Item: Spotfire
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Right now, Spotfire is used only in our "data science" department to perform complex business analyses to see how some KPIs evolve over time; simulate impacts of slight contractual adjustments, and finding the root causes of disruptive events. We also plan to use it as a live dashboarding tool for a production environment.

Pros and Cons

Analyst friendly: a lot of functionalities are implemented to help analysts/developers in their work. This is a good mix between ease of use and advanced capabilities. For example, it is very easy to join data tables, to clean data, to compute new columns, and to define complex aggregations.
Fast: even locally, Spotfire is able to handle large amounts of data.
Nice looking interface: the desk top client, the web interface or the export look both professionnal and detailed.

The labels on the graph appear/disappear in an uncontrolled way, depending on the size - not very convenient
A very specific point: when adding 4 columns or more to a bar chart (for example for different aggregations), I did not find how we could change the display name on the x axis - not very convenient.

Data Integration

Very easy to do data transformation (merges), multiple sources. However, it is missing tools to explore a document oriented database such as MongoDB or tools to flatten XML files.

Collaboration and Sharing

Sharing information over the server with other people is easy. However, there are no versioning possibilities of the report.

Alternatives Considered

We compared Spotfire 7 to QlikView. QlikView is much older and very less easy to use for analysts (if you use QlikView from time to time, you will need 1 hour before each use to remember how to do things). QlikView is also only an in-memory tool which makes it less powerful.

We also compared Spotfire 7 to Excel, and the difference is of course huge in favor of Spotfire in terms of features, ease of use for complex analyses, and performance. However, Excel provided cell-by-cell editing capabilities that Spotfire doesn't (which is quite alright since the aim of Spotfire is not the same as Excel).

We compared also Spotfire to Kibana, but these are absolutely not the same products (Kibana is only dashboarding whereas Spotfire provides analytic possibilities).

Other Software Used

QlikView

Likelihood to Recommend

When you have small amounts of data (< 1000 lines), Spotfire might be too heavy for what you intend to do.

When you have medium amounts of data (10 000+ lines), Spotfire is great if you need some advanced computations/aggregations features. Excel pivot tables are very limited and Spotfire helps with building very advanced filters/aggregations/formulas and displays. It is also much faster, especially for join requests.

When you have large amounts of data, Spotfire can help you by provinding both complex analyses and dashboards, in a scale that Excel will never be able to catch up with.

In a nutshell : Spotfire is very useful either if you want to do advanced computations, if you need user friendly dashboards and also if you need to quickly handle a large amount of data.

Excellent software for data analysts /scientists and for reporting

Overall Satisfaction with Spotfire