42 Technologies vs. QlikView vs. Spotfire

Sales data validations have helped manage our justifications in the past, especially with regard to new product development and new business introduction. It has also been helpful in identifying trends with business impact and direction specific to quarter and monthly sales from ERP data as well as decisions to purchase equipment of staffing based on run rates and product demand.

One thing that can get out of hand is data output - if you aren't careful in your query, you may be overloaded with data dumps and drown in the amount of info you have to filter through. This is a user caution, not a comment on the software itself.

Incentivized

Spotfire was used to look at a large data set of an in process manufacturing step. The data visualization was set up to look at yield as a function of several inputs (chemical / equipment / operator). After only a short analysis it was immediately obvious that there was a 5% yield discrepancy based on the operator using the equipment. The operators were retrained and the yield gap was eliminated.

Incentivized

• QlikView has a simple, relational data model that's REALLY fast. Filtering and changing data is dead simple results are almost immediately available.
• The free version of Qlikview is almost completely featured, so you roll a pro-level product out to an entire department for really cheap.
• QlikView is really flexible--if you can imagine it, you can build it.

Incentivized

• It has the best coding integration (python, R) of any BI product
• The ability to work with very large datasets (10 mil+) is better than competitors
• Export options are more complete and have better functionality
• The data canvas is the best tool to join and transform data vs. competitors

Incentivized

• We found that QlikView can be a bit slow in supporting some forms of encryption. It is web-based and we needed to upgrade all of our server to not support the older SSL and TLS 1 protocols, only support TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. However, QlikView could not run with TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. We had to wait over six months to get a version that would handle the newer TLS versions.
• There are so many options with QlikView that you can get lost when developing a visualization. There are still items I have not yet figured out, such as labeling a graph with the name of a selected detail item.
• QlikView works by pulling the data it is going to use for visualization into its database. I am a security reviewer and I need to make certain that PII and PHI is not pulled by QlikView for a visualization, otherwise this could become a reportable indecent.

Incentivized

• They should have a lower price point for users to access the analyst version who don't require advanced capabilities. For example, a lower price if users just need to do some basic slicing and dicing with their data and not have to the data science functionality (ie. K-means clustering, regression modeling, classification modeling, etc.).
• Currently, you can't change the font type/color on the axis, which I'm sure will eventually be available in the future as they have a Spotfire Ideas portal that they're fairly responsive to and act on. I guess at the end of the day, it's about the data and what insights you get from it.

Incentivized

Ease of use, ability to load from pretty much any data source. today I created an application that loaded time sheets from excel that are not in a table format. With Qlik's "enable transformation steps" I was able to automate loads of multiple spreadsheets and multiple tabs easily. Could not do that with any other tool.

Incentivized

It's a very powerful tool that allows for a myriad of customizations within the analysis files themselves, particularly with the custom expression functionality. There have been some great strides with the quality of the visualization options (which were not great to begin with) and I hope to see more improvements made as the product gets updated.

Incentivized

I do think there is a steep learning curve to the program and that it requires a high level of experience or a data scientist background to fully take advantage and implement dashboards, and users will require ongoing training to maximize ROI, but it is absolutely worth it considering the impact it can make on an organization.

Incentivized

Basic tasks like generating meaningful information from large sets of raw data are very easy. The next step of linking to multiple live data sources and linking those tables and performing on the fly analysis of the imported data is understandably more difficult.

Incentivized

QlikView server is very stable, with minimal errors and rare outages.

Incentivized

Even though, it's a rather stable and predictable tool that's also fast, it does have some bugs and inconsistencies that shut down the system. Depending on the details, it could happen as often as 2-3 times a week, especially during the development period.

The scripting option gives me options to connect to different databases with ease

Incentivized

Generally, the Spotfire client runs with very good performance. There are factors that could affect performance, but normally has to do with loading large analysis files from the library if the database is located some distance away and your global network is not optimal. Once you have your data table(s) loaded in the client application, usually the application is quite good performance-wise.

The documentation presented by QlikView is very clear and exact. This makes the process of implementation more easy. If any questions arise while creating the reports it is very easy to access the QlikView documents through the internet. QlikView also has a Qlik Community, full of different questions and answers. This helps a lot to resolve issues even without contacting the support team.

Incentivized

Support has been helpful with issues. Support seems to know their product and its capabilities. It would also seem that they have a good sense of the context of the problem; where we are going with this issue and what we want the end outcome to be.

Incentivized

My team attended, but I cannot myself rate, but I think it was good as they've successfully launched a training program at our company themselves for users. It was 3-4 day training.

The instructor was very in depth and provided relevant training to business users on how to create visualizations. They showed us how to alter settings and filter views, and provided resources for future questions. However, the instructor failed to cover data sources, connecting to data, etc. While it was helpful to see how users can use the data to create reports, they failed to properly instruct us on how to get the dataset in to begin with. We are still trying to figure out connections to certain databases (we have multiple different types).

Incentivized

Training was as expected. The demo environments tend to be more fully featured that our own environment, but the training was clear and well delivered.

The online training is good, provides a good base of knowledge. The video demonstrations were well-done and easy to follow along. Provided exercises are good as well, but I think there could be more challenging exercises. The training has also gone up in price significantly in the last 3 years (in USD, which hurts us even more in Canada), and I'm not sure it is worth the money it now costs (it is worth how much it cost 3 years ago, but not double that.)

Incentivized

It has taken some time to get used to Qlikview and the backend team behind it. From understanding the new regulations on using less images and also pushing for more tools (such as full compatibility on desktop, laptop, ipad, phone). We were given training on this and have helpful tips to find analytics behind Qlikview but it is very much also a learn as you implement system.

Incentivized

The original architecture I created for our implementation had only a particular set of internal business units in mind. Over the years, Spotfire gained in popularity in our company and was being utilized across many more business units. Soon, its usage went beyond what the original architectural implementation could provide. We've since learned about how the product is used by the different teams and are currently in the middle of rolling out a new architecture. I suggest:

• Have clearly defined service level agreements with all the teams that will use Spotfire. Your business intelligence group might only need availability during normal working hours, but your production support group might need 24/7 availability. If these groups share one Spotfire server, maintenance of that server might be a problem.
• Know the different types of data you will be working with. One group might be working with "public" data while another group might work with sensitive data. Design your Library accordingly and with the proper permissions.
• Know the roles of the users of Spotfire. Will there only be a small set of report writers or does everyone have write access to the Library?
• ALWAYS add a timestamp prompt to your reports. You don't want multiple users opening a report that will try and pull down millions of rows of data to their local workstations. Another option, of course, is to just hard code a time range in the backing database view (i.e. where activity_date >= sysdate - 90, etc.), but I'd rather educate/train the user base if possible.
• This probably goes without saying, but if possible, point to a separate reporting database or a logical standby database. You don't want the company pounding on your primaries and take down your order system.

With QlikView and Qlik Sense the users can answer their own questions more interactively. They also can build their own visualizations without waiting [for] someone from IT to create a new report. The users can navigate through the data finding out relevant information. Through QlikView color code, users can get aware of the relationship between the different data points.

Incentivized

Spotfire is appropriate for every organization of any size because it can be a recipient of data for better decision-making. Being a robust development platform for creating reports and dashboards, creating a new Spotfire dashboard is relatively simple. Developers can create highly customized dashboards using the tools it provides. I will recommend this software to others

Incentivized

In an enterprise architecture, if Spotfire Advanced Data services(Composite Studio),data marts can be managed optimally and scalability in a data perspective is great. As the web player/consumer is directly proportional to RAM, if the enterprise can handle RAM requirement accomodating fail over mechanisms appropraitely, it is definitely scalable,

Incentivized

• Speed to market is the really big thing. You can attach to multiple data sources quickly and build a consumable model for a dashboard. It doesn’t require IT talent to build. We have built more dashboards and added more users in the last year, then in our entire history. I was at a company of 30k+ employees before, and we didn't have near this level of BI adoption.
• As a result, we are seeing benefits across business function. For example, within sales, our pipeline has much more visibility. It allows for much faster decisions on things like quotas. One of our biggest power users is in sales ops. She feels her dashboards load 10x faster than our previous tool and she can make changes on the fly.

• Spotfire really helped a lot of people in terms of analysis. It eliminates data analysis in excel. Because even underlying data you can explore it in Spotfire.
• Spotfire helps data analysts to investigate data and also help analysts solve inconsistency of data.
• Spotfire helps data analysts in building great dashboard that provide insights to users to make decisions to drive revenue and manage the churn.

Incentivized