Why Spotfire
Updated October 30, 2017

Why Spotfire

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

Software Version

Platform

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

Spotfire is being used across the organization for its analytical capabilities. It helps in doing predictive analysis, self-service BI and is an effective geo-analytical tool. Its near to real-time reporting helps do operational activities effectively.

Pros

  • Its recommendation engine for generating quick visual views and providing dashboard design & flow ideas
  • Geo Analytics - Its Geo Analytical capabilities used in the Natural Resources industry are very helpful.
  • Self-Service BI over the thin client.
  • Their training videos and online community sites are the best!
  • Its built-in support to scripting - Iron Python, TERR, JavaScript. Its basic ease of filter configurations and data mashups.

Cons

  • Its Server Administration! The node manager and server architecture is really good and makes sense. But when it comes to an administrator managing or building the environments, it becomes a nightmare. The logs need to be more descriptive and terms used should be user-friendly.
  • While the KPI chart and Waterfall charts are a good addition to the visualisation stack, there is a lot of scope to add new visualisations in the kitty. Visuals that are available with jsViz - can be made a part of default visualization list or provide a template for those jsvis where users just need to feed in dimensions and measures.
  • Images are limited to labels, tooltips or text area objects. Probably, object overlapping would give it a jazzy look. For example a background image for the whole page, currently we can only apply a background color via themes.
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, Spotfire has better visualization capabilities. SAS VA - Very good analytical tool and has interesting visualization. But it has limited scope for customization on dashboard designing, exporting capabilities; HTML visuals can be integrated but are not supported with the default charts or dashboarding features. Spotfire an analytical tool with rich visualization and dashboard customization capabilities. Microsoft Power BI - A basic visualization tool- good visuals but limited scope of customization.
I have worked with multiple BI tools for data visualization, but the extensive customization with built-in scripting capabilities and ease of developing them are the best part for Spotfire. Of course, improvements are needed on the built-in visualization list, but it does offer you [the ability to] build your own visuals with JS at ease. These JS visuals can easily interact with the built-in visuals.

Using Spotfire

Spotfire Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
  • Self-taught
In person training experience was not good. The trainer was not so much interested in explaining the functionalities and kept us guiding to visit the online tutorials.
Online training videos are really good and the activities really test your learnings.
I started working on Spotfire from version 5. It was pretty difficult to learn it back then but now with version v7.6, the tool doesn't seem that difficult to be adopted by the new resources and getting onboarded for this tool.

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