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Knowage vs TIBCO Spotfire comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 1, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Knowage
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
33rd
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
18
Ranking in other categories
Reporting (23rd)
TIBCO Spotfire
Ranking in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
15th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
5.7
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Knowage is 1.0%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TIBCO Spotfire is 1.2%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
TIBCO Spotfire1.2%
Knowage1.0%
Other97.8%
BI (Business Intelligence) Tools
 

Featured Reviews

BS
Software Engineer at syntegra
Open-source with great embedding capabilities but the dashboards could be better
I know the initial setup is pretty straightforward. It doesn't take a long time to deploy. Even on your own personal computer, when you want to try it out, it doesn't take too long to get it running. For the initial setup, I'd say it's maybe a four out of five in terms of how easy it is. You need to add these Java dependencies and so forth, which can be a bit boring, however, it's almost perfect. To deploy Knowage usually takes about a day. In terms of the implementation strategy, it's just following the instructions that they give us on the installation and then just knowing how to handle the process. Usually, there is a group of engineers who do that for us and manage the server itself. If a team is knowledgeable, then it doesn't take a long time. When you need a new instance, it's very quick. The implementation strategy is based on just following instructions on the installation process from Knowage. For deployment and maintenance, we need just maybe two people simply to monitor the traffic coming in. However, it's maintained by people who were doing other jobs like maintaining our other server. They just monitor the Knowage server and make sure that it's up and running and that there are no bugs. There are not too many bugs coming out from the debugger.
Jacobo Ortiz Avila - PeerSpot reviewer
Production Engineer at Parex Resources Inc
Has improved data handling and customization but requires more intuitive visual design for workflows
It was kind of tough to have the visualizations with HTML, or you have to create your own page. But it was working great with buttons and every page updated pretty fast with the server capability, and it was handling a big amount of data, maybe five years of data. It was performing quite well, taking maybe three minutes to update the whole model. It has been good, but most recently, they changed the commercial methodology to get the license. Our política in the company is to hire or get licenses year by year, but most recently, TIBCO Spotfire asked us to have a three-year license term. That made things a little bit tougher for the commercial relationship. Maybe with all these automation processes that you have, those could be more visually friendly. N8N is a good example where you could connect some platforms, and you don't have to code strictly, but you could visually create an algorithm. That capability of clicking and dragging some boxes of code could actually facilitate how people create their own algorithms. It could be very useful if the coding part of using the platform could be more user-friendly in terms of visual capability.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Nice features available in SpagoBI compared with other open-source BI are Auditing, Collaborative BI, Query By Example, and User Profiling."
"Unified interface, a lot of tools for BI, easy configuration, standalone SDK."
"The embedding feature is great."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"It's very easy to get the historical reports you need based on the business requirements and this helps our executives for taking decisions."
"We can easily do our own customizations."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"I am satisfied with the product in general given what the company invested in it, which was just our time."
"One of the main features is integrated statistical analysis."
"Spotfire is a wonderful product with vast reporting and analytical capability."
"The most valuable features of TIBCO Spotfire are visualization, it's very nice, clear, and flexible, you can analyze many data types and the user interface is very good."
"Technical support is excellent."
"The visualisations look very good, are easy to use and can answer almost any business question."
"I have used other so-called analytics tools in the past but Spotfire buries most others."
"R and automation services."
"This solution allows us to integrate data from across all client departments, for effective reporting via a single dashboard."
 

Cons

"When it comes to Knowage, it's a bit heavy, it's time-consuming sometimes, it's not very fast, and definitely not as fast as other business intelligence tools in terms of getting graphical reports."
"Yes, using Mobile and Desktop Editions, we would sometimes need to restart the service."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"We had stability issues."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"We expected the community to be bigger than what it currently is."
"Many things need to be improved, most of all robustness."
"I would like to have event-based automation (without integrating with other tools), e.g., send an email only if some event has occurred."
"If you made a mistake in building a table, you need to start all over, there is no way to change it."
"They have good training programs for it, but the learning curve for Spotfire is probably higher than it might be for Tableau."
"When you do the data loading, it is slow."
"Sometimes the Spotfire client crashes when you test a Python script."
"We encountered difficulties connecting the special data sets, as the post data set did not contain any shared columns, making it difficult to establish a connection between the data sets."
"Better UX/UI design to make the product look “sexier”. It’s somewhat difficult to add formatting to Spotfire dashboards to make them look nice (e.g. coloring backgrounds of charts, adding floating texts, etc.)."
"We would like an easier way to get the product to the cloud. Right now, we have the on-premise version, and we would like to find a way to make it easier to migrate it over to the cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost."
"Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available."
"This product carries a monthly licensing charge, with the amount depending on the features that are to be included. This costs also covers the use of technical support."
"The cost is a few hundred dollars per user per year."
"The ROI is nearly impossible to calculate."
"In comparison to other solutions such as IBM Cognos, TIBCO Spotfire is more affordable."
"The cost of TIBCO Spotfire could improve. It should be less expensive. It's the most expensive visualization tool in our company."
"I would describe TIBCO Spotfire as an averagely-priced product."
"The pricing seems competitive and reasonable. The value delivered by the product far exceeds the cost."
"The Tibco sales teams have been very difficult to work with - ignoring requests, misrepresenting level of demand, etc."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
University
11%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business7
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business18
Midsize Enterprise12
Large Enterprise42
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What do you like most about TIBCO Spotfire?
TIBCO Spotfire is easy to use. We initiated Spotfire as POC, with support from a tech team based in South Africa. While they assisted with the setup, we conducted the POC ourselves.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for TIBCO Spotfire?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for TIBCO Spotfire appears fair, and I think they are fairly priced as far as the features are concerned.
What needs improvement with TIBCO Spotfire?
The web client of TIBCO Spotfire lacked the full authoring capabilities available in the analyst client. Source control for DXP files was limited compared to a Git-style workflow. For regulatory su...
 

Also Known As

SpagoBI
Spotfire
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

FIAT Group, Italian air navigation service provider, Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Telecom Italia, ASL Genovese, San Giovanni Battista University Hospital
Allergan, ASSS de Montreal, Avantium, Blue River, Bank of Montreal, Citibank, FrieslandCampina, Hellmann Logistics, Merck, Novartis
Find out what your peers are saying about Knowage vs. TIBCO Spotfire and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
892,943 professionals have used our research since 2012.