4 SPSS Statistics Licensing Options

You have a surprising variety of options in acquiring your own copy of SPSS Statistics, with a focus on the different ways of licensing SPSS. However, if you either need to secure a copy or if simply want to better understand what’s out there, this article will help you find the best version of SPSS for you. Licensing is not the only choice, but it is the first big choice you have to make.

Four licensing options are available:

• Free trial
• Campus editions
• Subscription plan
• Commercial editions

Let’s get the easiest choice out of the way first. If you want a way to practice the exercises in this book and you haven’t had a trial version of SPSS within the last year, you’ll want to start with the free trial. The rules of the trial differ from year to year, but typically the length of the trial is either 14 days or 30 days. The only other choice you’ll have to make is the operating system: Windows or Mac.

There is also a server version of SPSS which gives you a third operating system option: Linux. Also, there are both 32-bit and 64 bit-versions. IBM provides good documentation for system compatibility issues on their website.

The free trial is always the subscription version of SPSS and always has all the add-on modules. One more warning about the free trial: The subscription version, while fully downloaded to your machine, needs to maintain access to the Internet. So, SPSS may give you trouble if you are consistently offline.

Because the free trial includes access to all add-on modules, make sure to take them out for a spin. At some point, the decision to include a module might add hundreds of dollars to your investment, so familiarize yourself with the modules while you can.

In the rest of the article, we describe the other three licensing options and the additional choices you have to make. Here is a quick summary of how to choose among them after you’ve exhausted your access to a free trial:

• Campus editions with their academic pricing are always the most cost-effective option, but you must be eligible to purchase it.
• The subscription plans allow you to change your mind from month to month, which is handy if your needs might change.
• Consider commercial plans with their term or perpetual license if you're prepared to commit to SPSS for multiple years, without version updates.

These options are also summarized in the following figure.

Campus Editions

IBM’s campus editions are an order of magnitude cheaper than any other option. If you're eligible for this option, you should absolutely pursue it. You must have an academic affiliation as an instructor or a student. Some academic researchers may also quality.

IBM does not sell this option directly. Often referred to as a GradPack or a Faculty Pack, you must purchase it through a third-party vendor. The vendors aren’t difficult to find on the Internet. In addition, IBM lists some partner companies.

Naturally, you’ll want to first double-check to see whether you have free university access as a student or faculty member through a campus-wide license. If you don’t have access, you'll have to decide whether to buy the base, standard, or premium edition. We list the add-on modules in each edition in the following table. You may be able to find terms that extend longer than 12 months in some cases.

Our advice is to buy the feature-rich premium edition and for the longest possible term. The equivalent of the premium campus edition would cost thousands of dollars per year with any other licensing arrangement. This your chance to try the add-on modules at a much-reduced cost to determine which ones you find useful. In particular, we think that the Custom Tables module is useful to everyone who uses SPSS. The academic pricing option is so much lower that it may even be cost-effective to take a university course to both sharpen your skills and get access to academic pricing.

If you see a listing for the AMOS campus edition, realize that IBM SPSS AMOS is not an add-on module. It's standalone software for performing Structural Equation Modeling.

Subscription Plans

When purchasing a monthly subscription, you don’t have to worry about the version number. For example, while writing this book, we used an offline desktop term license with version number 27, but the subscription has no such version number. Because you're paying each month, you simply download updates on an ongoing basis. Clearly a major advantage of a subscription is that the software is always up to date.

Although the subscription option requires that you download the software to your machine, the licensing requires access to the Internet. If you use this version of SPSS offline, it may stop working because it has to periodically check the license.

Periodically visit the Help menu and click Check for Updates. You’ve paid for the updates, so be sure to download them.

With a subscription plan, IBM makes it fairly easy to add and drop modules. For example, you could purchase an add-on module for a special project for as short a time as one month and then drop the module the next month.

IBM sometimes offers an annual payment of your monthly subscription in exchange for a discount. But even if you pay annually, it's still the subscription version — not the perpetual or term versions.

The subscription also has some bundled options with increasing access to add-on modules. Watch out, however. Unlike the trial license or the academic pricing, the add-on modules can double or triple your monthly investment. If you haven’t familiarized yourself with the modules it will be tough to decide what you need from the names alone. You could also consider getting the full version for one month as long as you can commit to spending some time during that month trying them.

Be careful. IBM's has given the upgraded subscription options nicknames such as Custom tables and Adv. Stats on their website, but don’t take these nicknames literally because they don't refer to every add-on module included in the option. Refer to the following table for a listing of the add-on modules included in each option.

Commercial Editions

Commercial editions offer two license options that are more traditional: a term license, where you purchase SPSS for a year, and a perpetual license, where you are an owner, not a renter, of SPSS, which has both advantages and disadvantages. For these styles of license, you need to contact IBM and speak to a representative, who will be able to give you a license code. Although you need to be online to process the license code, you don't need to be online when you're using SPSS.

Approximately once each year, SPSS offers a new updated version and assigns a version number. During the writing of this book, the authors used version 27 (which is just a bit lower than the number of years since SPSS has been available on personal computers). A number of members of the SPSS community opt to skip a version from time to time, or lag behind the latest version. If you do so strategically, it might represent a cost savings. This strategy requires that you make a substantial upfront investment and go awhile without an update. If the notion of missing out on updates and new features is unappealing, a monthly subscription might be the best option for you.

You also have to decide which add-on modules you need. The add-on modules substantially increase the cost of your term or perpetual license, much like the subscription option. A sales representative will ask you which modules you need. this table shows the add-on modules associated with the four editions of the perpetual and term licenses.

Note when comparing these two tables that the bundles in the subscription plans are different than those in the commercial editions.