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Spotfire - a solid BI application
January 11, 2017

Spotfire - a solid BI application

Martin Thorsen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Desktop

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

Several different reports are generated for both internal and external use. Primarily we provide our customers with analytics based on the data which has been collected by the customers using our software platform. Internally we also have executive and trend reports which can tell us about the number of users on our platform, the usage of the platform, and trends.
  • When designing reports it is easy to change between the different the visual diagrams.
  • The formatting capabilities are extremely detailed, which makes the visual appearances the best in the business.
  • The export to PowerPoint feature works, but doesn't have the same visual appearance as the visuals in the report. Would be great if you could hand-pick or mark which visuals to include in the PowerPoint before actually exporting. This would keep the consistency of the PowerPoint reporting.
  • One feature which I have been missing is the ability to only show part of some data in a visualization, without using the zoom feature. Using the zoom shows the zoomslider, and limiting data or filtering data away changes the statistics which I would like to keep. So what I am looking for is something that doesn't have the zoom slider displayed, but works in the same way. This will for example make it possible to show 2015 and 2016, but not 2014 and 2017. If you could also enter a offset you could make it only look at two and one year back in time relative to the current year, without hardcoding which years to not show.
Spotfire is well suited for querying on very defined and "small" datasets. When querying from many data sources and when doing many computations in Spotfire, you lose valuable time when waiting for the report to finish. Therefore, ideally run Spotfire on a Data Warehouse or a cube where the majority of data is ready for reporting or where the majority of data is pre-computed.

Spotfire Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
4.5
Customizable dashboards
4
Report Formatting Templates
5
7.3
Drill-down analysis
6
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
9
Report sharing and collaboration
5
6.3
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
5
Report Delivery Scheduling
6
6.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
6
Predictive Analytics
5
4.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
5
Role-Based Security Model
4
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
5
8.0
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Spotfire Training

  • Self-taught
The learning curve for Spotfire is quite steep if you are doing all the configuration yourself. In that case I would highly recommend additional training.

If you have enough resources and only have to focus the Spotfire desktop application, the application is pretty much self explanatory.