IBM SPSS Statistics vs. Wolfram Mathematica

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
IBM SPSS Statistics
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
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).
$99
per month
Mathematica
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Wolfram's flagship product Mathematica is a modern technical computing application featuring a flexible symbolic coding language and a wide array of graphing and data visualization capabilities.
$1,520
per year
Pricing
IBM SPSS StatisticsWolfram Mathematica
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$99.00
per month
Base
$3,610
one-time fee per user
Standard
$7,960
one-time fee per user
Professional
$15,900
one-time fee per user
Premium
$23,800
one-time fee per user
Standard Cloud
$1,520
per year
Standard Desktop
$3,040
one-time fee
Standard Desktop & Cloud
$3,344
one-time fee
Mathematica Enterprise Edition
$8,150.00
one-time fee
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
IBM SPSS StatisticsMathematica
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsDiscounts available for students and educational institutions. The Network Edition reduce per-user license costs through shared deployment across any number of machines on a local-area network.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
IBM SPSS StatisticsWolfram Mathematica
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
IBM SPSS StatisticsWolfram Mathematica
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM SPSS Statistics
-
Ratings
Wolfram Mathematica
9.9
6 Ratings
16% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports00 Ratings9.84 Ratings
Customizable dashboards00 Ratings9.94 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates00 Ratings9.96 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
IBM SPSS Statistics
-
Ratings
Wolfram Mathematica
9.9
9 Ratings
21% above category average
Drill-down analysis00 Ratings9.98 Ratings
Formatting capabilities00 Ratings9.98 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages00 Ratings9.97 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration00 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
IBM SPSS Statistics
-
Ratings
Wolfram Mathematica
9.3
8 Ratings
11% above category average
Publish to Web00 Ratings9.97 Ratings
Publish to PDF00 Ratings9.08 Ratings
Report Versioning00 Ratings9.97 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling00 Ratings8.95 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings8.95 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
IBM SPSS Statistics
-
Ratings
Wolfram Mathematica
9.9
9 Ratings
19% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)00 Ratings9.99 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization00 Ratings9.98 Ratings
Predictive Analytics00 Ratings9.98 Ratings
Best Alternatives
IBM SPSS StatisticsWolfram Mathematica
Small Businesses
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Alteryx
Alteryx
Score 9.0 out of 10
Entrinsik Informer
Entrinsik Informer
Score 9.3 out of 10
Enterprises
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
IBM SPSS Modeler
IBM SPSS Modeler
Score 7.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
IBM SPSS StatisticsWolfram Mathematica
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(86 ratings)
9.9
(9 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.6
(22 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(14 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
6.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.4
(12 ratings)
9.5
(2 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.7
(7 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
IBM SPSS StatisticsWolfram Mathematica
Likelihood to Recommend
IBM
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
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Wolfram
We are the judgement that Wolfram Mathematica is despite many critics based on the paradigms selected a mark in the fields of the markets for computations of all kind. Wolfram Mathematica is even a choice in fields where other bolide systems reign most of the market. Wolfram Mathematica offers rich flexibility and internally standardizes the right methodologies for his user community. Wolfram Mathematica is not cheap and in need of a hard an long learner journey. That makes it weak in comparison with of-the-shelf-solution packages or even other programming languages. But for systematization of methods Wolfram Mathematica is far in front of almost all the other. Scientist and interested people are able to develop themself further and Wolfram Matheamatica users are a human variant for themself. The reach out for modern mathematics based science is deep and a unique unified framework makes the whole field of mathematics accessable comparable to the brain of Albert Einstein. The paradigms incorporated are the most efficients and consist in assembly on the market. The mathematics is covering and fullfills not just education requirements but the demands and needs of experts.
Mathematica is incompatible with other systems for mCAx and therefore the borders between the systems are hard to overcome. Wolfram Mathematica should be consider one of the more open systems because other code can be imported and run but on the export side it is rathe incompatible by design purposes. A better standard for all that might solve the crisis but there is none in sight. Selection of knowledge of what works will be in the future even more focussed and general system might be one the lossy side. Knowledge of esthetics of what will be in the highest demand in necessary and Wolfram is not a leader in this field of science. Mathematics leves from gathering problems from application fields and less from the glory of itself and the formalization of this.
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Pros
IBM
  • 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.
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Wolfram
  • It allows straightforward integration of analytic analysis of algebraic expressions and their numerical implemented.
  • Supports varying programmatic paradigms, so one can choose what best fits the problem or task: pure functions, procedural programming, list processing, and even (with a bit of setup) object-oriented programming.
  • The extensive and rich tools for graphical rendering make it very easy to not just get 2D and 3D renderings of final output, but also to do quick-and-dirty 2D and 3D rendering of intermediate results and/or debugging results.
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Cons
IBM
  • It would be beneficial to have AMOS as part of the SPSS package instead of purchasing it separately.
  • It would be beneficial to have other statistical tests, such as PROCESS, be part of the standard SPSS tests instead of having the need to run a syntax to have it installed.
  • My dataset tends to be smaller, and I have never had any issues with using SPSS. I heard that SPSS may not be optimal when handling large datasets.
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Wolfram
  • Should include more libraries and functions.
  • Should include more functions that can be used in Machine Learning.
  • Should include more functions that can be used in Data Science.
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Likelihood to Renew
IBM
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
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Wolfram
No answers on this topic
Usability
IBM
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.
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Wolfram
No answers on this topic
Reliability and Availability
IBM
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
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Wolfram
No answers on this topic
Performance
IBM
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.
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Wolfram
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
IBM
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
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Wolfram
Wolfram Mathematica is a nice software package. It has very nice features and easy to install and use in your machine. Besides this, there is a nice support from Wolfram. They come to the university frequently to give seminars in Mathematica. I think this is the best thing they are doing. That is very helpful for graduate and undergraduate students who are using Mathematica in their research.
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Implementation Rating
IBM
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.
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Wolfram
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
IBM
I have used R when I didn't have access to SPSS. It takes me longer because I'm terrible at syntax but it is powerful and it can be enjoyable to only have to wrestle with syntax and not a difficult UI.
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Wolfram
We have evaluated and are using in some cases the Python language in concert with the Jupyter notebook interface. For UI, we using libraries like React to create visually stunning visualizations of such models. Mathematica compares favorably to this alternative in terms of speed of development. Mathematica compares unfavorably to this alternative in terms of license costs.
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Scalability
IBM
I am neutral because I have not had to look into scalability since I am using as a student.
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Wolfram
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
IBM
  • IBM SPSS has allowed me to quickly analyze data for research.
  • IBM SPSS has allowed me to complete analyses in order to submit research findings to conferences and complete manuscripts.
  • IBM SPSS has enabled me to meet research objectives set out in grant proposals.
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Wolfram
  • Easy to solve huge mathematical equations, so it saved time there
  • Doing analysis and plotting graphs is also another plus point
  • Learning is very slow, and it took lot of time to learn its scripting language
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