SAS Viya vs WebFOCUS

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Our analysts compared SAS Viya vs WebFOCUS based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Big Data Analytics Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

WebFOCUS Software Tool

Product Basics

SAS Viya is a cloud-based in-memory analytics engine that provides data visualization, reporting and analytics to businesses for actionable data insights. Powered by AI, it brings together visual analytics, visual statistics and data science for enterprises to achieve end-to-end self-service analytics. It uses a standardized code base with support for programming in R, Python, SAS, Java and Lua.

Deployable in the cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, it integrates with a wide range of business applications through an agile, scalable architecture. The vendor offers an introductory 30-day free trial.

Pros
  • Comprehensive features
  • Powerful analytics capabilities
  • User-friendly interface
  • Scalable architecture
  • Strong support from SAS
Cons
  • Steep learning curve
  • Limited customization options
  • High cost of ownership
  • Potential vendor lock-in
  • Resource-intensive
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WebFOCUS is a comprehensive data management and analytics platform that enables organizations to access, transform, visualize, and distribute data across multiple platforms. It's particularly well-suited for enterprises with large, complex datasets and a need for robust reporting and analytics capabilities. Key benefits include its ability to unify disparate data sources, create interactive dashboards and visualizations, and automate data-driven workflows. Popular features include its drag-and-drop report builder, self-service data exploration tools, and integration with various business intelligence applications. User experiences generally praise its ease of use, scalability, and ability to handle diverse data types. Pricing is typically based on the number of users, data sources, and required features, with options for both on-premise and cloud-based deployments.

Pros
  • Easy to use interface
  • Handles large datasets
  • Diverse data source integration
  • Customizable reports and dashboards
  • Scalable for enterprise needs
Cons
  • Occasional performance issues
  • Limited out-of-the-box visualizations
  • Upgrades can be complex
  • UI may feel outdated to some
  • Learning curve for advanced features
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$10,000 Annual
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$50/Three Concurrent Users, Annually
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Product Assistance

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Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
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24/7 Live Support

Product Insights

  • Improve Decision-Making: Make informed business decisions by using historical and current proprietary information to derive analytical insights. Compute vast amounts of data faster and resolve complexities through parallel processing. Boost workflow efficiencies by deploying operational decisions that define real-time best actions at scale. 
  • Self-Service Analytics: Easily perform automated forecasting, goal-seeking and scenario analysis — no technical skills needed. Identify user sentiment through text analytics and incorporate geographical data for a complete picture of business metrics. 
  • Maximize ROI: Save time through built-in automation for data prep, feature engineering, algorithm selection and AI-powered data discovery. Innovate, rather than spending time on tedious data management and analytics tasks. 
  • Data Security: Ensure data encryption at rest and while moving across systems, in addition to auditing protocols. Connect to external data management systems like Oracle, Teradata, Facebook, Amazon and Esri seamlessly through Kerberos, SAML, OAuth and OpenID. 
  • Data Management: Import data by using an IDE or through REST APIs, and visualize and analyze it through self-service data prep. Join tables, apply functions and perform calculations, or drag-and-drop, pivot, and slice and dice to view desired metrics. 
  • Augmented Analytics: Identify relationships in data through automatically generated suggestions and guided analysis, and track anomalies and outliers. Tell data stories by generating easy-to-understand visuals and dashboard summaries in natural language. Derive meaningful insights for the future by creating what-if scenarios for forecasting and predictive analytics. 
  • Mobility: Access business reports on the go through a native mobile app that supports a variety of charts, graphs and tables. Configure app functionality per device for specific users to add and view reports, share links, add and view comments and view alerts. 
  • Scalable Architecture: Leverage its modular microservices architecture to scale as per business needs. Monitor and manage the health and configuration of individual microservices instances through the SAS Environment Manager. Deploys seamlessly to any type of environment, including the cloud, and runs on Cloud Foundry as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). 
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  • Ease of Use: Everyone can access and derive rich insights and helpful information from enterprise data through an intuitive GUI with drag-and-drop ease. Increase adoption and encourage self-service data exploration at all levels of technical knowledge.
  • Make Better Decisions: Empower smarter, more consistent and more accurate proactive decision-making throughout the organization.
  • Faster Time to Insight: Streamline data workflows and analytics processes and efficiently access the most relevant insights through a personalized, interactive home page and enhanced content search.
  • Scalable: Deploy to millions and customize the solution to business needs. Scale up or down, enjoy regular updates and maintain security through the cloud.
  • IT Friendly: Easily deployable and connectable with internal IT resources, with accelerated upgrades. 
  • On-the-Go Information: Stay connected to data through its native mobile app and browser-accessible platform.
  • Strong Vendor Support: The vendor has earned several awards in recent years for its dedication to customer success through professional and friendly service.
  • Free Trial: Request a free 14-day trial of the product through the vendor’s website.
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  • Visualization and Reporting: Dig into data for in-depth analysis and view key business metrics through autonomous data exploration and manipulation. Create and customize interactive reports and charts to share with others across the organization for collaborative insight. Get suggestions on graphics best suited to display pertinent data through auto charting. 
  • Data Modeling: Analyze data with predictive models through regression, clustering and neural networks. Ensure version control by tracking data models from creation through usage by registering, validating and monitoring each version. Creates snapshots of model properties and files and retains them for the future. 
  • Visual Statistics: Build diverse scenarios simultaneously and refine them with what-if analyses to uncover insights through experimentation. Unifies all business tools, irrespective of the language they support, into a common visual analytics solution. 
  • Cloud Integrations: Develop low-code technologies by porting SAS open-source models into mobile and business applications through its cloud-native capability. Optimize analytics workloads on clouds like Microsoft Azure and ensure cost-efficient migration of analytics to the cloud through a workload management tool. 
  • ML-Based Insights: Get valuable insights from new data types by combining structured and unstructured data in integrated machine learning programs. Choose the desired ML algorithm from a range of options and easily find the optimal parameter settings. Use Python within Jupyter notebooks for deep learning functions like computer vision, natural language processing, forecasting and speech processing. 
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  • App Studio: Develop customized applications called InfoApps that analyze data and generate insights for end-users. Supported features include data visualization, reporting, drill-downs and more. 
  • Data Visualization: Turn data into content with eye-catching data visualizations. Create and customize a variety of charts that highlight meaningful trends.
  • Pages: Organize visual content and information into interactive, responsive pages that function as dashboards. Drag and drop items onto the canvas and create compelling data stories 
  • BI Portal: Build a complete, modern website that displays key information in one place with zero-training accessibility. Encourage self-service data discovery through drill-down, filters and more. Enable a custom sign-in page for the company.
  • Home Page: Easily navigate to the tools, functions and features used most, with a personalized landing page that displays favorites, last viewed items and more, based on recent activity.
  • Data Management: Streamline data access and data management. Connect to various data sources — including big data — upload and modify files and prepare it for future analysis, all from a single environment. Improves data quality with various data preparation enhancements.
  • Reporting: Create highly complex reports from any enterprise data source. Automate scheduled report distribution to anyone within or outside the organization.
  • In-Document Analysis: Interact with analytics with an integrated, in-document engine that supports data sets and functions similar to Excel. Brought together in singular HTML 5 pages that are accessible even without an internet connection. 
  • Security: Leverage a variety of tools and controls for administering and securing the platform, including role-based access control and granular level security options.
  • Mobile: Run reports, analyses and dashboards from any corporate data source on iOS and Android devices. The native mobile app supports familiar, touch-based gestures for smooth navigation. Find, retrieve and share content, whether online or offline.
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Product Ranking

#41

among all
Big Data Analytics Tools

#50

among all
Big Data Analytics Tools

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

SAS Viya
WebFOCUS
+ Add Product + Add Product
Augmented Analytics Computer Vision And Internet Of Things (IoT) Dashboarding And Data Visualization Data Management Data Preparation Geospatial Visualizations And Analysis Machine Learning Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting 96 100 98 96 86 93 70 96 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 203 reviews
Great User Sentiment 439 reviews
85%
of users recommend this product

SAS Viya has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 85% when considering 203 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

87%
of users recommend this product

WebFOCUS has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 87% when considering 439 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

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4.5 (14)
4.2 (157)
4.4 (158)
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4.5 (170)
4.3 (33)
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4.7 (13)
4.3 (65)
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3.2 (32)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated SAS Viya and concluded it deserves the award for the Best Overall Big Data Analytics Tools available today and earns best-in-class honors for Augmented Analytics and Computer Vision and Internet of Things (IoT).

Analysts' Pick Award
Augmented Analytics Award
Computer Vision and Internet of Things (IoT) Award

we're gathering data

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Ease of Use: All users who mention its interface say that it makes autonomous analysis and data modeling accessible to users of all skill levels.
Support: All users who review support say that representatives are responsive and helpful in resolving issues and queries.
Functionality: Around 71% of the users who comment on its feature set say that the software helps discover data insights through powerful visualizations and on-the-fly calculations.
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Support: All of the users who mentioned the vendor’s support praised their responsive, helpful support team and dedication to customer success.
Reporting: Around 96% of users who mentioned reporting said that this tool works well for report creation and scheduled distribution.
Data Visualization: About 90% of users who reviewed the tool for data visualization said that it excels in dashboard and chart creation.
Functionality: This is a robust, feature-rich tool with a great degree of flexibility and frequent updates, according to around 76% of users who reviewed the tool’s functionality.
Ease of Use: According to about 63% of users who reviewed the platform’s ease of use, its intuitive drop-and-drop interface simplifies data analysis and visualization.
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Cost: All users who discuss its pricing say that the cost of acquisition is high.
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User Interface: Of the users who mentioned this solution’s UI, approximately 87% said that it looks outdated, especially compared to those of competitors.
Cost: About 83% of users who reviewed it for price said that this solution is expensive, especially when considering add-on modules.
Performance: All of the users who reviewed the platform’s performance and speed mentioned bugs, lag and crashes, among other issues.
Learning Curve: It takes some time to learn this platform, according to about 60% of users who reviewed its learning curve.
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SAS Viya is an AI-powered data management and visual analytics platform with a robust, scalable architecture. All users who reviewed data source connectivity said that it connects to multiple sources and integrates easily with business applications, giving a seamless user experience. With fast in-memory processing of big data sets, it leverages the power of R to enable visual statistics. All users who mentioned predictive analysis said that it enables automated forecasting through what-if scenarios, goal-seeking, text mining and decision trees. Citing ease of use, all users say that the platform is intuitive and enables easy data modeling and self-service visual analytics. All users who mentioned support said that they are responsive and knowledgeable. Around 71% of the users who comment on its functionality say that it is a robust, scalable and flexible platform that enables visualization and analysis of business data, though some users say visual statistics need improvement. On the flip side, all users who review its cost say that the tool is expensive. In summary, SAS Viya is an analytics tool that provides data management, visualization and AI-powered analytics to enterprises for improved decision making, though small organizations and startups might find it cost-prohibitive.

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WebFOCUS offers a feature-rich business intelligence data and analytics platform that unlocks actionable insights and the power of decision-making for users throughout an organization. Rated highly for ease of use by most reviewers, it empowers self-service data discovery with a user-friendly UI that enables drag-and-drop data analysis and visualization; some users noted that this UI looks outdated, especially compared to those of competitors. The platform offers a wide range of prebuilt data visualizations that users can further customize if necessary. This platform excels at creating and designing reports, then distributing them either at-will or through the automated scheduling tool, as noted by a majority of users who reviewed reporting. Most notably, the platform has an outstanding support team - all of the users who reviewed its support expressed satisfaction with their proactive, responsive assistance, citing the vendor’s dedication to the success of their customers as notably apparent. Customers can tailor the platform to their needs, as its flexibility allows for customized solutions. Frequent updates add value over time, though some users remarked that these sometimes break features from older versions. Other performance issues noted in reviews include lags when performing complex queries, infrequent crashes, slow load times and issues when accessing the platform from specific devices or browsers. While easy to pick up and use, especially for the end-user, some reviewers said that there is a learning curve to master the many features of this tool — a few users noted that this learning curve lasted a few months for some team members in their organizations. Overall, WebFOCUS is a worthy pick for self-service data visualization and reporting, especially in the hands of an organization willing to invest the resources and time to make it shine.

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