Reveal vs. Spotfire

As a company responsible for people money we have to deal with following challenges every day: Clients who want to track the status of their transfers. Licensing agencies who need to ensure professional standards are met. Internal team managers who need to track client and staff progress to ensure company progression and success. Reveal does a good job as self-service tool enabling the accountable parties to have full access to important insights 24/7. The prebuilt dashboard themes save time and investment as we don’t need to hire a dedicated data analyst. The interactive dashboards give full transparency. The ability to easily create, analyze and report keeps clients, partners and stuff on the same page.

A high level of data integration is available here it supports various data sources and so on. Collaborating features allow users to give access to the dashboard and merge data analytics with other team members. It can meet the demands of both small and large size business enterprises. A customized dashboard and reports are provided to meet the specific needs and get support of extensibility through APIs and customized scripts.

Incentivized

• Ease of Use - Reveal is super intuitive when it comes to creating dashboards. You don't need to be a data expert, which is key for me.
• Sharing - The ability to share across our teams, locations, and with clients is great. We create teams for our different clients and share dashboards there that also are connected to our company dashboards.
• Support and Roadmap - Reveal support has been great. They care about the needs of their customers. They have released 3 updates in the last few months, and they are adding a lot of value.

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

• There are a limited number of templates, but this is something they say they are working on.
• Cost is reasonable for individual personal use, but prohibitive to small companies looking to embed their services in their own App.
• Responses to emails for support can be delayed, but what else is new?

Incentivized

• The donut chart is I guess a powerful illustrations but I hope it should be done quite simple in Spotfire. But in Spotfire there are lots of steps involve just to build a simple donut chart.
• Table calculation (like Row or Column Differences) should be made simple or there should be drag and drop function for Table Calculation. No need for scripting.
• Information Link should be changed. If new columns are added to the table just refreshing the data should be able to capture the new column. No need extra step to add column

Incentivized

As a developer of the project, I feel comfortable with this tool for its peculiarities: acceptable costs, simple configuration, creation and maintenance of simple reports, fairly complete account management, also, not least, I appreciate the work done by their technical support always timely intervention and, above all, resolutive.
Furthermore, as far as end users are concerned, I found a good appreciation of the proposed reports

Incentivized

-Easy to distribute information throughout the enterprise using the webplayer. -Ad hoc analysis is possible throughout the enterprise using business author in the webplayer or the thick client. -Low level of support needed by IT team. Access interfaces with LDAP and numerous other authentication methods. -Possible to continually extend the platform with JavaScript, R scripts, HTML, and custom extensions. -Ability to standardize data logic through pre-built queries in the Information Designer. Everyone in the enterprise is using the same logic -Tagging and bookmarking data allows for quick sharing of insights. -Integration with numerous data sources... flat files, data bases, big data, images, etc. -Much improved mapping capability. Also includes the ability to apply data points over any image.

Reveal has a great usability for any level of computer user. The only major thing I see that is not exactly user friendly, is the color scheme issue I stated earlier in my review. Although, I am coming from a graphic design background, I need a platform that every team member in our office can use.

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

This assessment is due to the fact that I have not yet found Reveal not available for use. Apart from some problems of development crash, then fixed by the product assistance service, I have not found any particular problems or loss of time caused by the instrument.

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 pages load rather quickly even in the presence of several elevations in the same dashboard that insist on different data sources and with visualizations that insist on different types of graph. I can only be satisfied with these performances.

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.

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

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

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

None in particular, however, would be welcome if improvements were made in the personalization of the prospects and in the connection between them (perhaps being able to transfer the selections present in one prospect to another recalled by the first).

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.

While Reveal is relatively pricey, it offers some of the best features I would say it is more resourceful than most competitors. Being resourceful means it is more capable and delivers better reports - comprehensive reports.

Incentivized

Spotfire is significantly ahead of both products from an ETL and data ingestion capability. Spotfire also has substantially better visualizations than Power BI, and although the native visualizations aren't as flexible in Tableau, Spotfire enables users to create completely custom javascript visaualizations, which neither Tableau or Power BI has. Tableau and Power BI are likely only superior to Spotfire with respect to embedded analysis on a website.

This evaluation is the result of the fact that I have not had the opportunity to deepen the Reveal interface with other tools and / or other software, so the evaluation that I am giving follows what I have been able to read regarding the characteristics of the product online.

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

• We have the best platform for visualizing data for better understanding
• The drag and drop features saves time
• With data from multiple sources, we get the right intelligence to drive our business forward.
• While it is expensive, the benefits outweighs the high cost

Incentivized

• It is costly, so not suitable for small scale implementations.
• Dashboards are as good as the developer, so need experience to get most out of it
• You need to be on Spotfire 11 at least to implement out of the box visualizations
• Integration with Python and R is a game changer, it comes very handy to onboard data scientists without much hassle
• performance is exceptionally well.
• Secure

Incentivized