Item: Spotfire
Rating: 9
Author: Emilie Wheeler

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Spotfire is being used throughout the organization by various teams to analyze data, create workflow and performance management dashboards for leadership, and create easier solutions for regular reporting by the analysts. It addresses Excel's limitations with handling large data sets, performing calculations on those large data sets (quickly), and creating drill-down, interactive charts.

Pros and Cons

Spotfire can ingest extremely large data sets very quickly. We use Spotfire to analyze data sets of 5 million + rows - a feat Excel 2010 cannot handle.
It is very easy to join tables and insert columns (VLOOKUP) in Spotfire.
Spotfire is very user-friendly, and management loves to see the big picture, but then having the option to drill-down to the granular level of data as well.

We would like to be able to automatically reload data for Spotfire Library files for our Consumers, who do not have access to reload the data, without having to purchase another "module" or license.

Alternatives Considered

Tableau Desktop

I have used Tableau (at a conference workshop) and in my opinion, Spotfire is much easier to use, more intuitive, and is more aesthetically pleasing.

Other Software Used

Microsoft Access, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Training Types Used

Online training

In-Person Training

Online Training

The online training is good, provides a good base of knowledge. The video demonstrations were well-done and easy to follow along. Provided exercises are good as well, but I think there could be more challenging exercises. The training has also gone up in price significantly in the last 3 years (in USD, which hurts us even more in Canada), and I'm not sure it is worth the money it now costs (it is worth how much it cost 3 years ago, but not double that.)

Likelihood to Recommend

Spotfire is great for analyzing large data sets with multiple detailed fields for a single row, so you can look at the same rows of data with different views. It is also easy to bin columns to create roll-up fields in order to facilitate this drill-down feature, and join data tables to do this as well. For small-scale analyses where some manual manipulation is required, Spotfire would not be the desired tool.

User-friendly, intuitive and easy... What more could you ask for?

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire