TIBCO Spotfire alternatives and competitors

We use it in our parent company as well as in client companies. A few of our environments are on-premises, and a few are on Tableau Online. We have a mix of both.

The UI part is the best. The end-users can easily get started with Tableau Desktop or Tableau Online because of its user-friendliness.

I also work as an SME on the platform side. Tableau is very nice and jazzy for the end-users, but there are pain points for the admins. Performance is something about which we hear a lot of complaints, such as the dashboard doesn't open in time. It performs well on the desktop but not on the server. I know that there is always a limitation when it comes to a huge amount of data or the complexity of the calculations, but we often hear from end-users about the performance on the server side. It is easy to drag and drop all the columns and do what we want, but if it is not going to load better on the server, users are not going to like it.

Their standard support is not good. They should improve it. I don't know if it has anything to do with the acquisition, but lately, their support has not been great.

Their upgrades have always been an issue. They never work. 

Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

They should make it easy to integrate with tools like SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, etc. Its integration with Office 365 should be improved because most of the users already have tools like Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint, and they want to integrate a reporting tool or a visualization tool with their existing tools. 

It is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire. We can do a lot of changes in the UI by writing some scripts. That could be something that Tableau can look into. They can also consider providing APIs, but most of the people who work with Tableau do not really work much on the scripting side. So, I am not sure if it is feasible or required technically.

I have been using this solution for almost eight years.

It is scalable for online and on-premises versions. With the online version, they take care of the load, and we don't have to worry about that. For on-premises, initially, we used to have core-based licensing in which we had a cap on the number of cores we could expand to. We then moved to user-based licensing, which makes it easy to scale.

In our parent company, we have close to 200 users. We also have two clients on this platform. One of the clients has about 400 users. For another client, overall, we support close to 20K customers on this platform. That's one of the biggest environments.

Their premium support is really good, but their standard support is failing. Their standard support is the worst. We recently had an experience where we waited for more than seven days for a ticket to be picked up. It was vacation time, and there were a lot of factors, but their standard support is not good. For a few of our clients, we do have premium support, and they respond to any issue because we include the technical account managers in the communication.

Comparing it with Power BI, the main differences are the cost and the integration with Office 365. It is very easy to integrate Power BI with Teams or SharePoint because they all belong to the same company, whereas with Tableau, I have to integrate it with a third-party vendor. It is a little tough to integrate Tableau with SharePoint or Teams. Nowadays, everyone wants everything in one place; it could either be in SharePoint or in Teams. 

I have been working with Spotfire lately, and it is very easy to integrate scripting in Spotfire.

The Tableau server-side used to be very good initially, but for the last year, we are having issues with the upgrades. Their upgrades never work. We always get stuck while doing the upgrades, and we end up taking a different approach. We take the data and keep it somewhere. After that, we wipe out the entire server and install it again. We then restore the data into that environment. 

In terms of maintaining this solution, I used to belong to level three (L3) support till last month. We were only handling the performance issues and any issues that need RCA. The L3 support used to have close to five people. L2 support, which usually included adding a user, removing a user, adding a new group, and providing usual production support, was taken care of by the Ops team. They used to have more than five people on the team.

Cost is where tools like MicroStrategy, Power BI, or Spotfire come into play. Cost-wise, Tableau is a little bit costlier than other tools such as Power BI.

I have been using Tableau all these years, but about four years ago, Power BI came out at a very low cost. Their desktop version was free from the beginning. Power BI Desktop has always been free, whereas Tableau Desktop is costly. When it comes to cost, people prefer Power BI because it integrates very well with Office 365. You don't have to worry about integration with Teams or SharePoint.

It is easy to use for most business users, but before using it, you should understand the basics of dimensions or measurements. If you directly come to this tool without understanding the concepts of warehousing, dimensions, and fact tables, you would not get what you want. This applies to any reporting tool. You should have a basic understanding of what data warehousing is all about and then get started with the tool.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. Tableau has always been at the top of my list. Because of the technical hold that I have on the tool, I always prefer Tableau. It would always be on top as compared to any other tool.

I lead the data visualization competency. As a competency leader, my responsibility is to make people grow in this technology. It could be Power BI, Tableau, or QlikView. We are service-oriented, and depending upon the demand, we have to have experienced people and a resource pool ready in these areas. Depending upon the requirement, I decide how many people need to be trained or hired.

Most of the clients I am interacting with are looking towards Power BI because of the cost and simplicities. It provides an entire feature set and a complete solution. It has tight integration with Office 365, Dynamics 365, Microsoft Technology Stack, and datatypes like R and Python. 

It should be more scalable for an enterprise-level implementation. When you deploy large data sets, the response has to be faster in Power BI. This is one thing that needs to be improved in it.

I have been using this solution for close to two years.

We found no issues. It is an aggregated reporting tool. It cannot handle a detailed level of data. It is meant only for the dashboarding purpose. You need to have your underlying data in an aggregated way, and then it would be faster. It depends on whether you have a live connection or you don't have a live connection.

We don't see many issues, but whenever we put a request, they at least respond.

I have worked on Tableau. Before Tableau, I have worked with traditional tools, such as SAP BusinessObjects. My team has got experience with Spotfire, but we are not seeing a great demand for Spotfire.

If you ask me for the top three, I would qualify Power BI, then Tableau, and then QlikView. That's the demand that I'm seeing in the market from various customers.

I am satisfied with its price. Its price is very less as compared to Tableau and QlikView.

My first advice is to learn SQL. The foundational knowledge and SQL skills are the most important. You have to be very strong in writing SQL code. You have to improve your mind so that you know what you are writing in Power BI. After that, it is very easy to pick up any front-end reporting tool, such as Power BI or Tableau. After you have good expertise in Power BI, you can slowly learn Python so that you can do good integration. All these efforts would be great for your career.

Being a gold partner of Microsoft for the past few years, we work directly with Microsoft product teams. Sometimes as part of a pre-launch, they also connect with us. If we see a feature or functionality that a client requires, we at least put it across to them. How they prioritize it within their product team is up to them. They prioritize depending on the need of the market and demand from various clients, and they release features accordingly. Sometimes, we also work on a pre-release.

They release new features and functionalities every month. They have also recently released data protection smart narratives. If you look at the Gartner report, they are leading. I see a lot of demand for this solution.

I would rate Microsoft BI an eight out of ten.

This product is used for reporting and visualization.

We are not using the latest version but rather, one version back.

From a financial or bank perspective, this product is secure enough.

The dashboards, analytics, visualizations, and different reports are valuable for business analytics.

The AI/ML enablement is useful, as many reporting tools do not offer machine learning models as of now, without writing customized code.

This product does not support custom charts in the visualization.

At this time, dataflows cannot be shared, but I think that this should be enhanced.

There are a couple of other limitations. For example, many reporting tools offer good features and oracle should learn from that.

There should be tool tech enhancements.

We have been using Oracle Analytics Cloud for approximately three years.

This is a stable solution and we plan to continue using it for at least another year.

I believe that this is a scalable product.

We have been in contact with Oracle technical support and we are satisfied with it.

I have worked with many reporting tools including SAS Visual Analytics, Spotfire, and Activu.

There was no specific reason for switching to Oracle Analytics Cloud. This was a decision driven by the priorities of the moment.

The time required for deployment is almost an hour.

Deployment requires a small team of people. One from admin, another from the development team, and one more.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.