What Most Don't Know About Spotfire
Updated June 18, 2015

What Most Don't Know About Spotfire

Colin McClelland | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review

Software Version

7.0

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire

Spotfire is used to create internal reports for sales and marketing efforts. It is also presented as a potential BI solution for clients.

Pros

  • Not only does Spotfire provide recommended visualizations based upon the data you want to look at, it will then build those visualizations for you, taking half the clicks as other BI tools.
  • Spotifire allows you to create detailed visualizations from multiple data sources and tables on the same page. You cannot do this with Tableau.
  • Spotfire automatically creates and populates a filter panel based on the columns of the tables you import. With Tableau you have to build each filter panel from scratch.

Cons

  • Spotire could advertise it's user community more so that more customers are aware of it.
Spotfire isn't based on Cores, Nodes, or RAM, therefore you only pay for what you need, and can easily add additional users or functionality at any point in the future without affecting performance. This is a big differentiator. With competitors like Tableau, you have to guesstimate future load and demand and then pay for it before you need it.

Spotfire automatically creates and populates a filter panel based upon the columns in the loaded data tables; Tableau doesn't. Spotfire allows you to create detailed visualizations from multiple data sets to view and interact with on the same page; Tableau doesn't. Spotfire not only recommends visualizations based on the data you want to look at, it builds those visualizations for you. The competition doesn't do this. And of course, the powerful predictive analytics engine can't be beat.
With the new subscription based pricing, Spotfire is extremely competitive with other BI tools. With the predictive analytics component included, it's like getting a free add on!
If you only want to pay for what you currently need, are not sure how much you'll need to scale in the future (but don't want any restrictions) or if you're looking for a powerful predictive analytics engine embedded into a BI tool, than Spotfire is definitely a tool to consider. Since Spotfire's memory engine is not dependent upon Cores or Nodes (unlike Tableau), you don't have to estimate how much processing power you need or will need. You only buy what you need, and scaling as far and as wide as your organization demands is as easy as purchasing additional licenses.

Using TIBCO Spotfire

Drag and drop almost everything. The recommendations feature is awesome and actually BUILDS the visualizations for you, unlike some of the competitors.
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • Multiple visualizations on the same page
  • Drill down and predictive analytic capabilities
  • filtering
  • data mash up and manipulation

Comments

  • Arnaud Varin | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Thank you for your review! About user community, recently we successfully launched Spotfire Community (community.spotfire.com). This is THE place to go to ask questions to the users community, learn through wikis, extend Spotfire with Exchange content, suggest Ideas to enhance our product(s). Thanks again, Arnaud

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