Most Popular Data Mining Software

Surveys conducted by KDD Nuggets %EXT% and Rexer Analytics %EXT% have asked people involved in data mining what software they use. While it's not necessarily true that the most popular software is the best for a particular purpose, they can help guide you in choosing what software to evaluate. You can also see our full list of data mining software.

You can also see the Data Mining Software reviews at: Data Mining Software

KDD Nuggets Poll May 2010

The results of the KDD Nugget Survey were based on about 900 respondents to the question "Which data mining/analytic tools you used in the past 12 months for a real project?"

1. Rapid Miner
2. R
3. KNIME
4. "Own Code"
5. Weka or Pentaho

Note: I've omitted Microsoft Excel from 3rd place in the list as it's not really "data mining" software

Rexler Analyics Survey 2010

This survey asked data miners about the software the use as a primary tool, frequently or occasionally. You can request full results from Rexler's website or read an article on the survey results in Analytics Magazine.

The top 5 most used tools were:

1. R
2. SAS
3. IBM SPSS Statistics
4. IBM SPSS Modeller
5. Weka

The top 5 primary tools were:

1. Statistica
2. IBM SPSS Modeller
3. SAS
4. R
5. IBM SPSS Statistics

Rexer Analytics Survey (Early 2007)

This survey asked about the tools which were used frequently and occasionally. Clearly more popular than the rest were the top 3 most frequently used:

1. SPSS or SPSS Clementine
2. "Own Code"
3. SAS or SAS Enterprise Miner

Following on from these were

• R
• Weka
• C4.5 / C5.0 / See5

Rexer's analysis is quite in depth, and you can obtain the 7 page summary report %EXT% by contacting Rexer.

Rexer Analytics 2008 Survey

Rexer's 2008 survey is underway. Please enter the following access code TDM08 when you take part in the survey %EXT%. This code helps Rexer analyse where people heard of the survey.

KDD Nuggets Survey (May 2007)

Top ten most used packages:

1. SPSS/ SPSS Clementine
2. Salford Systems CART/MARS/TreeNet/RF
3. Yale (now Rapid Miner)
4. SAS / SAS Enterprise Miner
5. Angoss Knowledge Studio / Knowledge Seeker
6. KXEN
7. Weka
8. R
9. Microsoft SQL Server
10. MATLAB

Note: I've omitted Microsoft Excel from the list as it's not really "data mining" software, and I've merged the tools offered by a single vendor (SPSS and SAS)

You can see the full survey results %EXT% for more details