Logi Info vs. Spotfire

Logi Composer is the best of the product range that Logi Analytics offers; Logi Info is, in my mind, a terrible experience and should be discontinued. Logi Info is not a BI tool and many CEOs and product managers believe it is. Instead, it is a tool for web developers to create IIS apps with a library of BI-type components, and with everything else having to be hand-coded in JavaScript and CSS. Maybe this was cool back in the early 2000s when Logi Info came about, but today I'd recommend using Visual Studio, C#, .NET, and finding a NuGet package for your visualisations if you wanted to go the route of making your own web app. This said, where it is suited is if you have a burning desire to make a stand-alone IIS-based web application and you don't need or want to leverage any existing skills in .NET or PHP or other frameworks/languages. Instead, you want to use the Logi Info XML-based BI widgets and you're happy to make something quick without needing it to look really awesome.

Incentivized

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

• Clear/Concise view of data. Easily intuitive, amazing drill down capability, fully user configurable panels and dashboards.
• Self-Service is such a powerful tool for facilities that want to create/design their own reports/dashboards, it's instantly recognized as being very powerful and agile.
• Logi software makes the designer realize that they should think outside the box and not stick with "it's how we have always done it limitation". It allows you to be very creative.

• 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

• It is not always intuitive to incorporate JavaScript into Logi Info. The tools are all available, but the process requires multiple resource in translating between Logi and JavaScript.
• The toolbox is too vast for Logi to provide a 'quick implementation' or 'quick start guide'. There are so many tools that Logi expects the client to determine which fit their use case. There are purchasable 'Professional Services' options for implementation, but without these, the toolset is almost too big.

• 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

Logi Info is a very outdated, archaic product that tries to build .NET / Java web apps using an obscure XML-based markup language to implement BI widgets, with a lot of extra CSS/JavaScript needed on your own to make it do the best things. There are many other better tools. It is not a BI tool, and as a web development tool it's not great either. I'd recommend getting some good third-party .NET BI library if you want your web devs to make the reports, otherwise use a proper BI tool like Power BI or Tableau, or even Logi Composer (formerly ZoomData before Logi acquired it.)

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.

I am giving 9 rating because the Logi Info still needs to improve on the tutorials part and make it easy for the beginners. Otherwise, it's a very good analytics tool which offers more than 20 types of visualization. It's predictive analysis feature and easy to embed with technologies make it stand out in the market.

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

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.

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 support process is bit slow and has a good scope improvement but overall it's good as team is very supportive. They generally take 1-2 days time to respond emails sent to them but some times a delay is also expected. Overall, I did not face any major issues using the service.

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

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

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.

Logi gave us the flexibility we needed to meet the configurable nature of our product and for the need to create custom reports. Other products did not allow flexbility to generate reports via script as was one of our primary requirements.

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.

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

• By embedding Logi in our solution and using the Logi Self-Service Module we can provide this flexibility to our users without requiring custom development work for each new request.
• We succeeded in developing embedded self-service analytics at scale with a combination of Logi analytics as front-end and a Cassandra data lake with Spark aggregation algorithms as back-end.
• We analyze the insurance industry and need to replicate different data formats across hundreds of databases to support multi-tenant (customer) BI reports and "ad hoc" data review on millions or hundreds of millions of records per customer.

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