Spotfire review: chemistry centric
March 08, 2019
Spotfire review: chemistry centric
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Spotfire Platform
Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire
I am a freelance chemistry consultant serving clients in the biotechnology/pharmaceuticals industry. Prior to this I was in big pharma for 20+ years and used Spotfire for data analysis and visualization. We have complex datasets and Spotfire allowed us to analyze components and look for trends. There are other programs that will do this, but Spotfire has a chemically intelligent add-in that allows chemical structures to be linked to data. This is a critical component for my specialty, so I continue to use this to assist my clients with their data analysis needs.
- Importing and exporting of large datasets is very fast, as is manipulation of the data within Spotfire. Other programs I have used don't do this as well.
- Data visualization is extremely powerful and fairly intuitive to set up—there are multiple ways to view and organize data. Additionally, the statistical analysis and clustering capabilities are powerful and fairly straightforward to use.
- The export function into Microsoft Products is nice, allows easy loading into static presentations.
- Like most very powerful software programs there are parts of Spotfire that are not intuitive to use. While the help function inside Spotfire is useful—I like the fact that the help function is not just a static .pdf file, but has index/search capabilities. It doesn't cover everything, and sometimes getting data into Spotfire can be a challenge. For example, adding and combining data is not always a simple process depending on the data source
- I have rarely tried to use the Spotfire support team so this is a small sample size, but I have not been impressed with their response time or customer assistance when I have used them.
- This is a specialized piece, but calculating and inserting chemical properties in a compound table can be slow in Spotfire if the data set is large. I have used other chemically-intelligent data visualization programs where calculated properties are done much faster.
I have used the Dotmatics Vortex. The programs are similar overall, there are strengths and weaknesses of each program. I selected Spotfire Lead Discovery because I am more familiar with it and because it's a bit cheaper.
- In-person training
- Self-taught
years ago I had in-person training on SpotFire, it was a huge help. Would have been much harder to get going if hat had not happened. And the software has evolved to become much more intuitive over the years.
I only use Spotfire Lead Discovery.