Item: Spotfire
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Spotfire is being used mainly to build a custom tool and in one department for client deliverables. The client wants to be able to dive into the data and see it from different angles.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Easy to create visualizations
The ability to create custom functions with Python
Data can be saved on a server instead of locally within the dashboard
Web application means the client doesnt need to install new software to view their dashboard

Cons

I would like to see more stock analytic packages in the standard version of Spotfire. Or the ability to download Python analytic packages right into Spotfire. Maybe this is possible and my computer has just limited permissions.
The ability to stack pivot tables of multiple variables into one visualizations. Currently, it works like Excel where pivot tables are hierarchical.
Resizing and moving visualizations around is annoying if you make the page bigger. Its doable, but could be done better
Linking tables would be better if it worked more like Access or PowerBI. You can link a code-description map table to a table with diagnosis codes, but in order to see the mapped descriptions, you need to physically add it to the original table. In Access or PowerBI, the linking works like a SQL join. It seems linking is more for if you had financial data tables of the same structure but for different quarters, and you wanted to link the quarters together.

Alternatives Considered

I have really only used the standard Tibco Spotfire.

Return on Investment

It has made report creation less of a hassle by being quicker and cleaner.
Less room for errors since it has drag and drop visualizations like Excel and not having to do it code based like in SAS.
Clients like the shiny new toy they get to use and show off to their superiors to make them look better also.

Training Types Used

Online training
Self-taught

It was fairly easy to pickup the software and start using it. Tibco has training videos on their Youtube channel and website that help you get started.

Spotfire is well suited for most business intelligence needs. I keep hearing that PowerBI and Tableau are doing more advanced analytics, but I do not like PowerBI as a deliverable to a client because it does not look that clean.

Comments

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Spotfire is good for most business intelligence needs

Software Version