Steel plate shear walls (SPSW) are considered one of the most 
common and acceptable lateral resisting structural systems for 
steel structures due to their excellent seismic performance. This 
system offers several advantages over the other usual lateral load 
resisting systems such as the conventional braces. Steel saving, 
installation easiness, reduced foundation cost, and providing 
major stiffness against building drift are some apparent 
advantages of the steel plate shear walls. This paper describes 
and investigates the effect of using steel plate shear walls on the 
behavior of steel frames. Therefore, finite element (FE) analysis 
was adopted using ABAQUS software to simulate two steel 
frames equipped with a steel plate shear wall and conventional 
brace under cyclic loads. Eigenvalue buckling analysis was 
conducted as a preliminary analysis and the results were
introduced to define the initial imperfection for a realistic 
simulation. The important seismic parameters including the 
lateral stiffness, the ultimate shear capacity, energy dissipation, 
and ductility are investigated using static nonlinear analysis after 
confirming a good agreement with the results of nonlinear 
dynamic analysis of the laboratory sample. The numerical results 
indicated that using SPSW as lateral-load resisting gives higher 
stiffness, ultimate strength, higher ductility and energy 
absorption than the conventional brace frame.