SPSS Statistics vs Sigma Computing

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Our analysts compared SPSS Statistics vs Sigma Computing 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.

SPSS Statistics Software Tool
Sigma Computing Software Tool

Product Basics

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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Sigma Computing is an analytics solution that directly connects to cloud warehouses and delivers real-time insights that drive data-informed decision making. With a spreadsheet-like interface, it provides a familiar experience for business users and analysts to utilize formulas to analyze and visualize their data. Through a self-service model, users can explore their data and ask and answer questions for themselves. It streamlines complex data analysis processes and promotes teamwork throughout a business with a balance of collaboration and control.

It is entirely cloud-based and enables data access without the risk of extracting, moving and storing data. Suitable for companies of all sizes, this SaaS runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.

Pros
  • User-friendly interface
  • Affordable pricing
  • Scalable for business growth
  • Cloud-based accessibility
  • Responsive customer support
Cons
  • Limited data analysis features
  • Less powerful than competitors
  • Occasional performance issues
  • Restricted data storage capacity
  • Lower customization options
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$99 Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
$300 Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
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Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
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Videos
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Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
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24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • 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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  • Fast Integration: Without coding experience, users can securely and directly connect to data warehouses and get started without wasting valuable time on importing their data. Analysts can lay the foundation for the entire organization to succeed with data in hours, rather than days.
  • Ease of Use: Users work with a familiar spreadsheet-like interface and formulas to generate insights, no code required. The system automatically translates all the front-end actions input by users into SQL on the back-end.
  • Real-Time Access: Users can leverage the power of the cloud to query data directly where it lives, allowing for live analysis of massive datasets and insights in real time. 
  • Keep Data Safe: Sigma never moves, stores, copies or caches users’ data, instead running queries against the data warehouses and passing the results back to the system, ensuring that data remains secure with robust data governance and platform security that exceeds industry standards. It complies with data privacy guidelines SOC 2 Type II, CSA, GDPR and CCPA.
  • Improve Collaboration: The system eliminates BI bottlenecks and inaccurate analyses by establishing a single, reusable and accessible source of truth for all users to query. Sigma transforms the data modeling process into a collaborative one; users can edit tables and create visualizations together, enabling better communication and decision making by forging a bridge between data teams and business users.
  • Self-Service BI: Users have the freedom to explore ad hoc analysis without waiting for IT teams to update models.
  • SQL Authoring: Users with SQL technical knowledge can create and edit reusable analyses to activate with one-click parsing.
  • Free Trial or Demo: Interested customers can try out the full platform for free for 14 days, or request a demo of the solution to try with their own data warehouse.
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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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  • Data Warehouse Connectivity:  Sigma connects directly with many popular data warehouses, including Snowflake, Google Big Query, Amazon Redshift and PostgreSQL, or users may pull their data from other partners like Matillion, Fivetran, Alooma and Stitch to create their central source of truth by indexing all the tables in those sources. 
  • Dataset Preparation: Sigma creates reusable datasets from individual or joined tables using one or more data sources. These Datasets can be edited either with a no-code worksheet-based interface, or with Sigma’s SQL Runner. 
  • Links: Users can add context to their Datasets by setting up the relationships between datasets in a guided, contextualized way. Non-technical users can preview and create pre-model joins without needing knowledge of the join creation process. The system also pulls pre-existing relationships in databases upon connection with a data warehouse.
  • Data Visualization: Users can create assorted kinds of charts and graphs from their worksheets, including bar charts, line graphs, pie graphs, tables and more. These visualizations can be formatted in various ways. 
  • Object Badges: Users can flag datasets and worksheets as Endorsed, Warning or Deprecated, guiding others to the most accurate and relevant data with a glance.
  • Shareable Workspaces: The platform has both individual and team workspaces, allowing for collaboration on data analysis. These workspaces can be shared externally, providing access to insights to partners or third parties who may benefit from them. The system also has an organization-wide workspace that everyone can search and explore through filters, descriptions and file names.
  • Role-Based Permissions: The system has tiered permission levels from highest to lowest for admins, authors and viewers, to allow different permissions and access settings on a role-by-role basis. Permissions may be granted on an individual or team level, allowing for organizations to add and remove users from access levels based on function, department or other categorization.
  • Data Security: In addition to role-based access control, the platform provides single-sign-on (SSO) and row-level security to ensure safe data analysis. The application has a secure infrastructure, with firewalls, credential and vulnerability checking, peer review, static code analysis, threat and anomaly detection and encryption in transit.
  • JSON Support: The visual interface enables business users to create views with JSON that unlock the value of semi-structured data. These strings of JSON can be stored, referenced and reused for analyses and visualizations across the ecosystem. 
  • Third Party Integrations: The system integrates with Slack and Google Sheets for enhanced collaboration.
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Product Ranking

#86

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#184

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1881 reviews
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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)
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4.51 (528)
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4.5 (425)
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4.6 (40)
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4.2 (158)
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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

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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User-friendly interface: Sigma's intuitive design and drag-and-drop functionality make it easy for users with limited technical expertise to get started and create insightful reports.
Affordable pricing: Sigma offers a competitive pricing model with a free tier for individual users and small teams, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.
Scalable for business growth: Sigma's cloud-based architecture scales seamlessly to accommodate growing data volumes and user bases, ensuring your BI solution can grow with your business.
Cloud-based accessibility: Access your data and insights from anywhere, anytime with Sigma's cloud-based platform, eliminating the need for on-premise infrastructure.
Responsive customer support: Sigma provides responsive and helpful customer support via email, phone, and live chat, ensuring you get the assistance you need when you need it.
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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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Limited data analysis features: Compared to more robust BI solutions, Sigma offers a less extensive range of advanced data analysis capabilities.
Occasional performance issues: Some users have reported encountering occasional performance issues, such as slow loading times and data refreshes.
Restricted data storage capacity: Sigma's free and lower-tier plans offer limited data storage, requiring upgrades for larger datasets.
Lower customization options: While Sigma offers some customization options, its capabilities are not as extensive as other BI platforms.
Less powerful than competitors: Although Sigma excels in user-friendliness, it may lack the power and flexibility required for complex data analysis needs.
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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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While Sigma Computing receives praise for its user-friendly interface and affordability, some users feel it lacks compared to similar BI tools like Tableau and Power BI. One user noted, "Sigma is great for beginners, but I quickly outgrew its capabilities. It just doesn't offer the depth of analysis I need." Another echoed this sentiment, stating, "The lack of advanced features was a dealbreaker for me. While Sigma is easy to use, it's not powerful enough for complex data analysis." However, others find Sigma's strengths outweigh its weaknesses. One user commented, "For the price, Sigma is a fantastic tool. It's simple to use and allows me to create insightful reports quickly and easily. I don't need all the bells and whistles offered by other platforms." Another user praised its scalability, saying, "Sigma has grown with my business. As my data volume increased, Sigma seamlessly scaled to accommodate my needs." One differentiating factor is Sigma's focus on real-time data and collaboration. One user highlighted this, saying, "Sigma's ability to work with real-time data is a game-changer. It allows me to make decisions based on the latest information, not outdated data." Another user noted the benefits of collaboration, stating, "Sigma's collaborative features make it easy to work with my team on data analysis. We can share insights and brainstorm ideas in real-time." Ultimately, the suitability of Sigma Computing depends on individual needs and priorities. If you're a small business or individual user who needs a basic, affordable BI tool, Sigma is a great option. However, if you require advanced data analysis capabilities or extensive customization options, you may be better served by a more powerful BI platform.

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