Another solution we used for business intelligence is the Arena tool. However, I find it quite different from IBM SPSS Statistics. It's more like running a model, listing and analyzing the data, especially when it comes to statistics or features from different sources.

I looked at SAS and Stata. They just seemed much more cumbersome and difficult to use.

I've used PSPP, the freeware version of SPSS, which is clumsy. However, it still does much the same job, at least, for elementary tasks.

We evaluated other options. In general, in the Middle East, we use many different software packages, like SAS, Minitab, and SPSS. But I believe that SPSS might be the number one in the Middle East. I'm talking about Saudi Arabia or Egypt. 

I have had the opportunity to evaluate some tools. The differences are not always obvious in casual use.  

For example, there are some little differences between SPSS and Minitab. If you want to make something called two-way ANOVA (Analysis of Variance), you can find it directly, and clearly in the Minitab interface. It is right in the menu and you can pick two-way ANOVA. But if you are thinking of two-way ANOVA using SPSS, you will not find it. You will find only one-way ANOVA. To make two-way ANOVA, you have to go to the general linear model, pick the univariate to use to obtain the two-way ANOVA. It is there and done a different way, it is just not called a two-way ANOVA. It is known as general linear model. The only problem is that the type of analysis is not known as two-way ANOVA in SPSS.  

So the difference is not that this type of analysis is impossible in one product and not the other.  

The price is a reason one of the reasons why the university chose IBM SPSS Statistics.

Although we're working with IBM right now, we're currently looking for a new data science platform solution. I was hoping to find an open-source tool that could fit our needs in the future. We're evaluating R and Python right now, but they're not quite what we need. On all of our new engagements, we'd really like to use open-source only.

As I said, I just follow what the company preference is for using tools. I'm not doing evaluation between products. The tool is already in place in the company, I just use it.

I think that IBM SPSS Statistics is a very powerful analytical tool, even for multivariate statistics. Other software solutions that I mentioned don't have these capabilities and are weaker than SPSS.