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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
32nd
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 April 2026, in the BI (Business Intelligence) Tools category, the mindshare of Knowage is 0.9%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of TIBCO Spotfire is 1.1%, 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 Spotfire1.1%
Knowage0.9%
Other98.0%
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

"The embedding feature is great."
"I can't name the features the way the Knowage community calls them because I still don't know the lingo. However, I can describe them. I like the ability to join more than one report, set all fields on one end, and replicate that on the other reports. I like that a lot. I think it's one of the features that got me using Knowage. They have tables, and I like that too. They took SQL scripts and many other scripts and enabled them to even correlate with Python. That's also one of the best things about Knowage. You could also decide to get information per user role, and this is also a feature that I like in Knowage."
"The most valuable feature of SpagoBI is that it is open source and 100% free without limits."
"I would use SpagoBI if a company wants to use a free tool that has enough features."
"Our customers really appreciate the self-service BI functionalities."
"Instead of just relying on emails to disperse our reports, having a central server to do this for us has helped our organization and has pushed us into a better place."
"The concept of engines is quite powerful allowing the user to work with report authoring/provisioning tools of their choice."
"It's a great product. It has a lot more features than many other BI tools. You can get the most out of machine learning, the best connectivity to Python, and it cuts across enterprise sections."
"Data discovery is very simple."
"Spotfire has delivered cost savings and helped with decision making at the right time."
"Spotfire is an easy-to-use yet powerful tool."
"It makes it possible to give us factual insights, helps us to take right decisions transforming our business."
"Spotfire is a wonderful product with vast reporting and analytical capability."
"This combination of features means it's relatively easy to take business users with little analytics background and scale them up to expert-level techniques."
"The flexibility, data preparation, and data wrangling abilities of the platform are exceptional."
"It's one of the best products I've worked with in my career, especially in the engineering, oil and gas, or chemistry fields."
 

Cons

"We are not happy with the poor graphic user interface. It looks a bit old and sometimes it is not properly user friendly."
"Tomcat configuration was tricky in earlier versions."
"As all software and especially the open-source ones have always something that can work better, in this case, SpagoBI is slightly difficult to implement."
"Unfortunately, many interesting features do not work when you are using a custom database for storing the metadata."
"The only challenge here is that it's a Java-based platform. It requires very high technical skills."
"I encountered a lot of issues when I tried to integrate the map in order to realize Intelligent Location Dashboards."
"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."
"There are additional features such as Data Integration, Data Visualization, MobileBI, Cloud BI, Data enrichment and massaging should be implemented in the next release."
"Spotfire requires better documentation."
"The design of the UI could be improved."
"When you do the data loading, it is slow."
"Integration with a custom web portal is still challenging."
"Technical support is acceptable, but not superior."
"The support is not very good in Indonesia."
"Learning to use the scripting language (Python) proved a challenge for me personally due to lack of good documentation, and the scripting editor is not so user-friendly."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Knowage is open-source, and an enterprise edition is also available."
"It allows the implementation of an effective reporting system using internal skills at a limited upfront cost."
"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 ROI is nearly impossible to calculate."
"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 of TIBCO Spotfire could improve. It should be less expensive. It's the most expensive visualization tool in our company."
"The cost is a few hundred dollars per user per year."
"The solution is affordable one."
"In comparison to other solutions such as IBM Cognos, TIBCO Spotfire is more affordable."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
University
10%
Marketing Services Firm
10%
Retailer
8%
Manufacturing Company
15%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Healthcare Company
8%
Retailer
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.
890,088 professionals have used our research since 2012.