SPSS Statistics is a software package used for statistical analysis. It is now officially named "IBM SPSS Statistics". Companion products in the same family are used for survey authoring and deployment (IBM SPSS Data Collection), data mining (IBM SPSS Modeler), text analytics, and collaboration and deployment (batch and automated scoring services).
$105
per month per user
Minitab
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Minitab Statistical Software can look at current and past data to discover trends, find and predict patterns, uncover hidden relationships between variables, and create visualizations. Key statistical tests available in Minitab include t tests, one and two proportions, normality test, chi-square, and equivalence tests. And its interactive tool with a gallery lets users view and explore multiple graph options without re-running analysis. Using the same selection of data each time, Graph Builder…
IBM SPSS Statistics beats the pants off of Minitab in every area except cost. Minitab has far cheaper entry-level costs, but the software is much more limited. With the versions of Minitab I have used, importing mapping data is a non-starter. With IBM SPSS Statistics, once the …
As a tech-lover, I used many software products,
such as Stata, R Studio, Python, Orange, Jupyter Notebook, MatLab, Julia,
Hadoop etc. Each software has its own specific features. However, I like open
IBM SPSS Statistics is well suited for pretty much any data analytic scenario. It can handle extremely complex and large-scale datasets with ease. It especially shines if you have to do any kind of analyses that involve significance testing. Being able to do any number of significance tests (i.e., t-tests, chi-square, ANOVAs, etc.) right inside the tool is very valuable. The only scenario I would say it is less appropriate is if you need to work on a very small dataset and answer very simple questions, like frequencies or averages. In those cases, something like Excel could probably do the job just as easily.
Teaching statistics to undergraduate and graduate students non-majors.
Teaching short courses in statistics for people from industry whose backgrounds are not statistics. They usually are not up to speed on coding and wants something that is easy to learn. Less appropriate for statistics majors or those developing statistical tools in a research environment.
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.
Availability of procedures in the base package seems to be dwindling.
The copy-and-paste function from output to Excel is not as easy as it once was (now I have to do a "paste special").
Text and date handling are terrible.
Need to include AI-based NLP for survey verbatims and other text-based fields. This is becoming increasingly important in the CX world, yet SPSS seems to be ignoring it.
Both money and time are essential for success in terms of return on investment for any kind of research based project work. Using a Likert-scale questionnaire is very easy for data entry and analysis using IBM SPSS. With the help of IBM SPSS, I found very fast and reliable data entry and data analysis for my research. Output from SPSS is very easy to interpret for data analysis and findings
Probably because I have been using it for so long that I have used all of the modules, or at least almost all of the modules, and the way SPSS works is second nature to me, like fish to swimming.
All the users at our site required training to be able to utilize Minitab in the different departments. It would be nice to have a user-friendly/basic user version for those who just need to view charts, data, etc
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
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.
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.
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.
