Gavagai vs. SAS Viya

Gavagai is well suited for a B2C business that receives a lot of customer feedback in a form of open-ended text. It makes life easier for the customer experience team to efficiently identify the strengths and areas of improvement for the business. It saves a lot of time and also the hassle of analysing text data manually. It is not just a word cloud tool that shows you the words with the most number of mentions. Gavagai directs you towards actionability.

Incentivized

SAS Advanced Analytics excels with projects that have at least 3 parts. The first part is the ability to address and compare different modeling types. Suppose you are an analyst interested in predicting home prices or whether an individual will reapply for unemployment insurance. There are lots of model types that could work for these two situations. SAS Advanced Analytics makes it easy (although not as easy as SAS Enterprise Miner) to compare the performance of different modeling types, such as comparing support vector machines with random forest models. A second scenario that SAS Advanced Analytics does a good job at is making the analysis reproducible. By showing the lineage of analyses, another analyst is able to follow the work of the previous analyst. This is a huge advantage for individuals working in corporations or governments. The third area SAS Advanced Analytics is useful is in text analytics. The field is huge now, and I haven't come across a software that makes text analytics as easy as SAS Advanced Analytics.

Incentivized

• Simplifies text data.
• Lets you customise your dashboard.
• Sentiment analysis
• Supports 47+ languages

Incentivized

• Complex Survey Analysis- SAS is a great resource if you need to analyze complex survey data. One can easily write code for this by inserting (survey) in front of the procedure with the weight, cluster, and strata variables. (ex: surveyfreq)
• Modeling/ Graphing- SAS creates clean and easy to understand graphs and models which take visual data to the next level.
• Support- There is a large SAS Advanced analytics online support in place. It is easy to find help on many procedures that you will use in this software.

Incentivized

• Auto generated filters based on the data uploaded.
• Adding more Indian regional languages.
• Competitive pricing

Incentivized

• SAS Analytics does not have very good graphic capabilities. Their advanced graphics packages are expensive, and still not very appealing or intuitive to customize.
• SAS Analytics is not as up-to-date when it comes to advanced analytical techniques as R or other open-source analytics packages.

Incentivized

Not only does SAS become easier to use as the user gets more familiar with its capabilities, but the customer service is excellent. Any issues with SAS and their technical team is either contacting the user via email, chat, text, WebEx, or phone. They have power users that have years of experience with SAS there to help with any issue.

If SAS Enterprise Guide is utilized any beginning user will be able to shorten the learning curve. This is allow the user a plethora of basic capabilities until they can utilize coding to expand their needs in manipulating and presenting data. SAS is also dedicated to expanding this environment so it is ever growing.

SAS probably has the most market saturation out of all of the analytics software worldwide. They are in every industry and they are knowledgable about every industry. They are always available to take questions, solve issues, and discuss a company's needs. A company that buys SAS software has a dedicated representative that is there for all of their needs.

Although nothing is perfect, SAS is almost there. The software can handle billions of rows of data without a glitch and runs at a quick pace regardless of what the user wants to perform. SAS products are made to handle data so performance is of their utmost important. The software is created to run things as efficiently as SAS software can to maximize performance.

SAS is generally known for good support that's one of the main reasons to justify the cost of having SAS licenses within our organization is knowing that customer support is just a quick phone call away. I've usually had good experiences with the SAS customer support team it's one of the ways in which the company stands out in my view.

Incentivized

SAS has regional and national conferences that are dedicated to expanding users' knowledge of the software and showing them what changes and additions they are making to the software. There are user groups in most of the major cities that also provide multi-day seminars that focus on specific topics for education. If online training isn't the best way for the user, there is ample in-person training available.

There are online videos, live classes, and resource material which makes training very easy to access. However, nothing is circumstantial so applying your training can get tricky if the user is performing complex tasks. When purchasing software, SAS will also allocate education credits so the user(s) can access classes and material online to help expand their knowledge.

Ask as many questions you can before the install to understand the process. Since a third party does the installation your company is sort of a passanger and it is easy to get lost in the process. It also helps to have all users and IT support involved in the install to help increase the knowledge as to how SAS runs and what it needs to perform correctly.

I didn't evaluate many options while choosing Gavagai, I had explored a few local vendors whose capabilities were either incomplete or were not up to the mark. Their customer support was also quite poor. Also, the tool was debugged enough which led to frequent crashing. Alchmer although is not a direct competitor to Gavagai, since it's more of a customer feedback tool with additional capabilities of text analytics. I found Alchemer to be extremely expensive. Zonka on the other hand was quite welcoming to feedback from me and promised to develop additional capabilities for my specific requirements although the plan didn't go through due to internal reasons.

Incentivized

We had major use of SAS in forecasting where it doesn't require high level of coding knowledge and which has highly efficient models built in which can give good results on forecasts without lot of manual intervention. This tool was designed specifically for forecasting and hence was always a better choice compared to other tools.

Incentivized

It all depends on the type of SAS product the user has. Scaleability differs from product to product, and if the user has SAS Office Analytics the scaleability is quite robust. This software will satisfy the majority of the company's analytic needs for years to come. In addition, if SAS is not meeting the users needs the company can easily find SAS solutions that will.

• Helps save man hours.
• Reduces the effort required to analyse big data.
• Helps to act upon areas of improvement faster.
• Indicates the strengths or things that are particularly liked by your customers.

Incentivized

• SAS Advanced Analytics is not the cheapest software on the market. The overall cost was weighed against free, open-source software tools. The overall return, I think, was quite positive because SAS Advanced Analytics saves enormous amounts of time compared to the open-source software tools.
• At first, adopting SAS Advanced Analytics was a negative return because it took time for individuals to change their analytics habits and adjust to superior tools available at their discretion.
• SAS Advanced Analytics has replaced the need to hire less expensive R or Python programmers. So, although the software requires an initial expensive upfront investment, the ease of use makes it so that other areas of expenditure save money.

Incentivized