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Spotfire
Updated July 19, 2022

Spotfire

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Spotfire Web Player
  • Spotfire Analyst
  • Spotfire Server

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire

Spotfire is being used as an Enterprise level Business Intelligence Platform.Our data is being fed from various different ERP's and a ETL team is transforming the data in a way it can be consumed by spotfire. During the design phase the spotfire and ETL teams come together and create a model where certain things will be handled in spotfire and most of them in the warehouse. Spotfire is a very robust tool, pulling lots of data with less columns ,makes no harm and gives ideal results.
  • Spotfire has a great Geo Analytics platform where Geo-coding is automatically performed from version 6.0 and complex geoanalytics problems can be solved in combination with the Tibco Enterprise Runtime for R (TERR) engine, if the company has R language expertise
  • Spotfire has some cool inbuilt functions available through which we do not have to do manual calculations like Total,%Cumulative Sum,YOY,MOM QOQ kind of stuff, and lots other functions which make life simpler
  • Iron python scripting is an advantage but, of course, tricky initially if you do not have experience, but it can simplify users' lives if used properly
  • Scheduled updates and caching. If we are trying to get the dashboards up in a flash , this feature is useful
  • One more important thing in the latest version, is the business author piece on the web player where business users can develop their own stuff on Web, this is a good start and hope to see this developed further
  • Spotfire is coming up with new Mobile Metrics platform, i.e. it is responsive on mobile devices
  • Also there is a new KPI chart which can be very useful for Executive reporting.
  • Customizability on the Analyst end: Spotfire is a good tool, but there are a few points where it should improve. I cannot hide an object like a tab or visualization r
  • Data Load speed at the analyst level, I somehow feel when i try to load data in the analyst level it loads slow and while using at webplayer because of the schedule updates it runs fast. I know there is the caching concept, but it is unlike QlikView whichgives a great performance with the desktop version as well. I would expect the same to happen here
I have used Tableau & Qlikview. I felt QlikView is very IT & Developer friendly with great customizable options and a great scope of scalability. Tableau with the limited use i did, I felt was very easy to use for simpler operations but for a larger complex operations I felt Spotfire & QlikView were more appropriate. But honestly, at the ease of use level, I felt Tableau was quite a bit more user friendly than Spotfire & QlikView.
Last couple of years, the amount of newer features what spotfire is bring is good, bt that has not added any value to our day to day work..so 70% impacted in a positive direction, do giving a 7 rating.
We have more than 800 users and user types mainly include Analysts who develop the dashboards, CIO Office, Metric Managers, and field executives.
Spotfire has a range of connectivity to different data sources
Spotfire does have collaboration, but our users could not adapt to it very easily. probably its a training gap or the tools features are not intuitive. We do not use much of the collaboration facilities
I have used all the charts in Spotfire, the ease of use of charts is great and especially their geo-spatial visualizations are very good.I like the tree map & heat map too, which solve many problems.

  • Positive: Business uses these tools for day to day operations, saving time
  • Negative: Usability can be little more intuitive
  • No Training
The only training was from the developers, there was no official training for users...The impact was huge..we spent a lot of time explaining users each area of the tool, this was very cumbersome.
yes it was easy to learn, but the advantage of working with a different BI tool, you can get hold of this too fast, over a period of time there were hurdles but we used to have intermediate sessions from the company (which stopped now) on the new features and releases, there is also a lot of webinar series organized by the company, joining them once a month solves many technical problems(but nothing specific for our organization). Ofcourse there is the Spotfire forum, where most of your encountered problems are already discussed. If its a new problem we need to get creative and read the documentation which is good.
We definitely evaluated few products , but the existing range of products what we had in our organization met our business needs and real reason to adopt another Spotfire product did not arise in our case.

Do you think Spotfire delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Spotfire's feature set?

Yes

Did Spotfire live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Spotfire go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Spotfire again?

Yes

Suitable Key questions to buy/use Spotfire:
Do you have an enterprise data warehouse ready and are looking for a BI tool which can get you results fast with less development?
Do you have a group of analyst who are good at Excel type reporting and can learn a new tool and do better reporting?
Do you have a group of data analysts who want to study data to identify patterns in it? Are you looking for a tool/technology company which takes customer feedback and incorporates them into the tool quickly? Are you looking for a tool whose tech forum is increasing? Apart from the above questions, if your team has basic programming skills , they can utilize the power of Java Script/Iron Python and R language to make wonders in spotfire. Ideally any scenario is possible in Spotfire, but do not consider this as data Transformation tool, basic transformations are possible ,but typically its a reporting tool which can tell the story of your data effectively. My purpose to use the software is short development cycles sometimes overnight if data is there.

Spotfire Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.0
Pixel Perfect reports
8
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
8
8.8
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
8
7.0
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
6
Report Versioning
Not Rated
Report Delivery Scheduling
7
9.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
9
8.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
9
Role-Based Security Model
9
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
8
8.3
Responsive Design for Web Access
9
Mobile Application
8
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
8
6.3
REST API
6
Javascript API
6
iFrames
7
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

Evaluating TIBCO Spotfire and Competitors

  • Prior Experience with the Product
With the same data set, would like to build dashboards on multiple tools and see the usability and customer xperieince.

Using TIBCO Spotfire

2000 - All
20 - Spotfire,Datawarehousing,Windows Administration
  • Track weekly progress
  • Actionable insights from the data
  • Predict the future outcomes
Spotfires Map Chart has inbuilt geo coding.As long as you Country,state & city within your data, integration map chart to the fines details is pretty easy.
It offers different types of Charts, and also offers different layers to be overlaid on the map.We can overlay a Feature or marker layer.
For example
1.you want to show how the sales are in the US by state, you can overlay the Feature layer on the base Map.
2.Now you want to see all the costcenter offices in each state by lat long positions, you can see them in the Marker Layer, as each markers.
There is a lot of scope of taking these maps to the next level by using R functions too...

TIBCO Spotfire Reliability

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,
Spotfire is pretty stable in our environment.Couple of issues we see is getting our scheduled cached reports loosing its cache at times, but it is considerably stable and all presentations went good :)
No, we have not encountered any problems here, spotfire loads pretty quickly after using Iron Python or Javascript