Spotfire vs. Tableau Server

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Spotfire
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Spotfire® is a data visualization platform that utilizes predictive analytics. In addition to data viz, it includes data wrangling capabilities, predictive analytics, location analytics, and real-time streaming analytics. Spotfire® is a business unit of Cloud Software Group, formerly known as TIBCO Spotfire.
$0.99
Per Hour (Starting)
Tableau Server
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Tableau Server allows Tableau Desktop users to publish dashboards to a central server to be shared across their organizations. The product is designed to facilitate collaboration across the organization. It can be deployed on a server in the data center, or it can be deployed on a public cloud.
$12
Per User Per Month
Pricing
SpotfireTableau Server
Editions & Modules
Spotfire for Amazon Web Services
$0.99
Per Hour (Starting)
Spotfire Cloud - Consumer
$250/yr
per seat
Spotfire Cloud - Business Author
$650/yr
per seat
Spotfire Cloud - Analyst
$1250/yr
per seat
Spotfire Platform
Please contact Spotfire sales
Spotfire Cloud Enterprise
Please contact Spotfire sales
Viewer
$12.00
Per User Per Month
Explorer
$35.00
Per User Per Month
Creator
$70.00
Per User Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SpotfireTableau Server
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFor Enterprise engagements, please contact TIBCO directly for a custom price quote.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SpotfireTableau Server
Considered Both Products
Spotfire
Chose Spotfire
They are similar but don't offer some of the specific client login portal capabilities. We needed a centralized platform that allows customization and sign-ins from multiple clients. Additionally, they did not quite have the diverse data source support capabilities that we get …
Chose Spotfire
Well, Spotfire was the only tool which could handle our data, we had over 100 Mio rows of data and with Spotfire you could navigate through the dashboard very fast. This was our killer feature. It also makes very nice and modern charts.
Chose Spotfire
Within our use cases Spotfire is preferred due to the ability to manage live data as well as big data in an appropriate time. It is also much better in statistics and advanced analytics.
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire is a hardcode data science tool which caters to true data statistical analysis very well. It suits science-based industries and offers powerful functionality. Tableau is the number one data visualization tool and Spotfire is not as robust in this area.
Chose Spotfire
less costly than Tableau and much more capabilities of analysis visualization.
Chose Spotfire
  • Evaluation was several years ago but we continually evaluate against cloud and on-prem solutions.
  • For data discovery, interactive visualizations, statistical charting, Lasso, heat maps, CPK control carts still all hold up as strong points.
  • Limitations in user self-scheduling are …
Chose Spotfire
Tableau rich in visuals and customization but easily breaks with large volume and complex drill downs. Spotfire being an enterprise level tool, handles it better. QlikView is great at handling large volumes of data but the visuals are not intuitive enough. Comparatively, …
Chose Spotfire

Spotfire is a leader among visually driven BI software tools. It is easy to learn, creating dashboards is intuitive, and has very powerful elements. It can do the job if you commit the time and resources upfront to make sure implementation and adoption is effective.

Chose Spotfire
The API, support for JavaScript, HTML, and control of Web Player. All of these are essential to provide visuals to clients. Other software requires special treatments that Spotfire can achieve right out of the box.
Chose Spotfire
We evaluated on Mobility, Dashboarding, Web Based User Interface and Analytical capability. At the forefront was the user experience which accounted for just over half of our evaluation criteria. No platform was a 10/10 in all four categories - SAS Visual Analytics excelled in …
Chose Spotfire
Tableau is pretty but very shallow. Alteryx is very nice, but doesn't have the proximity to the data through visual exploration. Alteryx is more like a drag'n'drop analogy to programming, where you are placing icons in a workflow instead of writing code lines in a program. So …
Tableau Server
Chose Tableau Server
Tableau is extremely self intuitive to use and has a large supporting community
Chose Tableau Server
QlikView, Tibco Spotfire, SAS, and SAP. At the time, all cost more than Tableau for our (small) needs, SAS and SAP were in some ways overqualified in terms of breadth, and none of them had the ease of use of Tableau.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
SpotfireTableau Server
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Spotfire
8.3
299 Ratings
1% above category average
Tableau Server
9.3
95 Ratings
13% above category average
Pixel Perfect reports8.030 Ratings9.129 Ratings
Customizable dashboards9.1294 Ratings9.494 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.9258 Ratings9.381 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Spotfire
8.2
311 Ratings
1% above category average
Tableau Server
8.9
95 Ratings
9% above category average
Drill-down analysis8.3289 Ratings8.795 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.8302 Ratings8.593 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages8.3224 Ratings8.959 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration8.5274 Ratings9.589 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Spotfire
8.3
283 Ratings
1% below category average
Tableau Server
7.9
91 Ratings
6% below category average
Publish to Web8.2228 Ratings9.685 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.6267 Ratings9.384 Ratings
Report Versioning8.018 Ratings8.270 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling8.4178 Ratings7.577 Ratings
Delivery to Remote Servers00 Ratings5.19 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Spotfire
8.2
310 Ratings
2% above category average
Tableau Server
8.5
90 Ratings
5% above category average
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.6306 Ratings8.886 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization8.4271 Ratings8.885 Ratings
Predictive Analytics8.1234 Ratings7.864 Ratings
Pattern Recognition and Data Mining7.68 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Spotfire
8.1
250 Ratings
6% below category average
Tableau Server
7.5
95 Ratings
14% below category average
Multi-User Support (named login)8.7241 Ratings7.593 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.5206 Ratings7.590 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)7.8228 Ratings7.592 Ratings
Report-Level Access Control7.48 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)00 Ratings7.562 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Spotfire
7.3
189 Ratings
9% below category average
Tableau Server
7.7
79 Ratings
3% below category average
Responsive Design for Web Access7.9177 Ratings7.377 Ratings
Mobile Application7.6126 Ratings7.261 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile7.5148 Ratings7.968 Ratings
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding
Comparison of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding features of Product A and Product B
Spotfire
8.3
89 Ratings
5% above category average
Tableau Server
7.2
46 Ratings
10% below category average
REST API8.371 Ratings9.040 Ratings
Javascript API8.370 Ratings9.137 Ratings
iFrames8.454 Ratings9.140 Ratings
Java API8.257 Ratings5.57 Ratings
Themeable User Interface (UI)8.269 Ratings6.19 Ratings
Customizable Platform (Open Source)8.560 Ratings4.67 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SpotfireTableau Server
Small Businesses
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
BrightGauge
BrightGauge
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Reveal
Reveal
Score 9.9 out of 10
Enterprises
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Jaspersoft Community Edition
Score 9.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SpotfireTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
8.6
(335 ratings)
7.2
(111 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.3
(29 ratings)
10.0
(20 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(27 ratings)
5.4
(17 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(14 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Performance
7.1
(14 ratings)
8.1
(8 ratings)
Support Rating
8.7
(27 ratings)
3.3
(18 ratings)
In-Person Training
7.3
(52 ratings)
8.0
(4 ratings)
Online Training
8.8
(55 ratings)
9.0
(9 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.0
(17 ratings)
9.1
(13 ratings)
Configurability
7.1
(3 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.0
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
5.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
SpotfireTableau Server
Likelihood to Recommend
Spotfire
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.
Read full review
Tableau
Tableau Server is well suited for a data warehouse build and handling big data. Tableau data aggregation, transformation, clustering capability is powerful and easy to implement. The choice of charts and visualisation tools is outstanding. Customisation and dynamic data visualisation capability is superb. The user interface takes some time getting used to.
Read full review
Pros
Spotfire
  • 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
Read full review
Tableau
  • It's good at doing what it is designed for: accessing visualizations without having to download and open a workbook in Tableau Desktop. The latter would be a very inefficient method for sharing our metrics, so I am glad that we have Tableau Server to serve this function.
  • Publishing to Tableau Server is quick and easy. Just a few clicks from Tableau Desktop and a few seconds of publishing through an average speed network, and the new visualizations are live!
  • Seeing details on who has viewed the visualization and when. This is something particularly useful to me for trying to drive adoption of some new pages, so I really appreciate the granularity provided in Tableau Server
Read full review
Cons
Spotfire
  • 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
Read full review
Tableau
  • Tableau Server has had some issue handling some of our larger data sets. Our extract refreshes fail intermittently with no obvious error that we can fix
  • Tableau Server has been hard to work with before they launched their new Rest API, which is also a little tricky to work with
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Spotfire
-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.
Read full review
Tableau
It simply is used all the time by more and more people. Migrating to something else would involve lots of work and lots of training. The renewal fee being fair, it simply isn't worth migrating to a different tool for now.
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Usability
Spotfire
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.
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Tableau
Tableau Server is unbeatable at creating easy to use, interactive dashboards for busy executives. The software also saves time for the busy analyst that is tired of always using Excel. Tableau Server is a head and shoulders improvement over Excel.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Spotfire
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.
Read full review
Tableau
Our instance of Tableau Server was hosted on premises (I believe all instances are) so if there were any outages it was normally due to scheduled maintenance on our end. If the Tableau server ever went down, a quick restart solved most issues
Read full review
Performance
Spotfire
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.
Read full review
Tableau
While there are definitely cases where a user can do things that will make a particular worksheet or dashboard run slowly, overall the performance is extremely fast. The user experience of exploratory analysis particularly shines, there's nothing out there with the polish of Tableau.
Read full review
Support Rating
Spotfire
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.
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Tableau
We have consistently had highly satisfactory results every time we've reached out for help. Our contractor, used for Tableau server maintenance and dashboard development is very technically skilled. When he hits a roadblock on how to do something with Tableau, the support staff have provided timely and useful guidance. He frequently compares it to Cognos and says that while Cognos has capabilities Tableau doesn't, the bottom line value for us is a no-brainer
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In-Person Training
Spotfire
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).
Read full review
Tableau
In our case, they hired a private third party consultant to train our dept. It was extremely boring and felt like it dragged on. Everything I learned was self taught so I was not really paying attention. But I do think that you can easily spend a week on the tool and go over every nook and cranny. We only had the consultant in for a day or two.
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Online Training
Spotfire
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.)
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Tableau
The Tableau website is full of videos that you can follow at your own pace. As a very small company with a Tableau install, access to these free resources was incredibly useful to allowing me to implement Tableau to its potential in a reasonable and proportionate manner.
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Implementation Rating
Spotfire
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.
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Tableau
Implementation was over the phone with the vendor, and did not go particularly well. Again, think this was our fault as our integration and IT oversight was poor, and we made errors. Would they have happened had a vendor been onsite? Not sure, probably not, but we probably wouldn't have paid for that either
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Alternatives Considered
Spotfire
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.
Read full review
Tableau
Today, if my shop is largely Microsoft-centric, I would be hard pressed to choose a product other than Power BI. Tableau was the visualization leader for years, but Microsoft has caught up with them in many areas, and surpassed them in some. Its ability to source, transform, and model data is superior to Tableau. Tableau still has the lead in some visualizations, but Power BI's rise is evidenced by its ever-increasing position in the leadership section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Read full review
Scalability
Spotfire
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,
Read full review
Tableau
No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
Spotfire
  • 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
Read full review
Tableau
  • Tableau does take dedicated FTE to create and analyze the data. It's too complex (and powerful) a product not to have someone dedicated to developing with it.
  • There are some significant setup for the server product.
  • Once sever setup is complete, it's largely "fire and forget" until an update is necessary. The server update process is cumbersome.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Spotfire Screenshots

Screenshot of Smart Visual AnalyticsScreenshot of Geospatial AnalyticsScreenshot of Intelligent Data WranglingScreenshot of Point-and-click Data ScienceScreenshot of Real-time Streaming Analytics

Tableau Server Screenshots

Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Server interface and administration view 2.Screenshot of Tableau Server permissions view.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 1.Screenshot of Tableau Services Manager (TSM) view 2.