I'd take a software-as-a-service solution that I can replicate the data from in an open standard format like JSON or XML over a closed-source application with an impenetrable binary file format any day.
That seems like a false dichotomy. There are SaaS applications with no data export option, and there are closed-source locally installed applications that use textual data formats (e.g. XML), if only as a matter of convenience for their developers.
I mean this by way of comparison to applications that were distributed on floppy such as WordPerfect, dBase, FoxPro and so on, where the data format was proprietary.
It's only relatively recently that we've seen open-source and open-data applications. These are arguably better but relatively rare.
