Spotfire Handles it All, From Interactive Dashboards to Advanced Analytics
June 29, 2020

Spotfire Handles it All, From Interactive Dashboards to Advanced Analytics

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Spotfire Platform

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire

Spotfire is being used across the whole organization. We've connected to over 23 data sources with ease and have built corporate dashboards for drilling, completions, operations, geology, and reserves. We've also used Spotfire to build some complex Models. Spotfire Analyst users enjoy using it for slicing and dicing their data.
  • They have an excellent support team. Every one of their support engineers are top quality. You don't have to deal with the dreaded Tier 1, tell me about your problem and then I'll send you to Tier 2 scenario.
  • We're able to quickly build POCs in a matter of days. Spotfire's data wrangling capabilities are amazing, and if you need a little bit more data engineering/data science power, you have the option of using Python or R.
  • Spotfire is very extensible. If there's some advanced visualization that's not available out of the box, we've been able to generate it thru their JSVIZ add-on, which allows us to utilize any JavaScript visualization library (ie. D3, Highcharts, Plotly, Fusioncharts, etc.).
  • They should have a lower price point for users to access the analyst version who don't require advanced capabilities. For example, a lower price if users just need to do some basic slicing and dicing with their data and not have to the data science functionality (ie. K-means clustering, regression modeling, classification modeling, etc.).
  • Currently, you can't change the font type/color on the axis, which I'm sure will eventually be available in the future as they have a Spotfire Ideas portal that they're fairly responsive to and act on. I guess at the end of the day, it's about the data and what insights you get from it.
We evaluated Power BI and Tableau 4 years ago. Power BI at that time was in its infancy, but over the last 4 years have made huge leaps of improvements. At that time, the two products weren't comparable. Tableau 4 years ago was a very strong product and the acquisition from Salesforce will probably make it even stronger. At that time, Spotfire had more data connectors that were specific to our use case, ie, the ability to connect to OSIsoft PI out of the box and Oracle Essbase. Spotfire also has really good GeoSpatail mapping capability which I think Power BI and Tableau are still lacking. Today, I think the field is very competitive and all are good products when it comes to basic slicing and dicing of data and filtering. I always say whatever I know today about the products is completely different a month or two from now, as they all keep coming out with new functionality.
  • Spotfire costs us around 2% of our overall software and maintenance costs. We've been able to automate a lot of reports that use to require a lot of manual compiling. This has allowed our analysts/executives to have information at their fingertips and faster time to insights.
  • It's always tough to put a number around ROI, but if I had to look at the number of personnel hours required to constantly manually compile reports, Spotfire paid itself back really quickly.
  • Spotfire's also enabled us to quickly improve our data quality, as we're able to quickly connect to the data sources, and thru the power of visualizations, instantly pick out the outliers.
  • Online training
  • in-person training
Spotfire has a wealth of training material on their community website and on Youtube. They have a monthly Dr. Spotfire series, where they dive into basic/intermediate and advanced topics. We also had a local Spotfire partner provide in-person training to our analyst users.
We use Tibco's Data Virtualization, Automation Services, and Statistical Services products. We've been trialing the Statistica product for advanced analytics and it works really well with Spotfire. When you mark/filter data in Spotfire, that dataset is feed into Statistica for one or more predictive models to run, and the predicted values are instantly returned back to Spotfire so that we can quickly visualize the data and perform analysis. This allows us to run multiple scenarios very quickly. The traditional approach of R or Python programming would require a lot of manually coding to subset the data.
For every ticket I've submitted, I've always received a response back within 8 hours and the support team on the other side is highly knowledgeable with Spotfire.
Spotfire is truly an Enterprise BI Solution. We've connected to over 23 data sources in the last 4 years. Types of databases we've connected to include, Oracle, SQL, OsiSoft PI, Rest API's, OData, and Essbase. Spotfire's allows us to cache data so that it's readily consumable for users who just require visual interaction. We've built advanced models because of the built-in R and Python capability. We're able to generate and push PDF reports via their Automation Services.

Spotfire Feature Ratings

Customizable dashboards
10
Report Formatting Templates
10
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
8
Integration with R or other statistical packages
10
Report sharing and collaboration
9
Publish to Web
10
Publish to PDF
10
Report Delivery Scheduling
10
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
10
Predictive Analytics
10
Multi-User Support (named login)
10
Role-Based Security Model
10
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
9
Responsive Design for Web Access
10
Mobile Application
9
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
9
REST API
10
Javascript API
10
iFrames
10
Java API
10
Themeable User Interface (UI)
10
Customizable Platform (Open Source)
10

TIBCO Spotfire Support

ProsCons
Quick Resolution
Good followup
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
No escalation required
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Quick Initial Response
None
Yes - 

Yes, one of my reported bugs was fixed in their next release, so I just had to wait a month.


There have been multiple times where Spotfire has provided exceptional support. If I have any capability questions or how I might do this with their tool, they're able to provide answers and/or possible solutions to the capability question.