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Like owning an Italian sports car: high performance and high maintenance
March 11, 2016

Like owning an Italian sports car: high performance and high maintenance

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with TIBCO Spotfire Platform

Most recently I was using Spotfire to analyze clients' data, and to prepare reports and interactive presentations to the clients. I made it part of my regular meetings with my clients to give them as much opportunity to interact with their data and my analyses. I also set them up with the web client so they could interact with the data themselves.
  • Easy to set up analyses and visualizations.
  • Easy for novices to interact with data, analyses, and visualizations.
  • Visualization software runs fast, allowing good real-time interactivity with data.
  • Engineering, marketing, sales, and customer support don't seem to be talking with one another. There were many instances where I was promised one thing and got something else, and it often took weeks to resolve--if it got resolved at all.
  • What finally killed it for me was when I did a mandatory update of the software, and the updated software introduced a bug which made it impossible for me to continue my work with one of my clients. Getting them to even acknowledge the bug was slow and painful, and it took weeks of teeth pulling before they finally admitted they have no plans to fix the bug.
Spotfire seemed to have leapfrogged over the competition in terms of functionality a few years back, which is why I initially chose to use their software back when I was at Pearson.
Very complicated. I suppose this is a good thing since it's very flexible, but it took me a long time to figure it out. They could do a much better job on their documentation, especially in terms of what features are/aren't available with my license. Lots of hair pulling before I could successfully connect to my databases.
Marketing materials said one thing, sales told me another, and what I got was a third thing altogether. They didn't even use the same terminology in describing features and functionality. When I finally figured it out and got it working, things worked fine, but were limited in functionality compared to what I thought I was getting with my license.
I'm having such a better experience now that I've switched to Tableau. Frankly I find Spotfire more intuitive to use, but I cannot recommend it given my experiences.

Spotfire Feature Ratings

BI Platform ()
Not Rated
Supported Data Sources ()
Not Rated
8.0
Pixel Perfect reports
Not Rated
Customizable dashboards
8
Report Formatting Templates
Not Rated
8.5
Drill-down analysis
9
Formatting capabilities
9
Integration with R or other statistical packages
8
Report sharing and collaboration
8
8.0
Publish to Web
8
Publish to PDF
8
Report Versioning
8
Report Delivery Scheduling
Not Rated
8.3
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
9
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
9
Predictive Analytics
7
6.5
Multi-User Support (named login)
7
Role-Based Security Model
Not Rated
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
6
6.7
Responsive Design for Web Access
8
Mobile Application
6
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile
6
Application Program Interfaces (APIs) / Embedding ()
Not Rated

Using TIBCO Spotfire Platform

1 - Principal; analyst; chief scientist. Note that I terminated my license last year due to bugs.
1 - Principal/scientist/engineer. Note that I terminated my license last year due to bugs.
  • None as long as there are equivalent competing products from companies that are more together than Spotfire.
  • Exploratory data analysis
  • Communication with collaborators/clients