.

• Lots of finicky work to do simple tasks
• Usability is atrocious [in my opinion]. No ability to customize.
• Would love to see product enhanced with interpretation features or citation tools (e.g., report results APA style)
• Bulk editing variables would be an improvement
• UI looks like its straight out of AOL days

Incentivized

• I would like to see advance interactions with external databases to be able to kill ongoing queries from SAS. As of now, you can stop pretty much any ongoing process besides the one running on a remote database (killing SAS/EG doesn't stop the remote process)
• When creating prompts for programs, it would be nice to be able to have conditional prompts (based on the selection of other prompts). The prompts are clearly a recent feature and constantly under development but I wish it would be more powerful.
• More of a SAS metadata issue but when loading SAS/EG (first connection to the server), it takes a few seconds which feels like a long time. I really don't understand why the initialization of the session can take so long. Don't get me wrong, this has no real impact on productivity but that 10s delay just feels really like eternity when you want to run some code in a new session.

It's super easy to use for newbies and super powerful for power users! It does EVERYTHING you are usually asked to do analytically. Their Help Desk is PHENOMENAL. And I find the upgrade and renewal price to be a good deal.

Incentivized

On account of current user experience and the organization-wide acceptance.

SPSS is beginner friendly and user-friendly for beginner analysts and simple statistical tests. It's "click and go" interface does take some learning, but overall this is much easier than other programs I have used and seen. Compared to SAS software, SPSS takes a great deal less familiarizing and it not a matter of learning a coding language like SAS and RStudio.

Incentivized

It's not all bad, but I don't believe that an enterprise purchase of SAS is worth the expense considering the widely available set of tools in the data analytics space at the moment. In my company, it's a good tool because others use it. Otherwise, I wouldn't purchase a new set of it because it doesn't have some of the better analytical functions in it.

Incentivized

SPSS can tend to crash when I am trying to do a lot of data. This can slow me down when I need to do a lot of data

Incentivized

SPSS does the job, but it can be slow. I do have to plan a lot of time to get through a huge amount of data.

Incentivized

I have not contacted IBM SPSS for support myself. However, our IT staff has for trying to get SPSS Text Analytics Module to work. The issue was never resolved, but I'm not sure if it was on the IT's end or on SPSS's end

Although I use SAS support for information on functions, these are SAS related and haven't really come across anything that is specifically for SAS EG.

Incentivized

Have a plan for managing the yearly upgrade cycle. Most users work in the desktop version, so there needs to be a mechanism for either pushing out new versions of the software or a key manager to deal with updated licensing keys. If you have a lot of users this needs to be planned for in advance.

Incentivized

I've not worked hands-on with the implementation team, but there were no escalations barring a few hiccups in the deployment due to change in requirement & adoption to our company's remote servers.

If you have made it this far, you should have a very good idea of how SPSS stacks up the competition (data processing and analytics tools). Even the free ones, such as r Studio or Stata, are leaps and bounds ahead of SPSS. IBM is resting on a reputation developed nearly 30 years ago and has shown no desire to improve.

Incentivized

Python-based platforms like Pandas or Spark are very good too at displaying data and do exploratory analysis. I definitely prefer them to SAS EG. It's just too slow, and doesn't let you peek into the data very easily. Lots of clicking, and I'd rather just write some code, rather do clicking.

Incentivized

I am neutral because I have not had to look into scalability since I am using as a student.

Incentivized

• I found SPSS easier to use than SAS as it's more intuitive to me.
• The learning curve to use SPSS is less compared to SAS.
• I used SAS, to a much lesser extent than SPSS. However, it seems that SAS may be more suitable for users who understand programming. With SPSS, users can perform many statistical tests without the need to know programming.

Incentivized

• Faster decision making, through powerful big data handling functionalities.
• Faster operations on daily basis, once the project tree is built, unskilled personnel can use it in their daily operation.
• Don’t need to choose SAS EG if you are not going to be handling big data. (such as over 1 million rows and 50 columns)
• You need skilled personnel to build the initial project tree.

Incentivized