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Mathematica vs SPSS Statistics

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Our analysts compared Mathematica vs SPSS Statistics based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Intelligence Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

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Mathematica Software Tool
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SPSS Statistics Software Tool
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Product Basics

Wolfram Mathematica is a technical computing platform that can perform a wide range of computations and algorithms for mathematics and beyond. Primarily designed for research and academia, it enables users to create powerful scripts through a flexible, multi-purpose programming language. It allows users to analyze and visualize data in sophisticated ways and employ methods such as machine learning, data mining and deep learning to model and solve complicated problems.

It is available in the cloud through any web browser or installable on-premises on all desktop environments. Users can purchase licenses as individuals or under group or enterprise pricing for cloud, desktop or both versions.
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IBM SPSS, or Statistical Product and Service Solutions, is a data analysis platform that provides advanced statistical insights to propel business decision-making and research by crunching large datasets. With a user-friendly interface, it empowers everyone from basic users to experienced data scientists to perform statistical analysis. Scalable and agile, it is suitable for companies of all sizes.

Users can purchase it through an on-premises license or a subscription plan to a hybrid SaaS. Users who choose either monthly or annual subscription receive access to the base version and can choose which of three optional add-ons to include, if any, between Custom Tables and Advanced Statistics, Complex Sampling and Testing, and Forecasting and Decision Trees.

Perpetual and term licensees can choose between four editions that offer different levels of functionality: Base, standard, professional and premium. It was first launched as Statistical Package for the Social Sciences by three Stanford students in 1968 and later acquired by IBM in 2009.
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Product Insights

  • Seamless Integration: The system includes more than 5,000 built-in functions that cover all areas of technical computing and all integrate to work perfectly together so that code runs interactively and instantly within a native environment for its language. 
  • Automate to the Max: Through superfunctions, meta-algorithms and more, users can automate a variety of tasks so that they can work as efficiently as possible.
  • Code Designed to be Learned: Wolfram Language, the proprietary programming language that powers Mathematica, is user-intuitive with English-like functions that make it easy to read, write, learn and program in a way that makes sense and is often shorter than code written in other programming languages.
  • Always Moving Forward: Wolfram continually updates Mathematica with new features and functions that extend the vision and scope of the platform, while maintaining consistent compatibility for over 30 years.
  • Vast Resources: Wolfram provides a host of resources to help users get started with their projects, with more than 150,000 examples and more than 10,000 open-code demonstrations to which they can refer. In addition, access to instant real-world data broadens the spectrum of up-to-date information at users’ disposal.
  • Publication-Ready: Mathematica presents data and insights with beautiful visualizations and publication-quality documents, helping researchers and presenters make their results look their best.
  • Scalability: The platform streamlines workflows for programs and teams of any size, allowing users to scale up or down to address problems or projects as needed. Everything is industrial-strength, capable of handling large-scale problems through parallelism, GPU computing and more.
  • Access Everywhere: Through an interactive online cloud environment, all users need is a web browser or mobile app to compute with Mathematica or interact with Wolfram Notebooks, making it an ideal solution for instant, remote access.
  • Free Trial: Anyone can try Mathematica for free for 15 days. The trial includes both a download of the application to install on a desktop computer and access to the online platform.
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  • Increase Reliability of Analysis: Data analysts and scientists can reach more dependable conclusions and ensure high accuracy, backed by numbers and models made from their data.
  • Assists in Decision Making: Organize and analyze data sets in order to draw conclusions, glean insights and make data-driven business decisions.
  • Statistics with Speed: Maximize productivity by quickly crunching data sets. Handle complicated tasks in a third of the time of many non-statistical programs.
  • Data Management: Remove manual work, as the system does all the legwork in preparing and organizing data sets for analysis. It estimates and uncovers missing values, improving the accuracy of reports.
  • Ease of Use: According to the IBM website, 81% of reviewers rank SPSS as easy to use. A point-and-click interface and natural language processing allow analytics capabilities to be accessed by those without coding skills or advanced statistics knowledge.
  • Scalability: Built to scale and work with large volumes of data, supporting anything from basic descriptive analytics to advanced statistics simulations. Purchase as many licenses as needed, ensuring cost-efficiency for small businesses as well as robustness for large scale enterprises.
  • Customized Predictive Analytics: Tailor predictive analytics to unique needs and perform ad hoc analysis to find the information needed, making better predictions over time.
  • Free Trial: Access all capabilities with a free 14-day trial period.
  • Academic Versions: An academic version is optimized for higher education and research. Program availability varies based on user roles, including students, teachers, researchers and campus-wide administrators.
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  • Wolfram Language: Wolfram’s proprietary computational language allows developers to code with a language that allows both computers and humans to communicate with each other through almost 6,000 built-in functions. Built on a philosophy of knowledge-based programming, it aims to help users automate as much as possible and maximize coherence of design while being universally deployable in any environment.
  • Connect to Everything: Through symbolic expressions, interactions and external connections, the Wolfram Language conveniently connects to a broad spectrum of platforms, languages, databases, protocols, APIs, applications, file formats and devices.
  • Notebook Interface: With structured documents that store text, runnable code, dynamic graphics and more, Wolfram Notebooks provide an environment for technical workflows that supports interactive computation. They empower user literacy in a high-level programming interface through interactive coding, natural language queries and expansive documentation that make the platform accessible to users without coding experience.
  • AlgorithmBase: Not just through industrial-strength algorithms but also meta-algorithms and super functions, which automatically select the optimal algorithms to use in a given situation, users can define their goals or concepts and let the system take over to automatically achieve them, enabling discoveries and experimentation with algorithms. With its robust library of scalable and accurate algorithms, the AlgorithmBase serves as a trustworthy resource for programmers to use to ensure high-quality computations.
  • Data Visualization: Through algorithms, Mathematica can create visually compelling representations of data in the form of 2D and 3D plots, graphs, histograms, word clouds, geographic visualizations and more.
  • Machine Learning: Through highly automated functions that work on many types of data, the platform can carry out a wide range of tasks, including classifying data in categories, predicting values, learning from examples and performing automated time series analysis. 
  • Mathematica Online: Powered by the Wolfram Cloud, users can harness the computational system from directly within their web browsers, with no installation required. Everything automatically saves and stays in the cloud, and users can control who can access their documents through instant sharing, URL links and permissions controls. Seamlessly integrated with the desktop version, it allows users to upload or download notebooks and access the cloud from a computer.
  • Wolfram Knowledgebase: Mathematica and the Wolfram Language has access to the world’s largest and broadest trusted source of computable knowledge, curated by experts and derived from primary sources, including not just the data but also the methods that compute results.
  • Mobile App: The Wolfram Cloud free app for iOS and Android mobile devices allows users to edit, run and deploy programs and access Wolfram notebooks and instant apps through its home-screen-like experience.
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  • Data Source Connectivity:  Enables reading and writing data from a wide spectrum of file formats and sources. These include ASCII text files, spreadsheets and databases like Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Access, as well as those from other statistics packages. 
  • Data Preparation: Streamlines the data preparation process. Identify invalid values, view patterns of missing data and automate data preparation to analyze and clean up large data sets in a single step. Validate the accuracy of analysis with a thorough, efficient data conditioning workflow. 
  • Point-and-Click Interface: Allows users without coding knowledge to leverage point-and-click data analysis with drop-down menus and drag-and-drop functionality. 
  • Automated Analytics: Automate common tasks with syntax and create customized data analyses that run using algorithms. 
  • Comprehensive Statistical Analysis: Perform many kinds of statistics tests, including but not limited to linear and non-linear models, simulation modeling, bayesian statistics, custom tables, complex sampling, advanced and descriptive statistics, and regression.
  • Ad Hoc Analysis: “Slice and dice” data by creating customized tables to dig deeper and improve understanding.
  • Predictive Analytics:
    •  Uncovers complex relationships between variables with functions like time series analysis, forecasting, neural networks and temporal causal modeling. 
    •  Simulates values and accounts for the uncertainty of the future using probability distributions. 
    •  Improves predictive models with multilayer perception and radial basis function. 
  • Geospatial Analysis: Explore the relationship between data points that can be tied to specific locations.
  • Direct Marketing: Improve campaigns and target key customers. Conduct advanced statistics analysis of customers or contacts with RFM (recency, frequency, monetary) analysis.
  • Open-Source Integration: Enhance syntax with programming languages R and Python through a library of more than 100 free extensions on the IBM Extension Hub, or opt to build programs.
  • Export with Ease: Export data to a proprietary file format. Can be exported to a variety of widely accessible formats such as text, Microsoft Word, PDF, Excel, HTML, XML, XLS and more. Export to a variety of graphic image formats.
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Product Ranking

#47

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#86

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Business Intelligence Tools

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 305 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1881 reviews
92%
of users recommend this product

Mathematica has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 305 user reviews from 2 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

SPSS Statistics has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 1881 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.

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4.3 (18)
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4.2 (712)
4.59 (152)
4.51 (528)
4.6 (153)
4.5 (425)
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4.6 (40)
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4.2 (158)

Awards

Mathematica stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Symbolic Computation: Mathematica excels at handling and manipulating symbolic expressions, making it ideal for tasks that involve algebra, calculus, and other forms of mathematical analysis. This can be particularly useful for financial modeling, risk analysis, and other business intelligence applications that require complex calculations.
Visualization Capabilities: Mathematica offers a wide range of visualization tools that can be used to create high-quality charts, graphs, and other visual representations of data. These visualizations can be interactive, allowing users to explore data from different perspectives and gain deeper insights. This is essential for effectively communicating complex data to stakeholders in a business setting.
Automation and Scripting: Mathematica allows users to automate tasks and create scripts, which can save time and improve efficiency. This can be particularly useful for repetitive tasks, such as data cleaning and analysis. Automating these tasks can free up time for business intelligence professionals to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Machine Learning and AI: Mathematica includes a wide range of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can be used for tasks such as predictive modeling, classification, and anomaly detection. These capabilities are becoming increasingly important for business intelligence, as they can help organizations to identify trends, make better decisions, and gain a competitive advantage.
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Research Analysis: It’s easy to analyze and interpret large and complex datasets to generate insights, according to 96% of reviewers who mention this feature.
Ease of Use: The platform is user-friendly and easy to navigate as observed by almost 95% of reviewers mentioning ease of use.
Interface: The interface has a clean layout and visually appealing design according to 75% of users referencing it.
Syntax: It’s easy to use (copy and paste) and proof syntax, and save for later, as noted by 95% of reviewers who talk about this feature.
Resources: Of users mentioning support, 93% agreed that access to various support manuals and courses, as well as an extensive user community, was helpful.
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Price: Mathematica comes with a hefty price tag, especially for commercial use, which can be a significant barrier for individuals or small businesses.
Learning Curve: The software has a steep learning curve due to its vast functionality and unique syntax, requiring a significant time investment to master.
Closed Ecosystem: Mathematica operates within a closed ecosystem, making it challenging to integrate with other data analysis tools or programming languages commonly used in business intelligence.
Limited Collaboration: Collaboration features are not as robust as those found in other business intelligence platforms, hindering teamwork and knowledge sharing.
Visualization Capabilities: While Mathematica offers visualization tools, they may not be as intuitive or user-friendly as dedicated data visualization software, potentially limiting the ability to create compelling and insightful dashboards.
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Learning Curve: It needs extensive learning to understand advanced tools and different aspects, as observed by almost 75% of reviewers mentioning training.
Cost: More than 90% of users referencing the price remarked that the product is a bit expensive.
Slow Operation: The system runs slow at times while using huge or complex data sets, and needs to restart, as observed by 92% of reviews on this topic.
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Let's crunch some numbers and see what users have to say about Mathematica! Mathematica has garnered a reputation as a powerful computational tool, particularly in academic and research settings. Users frequently praise its symbolic computation capabilities, allowing them to manipulate and solve complex mathematical expressions and equations with ease. This strength sets Mathematica apart from competitors like MATLAB, which primarily focuses on numerical computation. Mathematica's notebook interface also receives positive feedback for its ability to combine code, visualizations, and text in a single document, facilitating reproducible research and clear communication of findings. However, Mathematica's steep learning curve and high price point are often cited as drawbacks. Users transitioning from other programming languages may find Mathematica's syntax and functional programming paradigm challenging to grasp initially. Additionally, the cost of a Mathematica license can be prohibitive for individual users or small businesses. Overall, Mathematica is best suited for researchers, scientists, and engineers who require a comprehensive tool for symbolic and numerical computation, data analysis, and visualization. Its extensive functionality and ability to handle complex mathematical problems make it an invaluable asset in these fields. However, individuals or organizations with limited budgets or those seeking a more user-friendly option may want to explore alternative software solutions. Keep in mind that software is constantly evolving, so it's always a good idea to check for the latest updates and user reviews to make an informed decision.

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SPSS Statistics is a point-and-click data analysis software that allows non-technical users to leverage advanced statistical analysis. Users praised its user-friendly, visually appealing interface. Many reviews also appreciated how easy it is to use and proof syntax, along with the extensive help documentation available for better understanding. Despite its ease of use, a majority found that using advanced tools involved a steep learning curve. Additionally, its cost runs on the high side and processing large amounts of information slows down its performance, as observed by most reviewers. It’s a good fit for students, data scientists and companies that want to analyze data sets but don’t have the technical resources and expertise to use a more advanced tool.

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