Item: Spotfire
Rating: 10
Author: Cindy Corritore

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I am a faculty member in the Business Intelligence and Analytics Department, Heider College of Business, at Creighton University. I learned about Spotfire years ago when it was at Stanford and followed it's progress since then. About 5-6 years ago, I incorporated it into my graduate Business Intelligence and Analytics Visual Analytics and Visualization course (about 100 students a year, all online). While we use Tableau for the majority of the course just because it is free and easy, we do use Spotfire for 20% of the course so the students can not only see a different system, but see the power of Spotfire and how easily one can get complex but easy to understand visualizations. In my opinion, Spotfire is best of breed. We use the Cloud version only because about 70% of the students have Macs, not PCs. Even though the Cloud has less functionality than the desktop version, I feel we can still experience a great deal of the features and visuals that Spotfire offers. I always get feedback from the students that they love the product, and are thrilled to have experiences in the course with it.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Drill-down visual creation
Brushing interaction
Ease of use of the cloud version
Cloud documentation

Cons

Pricing for academia (ie. free) - students and faculty using it in a course
Mac desktop version
Some complex tutorials/demos

Return on Investment

We can only use it for the free trial period.
I have to 'rebuild' the course sample files and accounts on Spotfire every semester.
It is perfect as an excellent alternative to Tableau in the course.
We have to use the less powerful Cloud version since the majority of the students have Macs. This means we can't use advanced AI features, for example.

Alternatives Considered

The only other tool we use in my course is Tableau. Tableau is very popular regionally (Omaha, NE), runs locally on Mac and PC, is free for students and faculty, and has a web outlet for sharing. It also plays well with AWS. For these reasons, we use it as the primary visualization tool in the course. As I mentioned earlier, we use Spotfire as an example of another tool that is popular and excellent. I have found that Spotfire is easier for them to use for many tasks, such as quickly building a visual, adjusting variables and data, and synchronizing charts.

Key Insights

Do you think Spotfire delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Spotfire's feature set?

Did Spotfire live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Spotfire go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Spotfire again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Tableau Desktop, Amazon QuickSight, Sisense

Likelihood to Recommend

As I described in the first question, I am a long friend of Spotfire. I believe that the user experience is excellent, and that students pick it up quickly. The students in our program are all working professionals in various business and health care fields and often have experience with other visualization tools. After using Spotfire in several assignments, the comments are always positive and generally ask for more time in the course with Spotfire. Many of the charts that they had difficulty creating in with other tools, such as a Parallel Coordinate Chart, are straightforward in Spotfire. This makes a big impression.

Comments

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Teaching Graduage Visual Analytics and Visualization with Spotfire Cloud

Software Version