Q Research Software vs. SAS Enterprise Guide

We use Q for quantitative data. If you know what you are doing it can still take a bit of time to manipulate your data into the most suitable format for the software to help you. But it is time well spent because once it's set up, Q makes the analysis a breeze. We use it for producing data tables, word clouds, significance testing, audience segmentation and coding of open-responses.

Incentivized

SAS Enterprise Guide is good at taking various datasets and giving analyst/user ability to do some transformations without substantial amounts of code. Once the data is inside SAS, the memory of it is very efficient. Using SAS for data analysis can be helpful. It will give good statistics for you, and it has a robust set of functions that aid analysis.

Incentivized

• Produces really easy to view tables
• Automatically applies significance testing to data, helping the user spot trends
• Create and insert your own variables and filters to help manipulate the data

Incentivized

• I think the most useful aspect of SAS Enterprise Guide is the ability to use a point-and-click interface to create graphics, transform data, and perform statistics. The best part is that SAS Enterprise Guide creates base SAS code from the process, making it easy to reproduce analyses.
• SAS Enterprise Guide makes creating summary statistics about as easy as it gets. If one doesn't know proc means or proc tabulate, one can use SAS Enterprise Guide instead.
• The time-series forecasting procedures within SAS Enterprise Guide produce fairly good results. SAS Enterprise Guide makes time-series model comparisons relatively straight-forward.

Incentivized

• The pricing model is a little restrictive for smaller teams that only really need one license but have to buy a 2nd to help out modest users/users learning the ropes.
• Learning the basics can take quite a bit of time but they offer plenty of free resources that help you through it step-by-step
• Too be honest, I don't have too many complaints

Incentivized

• SAS Studio has some great examples that can be implemented. Adding a filter to the output datasets for one.
• Some issues around having to enter my password every time I open it up. Some people are having this issue and others aren't. SAS admin is at a loss to work out why it's occurring.

Incentivized

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

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

I did not use the technical support of SAS EG. I can say that I have had hard time to find online tutorials or projects for SAS EG. For instance, it is hard to find completed researches or designed algorithms used with SAS EG. Sometimes it just depends on user's skill set and experience with databases and programming.

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.

We still use Excel in order to use Q, but all the analysis happens in Q. No need to learn formulas or reformat spreadsheets. Q does all the heavy lifting.

Incentivized

Why I prefer SAS EG: Data processing speed is much faster than that R Studio. It can load any amount of data and any type of data like structured or unstructured or semi-structured. Its output delivery system by which we have the output in PDF file makes it very comfortable to use and share that file to clients very easily. Inbuilt functions are very powerful and plentiful. Facility of writing macros makes it far away from its competitors.

• Time saving - not exaggerating when I say we can do at least 10x the amount of analysis than we could without it
• More thorough insights obtained from our data sets
• Makes data engaging to other stakeholders

Incentivized

• Positive (cost): SAS made a bundle that include unlimited usage of SAS/Enterprise Guide with a server solution. That by itself made the company save a lot of money by not having to pay individual licences anymore.
• Positive (insight): Data analysts in business units often need to crunch data and they don't have access to ETL tools to do it. Having access to SAS/EG gives them that power.
• Positive (time to market): Having the users develop components with SAS/EG allows for easier integration in a production environment (SAS batch job) as no code rework is required.