NVivo vs SPSS Statistics

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Our analysts compared NVivo 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.

NVivo Software Tool
SPSS Statistics Software Tool

Product Basics

NVivo is a qualitative data analysis solution for academic and industrial research. It lets users code and visualize their findings from interviews, surveys, text documents and demographic information. It’s helpful in social sciences, education and healthcare.

It has a friendly interface, powerful searches and advanced graphics. Once set up, the system can perform automatic sentiment analysis. Users can record the coding schemes and use them across the data. Documenting the steps enables future researchers to validate the research.

The vendor offers exclusive modules for collaboration and transcription. Its Collaboration Cloud lets many people work on the same project.

Pros
  • Powerful data management
  • Rich coding and query tools
  • Visualizations and data exploration
  • Team collaboration features
  • Support for various data formats
Cons
  • Steep learning curve
  • Can be expensive for individuals
  • Limited free trial/demo
  • Not ideal for simple projects
  • Occasional bugs and glitches
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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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$99/User, Monthly
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Tailored to your specific needs
$99 Monthly
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
Small
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Small
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Large
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile

Product Assistance

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

Product Insights

  • Boost ROI: Tap into buyer sentiment by noting their needs and preferences and applying them to product development. Push sales by fine-tuning marketing campaigns.
  • Innovate: Launch new products and improve existing offerings. Go beyond numbers and discover what customers think and feel with thematic and sentiment analysis.
  • Act: Save time while searching for information. Organize data from various sources, such as interviews, surveys and social media, in one system.
  • Improve Services: Build stronger customer associations by serving them better. Identify their pain points and improvement areas by analyzing feedback.
  • Save Money: Free resources for more strategic work by automating tasks like transcription — auto-code interviews with NVivo 14.
  • Test Drive: Try it for 14 days free, including the Collaboration Cloud.
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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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  • Data Import: Pull data from mobile apps like Evernote and organize it using folders, sets or file classifications. It supports transcripts, articles, audio/video recordings and social media content.
  • Qualitative Analysis: Uncover hidden insights using powerful search tools. It turns interviews, surveys and documents into charts, word clouds and maps.
  • Thematic Analysis: Understand findings after digging deep into gathered data and spot emerging themes.
  • Integrations: Combine research materials in one place. Allows direct imports from Microsoft Office. Plus, it can use data from SurveyMonkey and social media platforms.
  • Sharing and Publishing: Export results, models and charts to various formats, including Excel, Word, text, rich-text and PDF files. Use the system clipboard to copy and paste graphics into reports and presentations.
  • Transcription: Review and edit transcripts, tag speakers, and add notes, then import transcripts directly into NVivo for analysis. NVivo Transcription auto-transcribes uploaded audio files, with support for 28 languages.
  • Multilingual Options: Analyze data in Chinese, Japanese, English, French, German and Portuguese, among other languages.
  • Collaboration Cloud: Work together to co-author research projects. A user uploads a master project to a secure cloud workspace, enabling others to download and work on it offline and then seamlessly merge their edits back into the main project.
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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

#42

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Business Intelligence Tools

#86

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Business Intelligence Tools

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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 179 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1881 reviews
82%
of users recommend this product

NVivo has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 179 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)
4.1 (133)
4.2 (712)
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4.51 (528)
4.1 (46)
4.5 (425)
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4.6 (40)
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4.2 (158)

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Data Management: Organize and store various data types (text, audio, video, images) in one secure location.
Flexible Coding: Employ diverse coding approaches (tree, auto and query) to categorize and analyze data based on research questions.
Relationship Exploration: Uncover connections and hierarchies between codes using visual network maps and relationship coding.
Advanced Querying: Search coded data for specific terms, patterns or code combinations to identify key themes and trends.
Visualizations: Generate various visualizations (word clouds and concept maps) to present complex data findings clearly.
Collaboration: Share and collaborate on projects with other researchers using cloud-based options or file exports (depending on the version).
Support & Resources: Benefit from extensive online resources, tutorials, and user communities for troubleshooting and learning best practices.
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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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Steep Learning Curve: New users often report difficulty in mastering NVivo's features quickly, which impacts their productivity and project timelines.
High Cost: Some users find NVivo's pricing to be prohibitive, particularly those from smaller institutions or independent researchers with limited budgets.
Limited Cross-Platform Support: NVivo's limited compatibility with non-Windows operating systems can be a barrier for Mac or Linux users, who may have to seek alternatives or use virtual machines.
Resource Intensiveness: NVivo can be demanding on computer resources, leading to performance issues on less powerful machines, which can frustrate users when handling large data sets.
Occasional Software Bugs: Users occasionally encounter bugs that can disrupt workflow and require waiting for patches or updates, affecting the software’s dependability.
Rigid Licensing Policy: NVivo's licenses can be inflexible, and transferring a license to another computer can be problematic, causing inconvenience to users who need mobility.
Complex Data Importation: Some users find importing data from various sources into NVivo cumbersome, which could lead to a time-consuming setup process.
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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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NVivo is qualitative data analysis software that received positive reviews from users. They appreciate its user-friendly interface, powerful features and ability to handle large datasets.However, some users complained about lax customer support and the occasional bug.NVivo is popular but not as robust as some of the other options. It’s also expensive. However, many users believe that the extra cost is worth it for the additional features and functionality. It has robust coding features to analyze large amounts of data quickly.Overall, NVivo is a user-friendly qualitative data analysis software that can be expensive and complex for individual users but is a handy assistant for teams.

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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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