SAS EG is okay, does what you needed 10 years ago, but newer stuff is better
December 02, 2020

SAS EG is okay, does what you needed 10 years ago, but newer stuff is better

Ben Holmes | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with SAS Enterprise Guide

We use it for analytics, and rough end extracts. This gives our staff administrative permissions to handle inside their SAS workflows, adding external data, and retaining repeatable steps to generate the same extract. We have both PC and Server SAS. My team uses the server a lot to handle larger analytical jobs. It is also used to handle data statistics and verify data quality.
  • Flexible to data sources
  • Works well across teams
  • Helps with SQL code writing
  • Difficult to write quickly, particularly if you need to change something in the data flow
  • Lots of clicking, slow to develop
  • Doesn't view data on the fly, hard to see what impact a particular change might have
  • Lots of licensing costs, very costly for what it does, basically equivalent to Pandas, but with huge cost tag
  • Integrates IT development with analytical/business areas by giving a "code share"
  • Visual of data flow helps communicate process to others
  • Reasonably shares programs with team mates
Python-based platforms like Pandas or Spark are very good too at displaying data and do exploratory analysis. I definitely prefer them to SAS EG. It's just too slow, and doesn't let you peek into the data very easily. Lots of clicking, and I'd rather just write some code, rather do clicking.
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.
I haven't engaged the support areas of SAS and cannot give a yes or no. The product seems to work well, and we have a dedicated admin staff set up to handle all the issues. They probably deal more directly with SAS, whereas as a user, I have not worked with SAS support.

Do you think SAS Enterprise Guide delivers good value for the price?

No

Are you happy with SAS Enterprise Guide's feature set?

No

Did SAS Enterprise Guide live up to sales and marketing promises?

No

Did implementation of SAS Enterprise Guide go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy SAS Enterprise Guide again?

No

IBM Watson Studio (formerly IBM Data Science Experience), TIBCO Data Science (including Team Studio and statistica), IBM SPSS Modeler
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.