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Spotfire is Great For Data Visuals!
Updated November 02, 2017

Spotfire is Great For Data Visuals!

Brett Domeny, MBA | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Desktop

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

We use Spotfire for holistic business analysis. While we lack a centralized system database, Spotfire allows us to connect the right data points for comprehension in ways we would not have otherwise.
  • It helps us visualize and connect data into meaningful relationships quickly.
  • Has the abilities to implement quite complex statistical models or down to just simple charts to help review connected or manually loaded data.
  • Easy to use and learn. Great help topics and training tools available from Spotfire.
  • Could help to have better mobile support for on the go analysis of visualizations.
  • Cloud architect support would be helpful to be able to manipulate and create new visuals when away from my desktop.
  • Would be helpful at times to be able to connect more one-on-one with an individual vs. videos and help documentation.
Tableau stacked up well against Spotfire but Spotfire allowed for the deeper dive and more in-depth analytic models. Tableau might be a little easier to unbox and start to use but Spotfire allows you to go deeper and integrate more data models and complexity. The upside of Spotfire was higher than that of Tableau.
*Helps take many different databases and connect them into a seamless visual display.
*Allows non-users of data (executives etc.) to be able to quickly grab what's important to them without having to spend a lot of time interpreting.
*Creates dynamic visualizations to allow for on-going update of data without having to "re-run" reports

Spotfire Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.5
Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
7
9.5
Drill-down analysis
10
Formatting capabilities
10
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
8
8.5
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
7
9.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
10
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
8
10.0
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
10
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Not Rated
REST API
Not Rated
Javascript API
Not Rated
iFrames
Not Rated
Java API
Not Rated
Themeable User Interface (UI)
Not Rated
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
Not Rated

Spotfire Training

  • Online training
  • Self-taught
Great online training. Excellent video content and files to walk through the training together. The ability to go back and watch the videos would be helpful but understand the piracy concern. Great curriculum of courses as well to move from intro all the way to very sophisticated and complex. It also showed progress and broke content topics down into bite-size pieces.
I would not recommend this approach. The online training got me a lot further, faster. You can certainly figure it out but the immediate impact after taking just a few weeks of training was a lot higher than trying to hack my way through the tool. The help section, though, is very good but just takes more time to piece together the topics.

Using Spotfire

ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
Unnecessarily complex
Requires technical support
Slow to learn
  • Visualization creation
  • Self selector creation
  • SQL functions
  • Database and information link creation
  • User interface
  • Advanced features but not cumbersome.
Ove it's great to use. It would be great though if it had a cloud architect mode so you could do it via browser if needed.