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Spotfire for rapid drill-down collaborative data visualisation
February 01, 2019

Spotfire for rapid drill-down collaborative data visualisation

James Spender | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

TIBCO Cloud Spotfire Enterprise

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

Spotfire is used by Trading Analysts for data visualization globally across all Oil and Gas trading teams. It is used for Trade Analytics to support data scientists in modeling fundamentals such as supply and demand, crack spread, dark spread, etc and to perform Energy Trading Risk Management. At another Retail client, it was used for data visualization for customer analytics.
  • Easy to use - can click on any data element to drill down.
  • Quick to annotate and share comments with other users through the toolbar and export/publish.
  • Easy to connect to a wide range of data sources including Hadoop/Hive and SQL RDBMS like SQL Server and Oracle.
  • Self-service business intelligence.
  • Online documentation could be improved.
  • Some licensing options have a subset of features.
  • The alternative Microsoft PowerBI is often free to add to Office licenses.
  • Spotfire provided a quick entry point for the customer insights to add data visualizations.
  • Spotfire is one of a range of tools used by trading analytics and is more cost-effective than Tableau.
  • Spotfire licensing enabled us to share the tool for quick data discovery for data protection.
We integrated Spotfire with a Cloudera data lake and another client had it integrated with a Hortonworks Hadoop cluster. We did not use the Spotfire data integration tools for these clients. Although I have used Spotfire Designer and EMS pub-sub in the past, Spotfire had only just become available then.
Spotfire is very good for sales and marketing and customer insights. Tableau is a better all-around data discovery tool. Spotfire is more affordable for smaller industries, particularly if Tableau server is needed for large datasets. Spotfire has a broader product set that Spotfire is easily integrated with. Tableau is considered best-in-class but can be very pricey.
Good for a broad range of users who need to get started quickly with data visualization and collaborate and share their data. If they are already familiar with Excel or SAS, then they should find it easy to add data visualizations. If they are familiar with Tableau on the other hand, then they are probably better off sticking with that. It is also much more expensive than PowerBI.

Spotfire Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
7.0
Customizable dashboards
7
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
8.0
Drill-down analysis
8
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
Not Rated
Report sharing and collaboration
8
7.5
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
7
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
8.0
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
8
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
Not Rated
Predictive Analytics
8
7.7
Multi-User Support (named login)
8
Role-Based Security Model
8
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
7
Not Rated
Responsive Design for Web Access
Not Rated
Mobile Application
Not Rated
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
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
Using a self-service online and self-taught approach enabled us to get started quickly but meant that if we got stuck we often needed to wait for support from more experienced users in other regions to help us out. When we needed to return licenses to the pool it was quite hard to replace the data visualisations with Excel!