Dataiku vs. SAS Enterprise Miner

Dataiku is an awesome tool for data scientists. It really makes our lives easier. It is also really good for non technical users to see and follow along with the process. I do think that people can fall into the trap of using it without any knowledge at all because so much is automated, but I dont think that is the fault of Dataiku.

Incentivized

SAS Enterprise Miner is world-class software for individuals interested in developing reproducible models in a reasonable amount of time. Perhaps the most useful part of SAS Enterprise Miner is the ability to compare models with other models without writing code. The ensemble modeling capabilities is the easiest way to do ensemble modeling I have come across. SAS Enterprise Miner is well-suited for beginning to advanced analysts who know something about advanced analytics. The software is not well-suited for analysts or companies that have little interest in advanced modeling.

Incentivized

• Allows users to collaborate and monitor individual tasks
• Caters to both types of analysts, coders and non-coders, alike
• Integrate graphs and plots with visualization tools such as Tableau

Incentivized

• Enterprise Miner is really visual and lets you do a whole lot without actually going into the detailed options. For decent results, you should really explore the different advanced options though.
• The recent versions of Miner allow users to use R code in Miner. You can then compare several models and approach to get the best performing model.
• The resulting data is really well displayed and easy to understand (ex: the lift graph, score ranking, etc.)
• Miner has the ability to integrate custom SAS code which allows the user to add functionalities that are specific to the project.

Incentivized

• The integrated windows of frontend and backend in web applications make it cumbersome for the developer.
• When dealing with multiple data flows, it becomes really confusing, though they have introduced a feature (Zones) to cater to this issue.
• Bundling, exporting, and importing projects sometimes create issues related to code environment. If the code environment is not available, at least the schema of the flow we should be able to import should be.

Incentivized

• SAS is not as user friendly as other stats software.

Incentivized

The user experience is very good. Everything feels intuitive and "flows" (sorry excuse the pun) so nicely, and the customization level is also appropriate to the tool. Even as a newer data scientist, it felt easy to use and the explanations/tutorials were very good. The documentation is also at a good level

Incentivized

The open source user community is friendly, helpful, and responsive, at times even outdoing commercial software vendors. Documentation is also top notch, and usually resolves issues without the need for human interactions. Great product design, with a focus on user experience, also makes platform use intuitive, thus reducing the need for explicit support.

Incentivized

SAS' customer support used to be non-existent many years ago. Today, contacting SAS customer support is great. They are responsible, knowledgable, and seem to have an interest in getting the results right the first time. With that said, Enterprise Miner's online support is weak, probably because the user base is much smaller than other tools.

Incentivized

Anaconda is mainly used by professional data scientists who have profound knowledge of Python coding, mainly used for building some new algorithm block or some optimization, then the module will be integrated into the Dataiku pipeline/workflow. While Dataiku can be used by even other kinds of users.

Incentivized

SAS EM has a very great set of machine learning and predictive analytics toolsets, which helped our organization achieve its goals. We used other tools, but for us, SAS EM was the most intuitive and easy to learn the tool and it provides greater data exploration and data preparation capabilities compared to the other tools we used.

Incentivized

• Customer satisfaction
• Timely project delivery

Incentivized

• In our organization, users were using SAS already so the learning curve was really low. Within a few weeks after the implementation, the users were already delivering models developed with SAS Enterprise Miner. It is difficult to talk about ROI as models were already being developed before. It was mostly a change of technology and it was a smooth transition.
• Going with Enterprise Miner came with migration from desktop use of SAS to a server use of SAS. This created a new role of SAS administrator. This was obviously a cost but as the use of SAS increased greatly, it was expected.
• From a methodology standpoint, Enterprise Miner helped greatly in the documentation of the model development which was a requirement in a few groups such as the risk groups. Having a visual "GUI-like" approach to development, the flowchart or diagram of the project in Miner was able to give users a good understanding of the approach the analyst took to develop the model.

Incentivized