Found an interesting comparison between the features of SPSS and STATA (two statistical analysis packages), as provided by several statisticians on Windows Live Spaces:

SPSS Advantages:

• Slightly more user friendly in making complex tables & graphs
• Nice routines for testing interactions in logistic regression models
• Friendly ANOVA commands
• Generally easier to use
• Sophisticated survival analysis

STATA Advantages:

• Much easier to run a probit
• Much better documentation
• Can do a lot more procedures than SPSS
• Great company support, friendly user base
• Multiple pooled cross sectional time series routines
• Count procedures (poisson, negative binomial and zero routines)
• Maximum likelihood estimators (Tobit, multinomial logit, ordinal logit, ordinal probit)
• Huber-White correction for heteroskedascity
• More comprehensive ANOVA routines
• Cox regression
• Duration analysis procedures
• Capability to estimate models for complex surveys
• Better weighting capability (pweights vs. aweights and iweights)
• Ability to take clustering into account
• Lots of user written solutions
• Much better handling of longitudinal panel data
• Event history analysis capabilities
• Panel data analysis capabilities
• Faster development than SPSS
• Better leasing arrangement

What this all means to market researchers I cannot say — I generally in my day to day life do not use many of the statistical procedures they describe and I’ve never tried STATA.

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