TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

We use this solution to provide our customers with a data analytics platform.

We particularly like the data angling feature of this solution. This gives us the ability to work on data transformations, join files, and carry out other data preparation tasks all in a single tool.

We also appreciate the data science function, which lets us evaluate our Python functions within the solutions interface and create your visualizations.

We would like to see some development in the visualization aspect of this solution, as they can currently only be configured in the cloud, which limits us to one endpoint. It would be helpful if this could be integrated with other tools.

We would also like the level of environment control that is possible with on-premises installations, to be available with cloud-based variants.

We have been working with this solution for nearly four years.

We have found this solution to be stable. However, for optimal stability the hardware requirements need to be identified by evaluating peak load scenarios, and then put in place.

This solution is easily scalable by adding extra machines to the cluster as needed, as long as you have the appropriate hardware requirement available.

There is excellent support available for this solution, as well as a lot of case studies available for use in the online community area. We have found that most of the problems that we face can be solved by consulting the community.

Positive

The initial setup of this solution is simple, and uniform, regardless of whether it is installed on-premises or via the cloud.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We provide services to other customers. We have multiple customers who are in the oil and gas industry. We use this software for managing clients' assets.  Creating analytical dashboards on different datasets from Wales and various other datasets they have from their enterprise software.  Everything is very well accumulated in one place using Spotfire.

There were a couple of issues with Spotfire. But in the new releases, they have they have covered them. We had some challenges with respect to what they will say, compatibility issues for formatting and importing. So but those were fixed and some performance related issues for bladder datasets. But now in the newer releases, it's it is it is working fine.

I have been using TIBCO Spotfire for 5 years. 

Fifty users are using the solution at present. 

The initial setup is complicated and needs experience and knowledge.

Five engineers are required for maintenance.

The solution is an affordable one. 

Overall, I rate the solution an 8 out of 10. 

I work with a big bank in Azerbaijan. We have created a data warehouse and use TIBCO Spotfire. I have implemented this application in three banks.

We primarily use it for processing. I have experience and I understand the technical requirements so that we can design any report or we can use SQL links, or Postgres, et cetera.

It's a dynamic solution. There's dynamic reporting in TIBCO. It's very easy to add Power BI. With Power BI, if you want to create dynamic reporting, and dynamic dashboards, in Power BI you must create a lot of code files, however. It's very useful or it's very easy to create the dynamic dashboard in TIBCO Spotfire.

The solution is stable. 

The pricing is good.

It's scalable. 

We'd like better dashboard integrations. 

The initial setup can be difficult. 

The design of the solution could be updated. 

I've worked with the solution for seven or eight years. I have a rather large background with the solution. 

It's quite stable and reliable. The performance is great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. After working with the solution for seven years, I've never had any emergencies to contend with.

The scalability is good. It's not a problem to expand it. You can do all kinds of reporting, and as often as you want. It's very fast.

We have about 50 planned users on the product right now. 

At the present time, we don't have any plans to upgrade this system, however, we have a plan after the new year, or 2023, to look at everything. We might look at usage then.

The solution does not have good documentation or a strong community to help you.

That said, I' e never had issues that required me to directly reach out to technical support. We do have a partner in the region, and if we needed help, we would reach out to them to get assistance. We might need to reach out maybe once a year. It is never very often.

I also have experience with and am certified in Power BI. However, I've never used it in a banking environment. 

If we use Power BI, there are very good colors or a lot of dashboards and there are machine learning opportunities, et cetera. However, it is not easy to create dynamic dashboards. With TIBCO Spotfire, there are not very good color systems or nice UX designs. However, the reporting is very good. We only need reporting, which is why we choose to use TIBCO.

There were problems with the initial setup. There is not a lot of documentation for implementation. If you have any problems, you cannot easily find documentation for issues either. The community is okay, however, there is not enough information for solving problems. There are not really any tutorials to help you.

It's not user-friendly and pretty hard to deal with system settings. 

We do pay a yearly licensing fee. Three years ago, we paid for four years upfront. It's not overly expensive. 

We looked at Tableau, which is very good. I know Oracle BI is also a very strong system as well, as is QlikView.

I'm an end-user of the product. 

We are using both on-premises and cloud deployment of the product. We have a server, a TIBCO server, which we implemented. We have implemented several reports and have used the Spotfire design. 

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution to handle large datasets.

Live Query data on demand, R and Python integration, and the ability to write HTML and JavaScript text areas are all valuable features.

The data compression has room for improvement.

The usage of SPDF files can be improved.

I would like the ability to loop intellect queries the same way that I can with QVD data.

The UI has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for nine years.

The solution is stable.

The technical support is responsive.

I give the solution a seven out of ten.

We utilize the solution for real-time analytics. We have some IoT devices connected to the dashboard, allowing us to view analytics related to the devices for our clients in the energy sectors.

TIBCO Spotfire can be connected to the cloud or deployed on-premise. TIBCO also offers cloud servers for cloud deployment.

The most valuable feature is the map visuals that help us connect to the geo-specialized data which is more advanced than other solutions.

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. It would be beneficial if we had a feature to assist us in connecting to the pages of our special data, thus allowing us to the relationships easily.

I have been using the solution for five months.

TIBCO Spotfire is a stable solution that is able to handle a large data set and continue working efficiently.

The technical support is good. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. We had a few drag-and-drop items and some recommendations. Depending on the data sets the deployment can be completed within two days.

In comparison to other solutions such as IBM Cognos, TIBCO Spotfire is more affordable.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend TIBCO Spotfire.

As a service company, we were using Spotfire for things like timesheet analysis for our own purposes. What was more important was that we were advising our corporate customers, chemical, oil and gas companies like Shell, Total, and Exxon about where they should use this tool and how to develop an application using it. I'm really on the service side and Spotfire was a tool that I could offer to my customers for delivering projects.

In terms of use case, process data analysis would be number one. Then I'd say industrial performance dashboard, and lastly, problem root cause analysis.

I championed the use of this solution in my company (an engineering service company) and ultimately we delivered a lot of projects. Often, we were working on development, more specifically user interface development, graphical user interface, and other things that were extremely costly and time consuming. When the BI tools arrived, it seemed to be a very fast way to not only analyze data, but also provide interactive dashboards to people, which before would've required the development of a custom tool. This would've been magnitudes higher in terms of price, so I really saw an opportunity there with the BI tools.

At this stage, it was clear that Spotfire was the top runner. I don't have much experience with Tableau, but clearly for scientific applications, Spotfire was awesome. Especially because of its integration with things like RNG. As an engineer, I was very excited.

To be completely frank, the main problem of Spotfire is that it's being destroyed by Power BI. That's the only problem. Otherwise, the product is superior from a technical perspective, but they are victim of an extremely aggressive strategy from Microsoft and therefore, become far too expensive because Power BI is free in organizations. That's Spotfire's biggest weakness.

Another thing is the realtime boarding capabilities and the integration with other realtime streaming products should be much easier. The handling of realtime data could be improved.

I would also improve the consumption of realtime data. I'd also probably improve integration with the RNG, and generally speaking, the data science techniques. I think this is where Spotfire can still play a role and be competitive compared to Power BI. Other than that, I love the product, but I don't know how they can survive the offensive of Microsoft commercially.

I have been using this solution for around six years.

I've had projects running for a while and have no particular complaints about stability. Originally, Spotfire is an offline analysis tool, so stability isn't a huge issue. It's much more of an issue when you do realtime statistical treatment with realtime data . That's where I mentioned they have to improve. 

Tipco is a huge company and they have this policy of acquiring software all the time, which is an interesting yet aggressive policy for development. The problem when you keep acquiring companies is that at some point, you have to integrate the products. That's where things tend to take a lot of time. Afterwards, the integration can sometimes be wishy washy and I think this is what happens in the realtime space. 

Spotfire has identified that there was something in the market that was asking for the consumption of realtime data and the provision of realtime dashboards and analysis. What they've done is half integrate another product that they bought and I found this strategy weak. I think this is where the stability will really become a critical factor, but overall, I would say so far so good.

I think scalability is pretty good. I've seen customers running thousands of reports. For reaching good scalability, it also depends on your network architecture and whether you host it on cloud or not. I would say there's nothing in the software that really worries me, but you can always mess it up.

Overall it's quite good. As a partner, there's a big difference because my request for assistance is usually prioritized over regular customers. I probably had access to the hotline, but it's very clear that when you're a partner and you meet the commercial team, they know that you're pre-sale, and so you get a lot better answers from them than you do from the hotline. Overall, I have nothing to complain about, but I'm not blown away either.

It depends how you deploy it and the use case. If you just want to install it on your computer and get going for self-service usage, that's a matter of five minutes, so that's extremely easy. If you want to deploy it at the corporate level with the web server, that can be more complex. For a corporate analysis solution or corporate dashboarding solution, it's more complex, but also not unexpected.

When you've installed or deployed the software in your company, you're still nowhere; that's probably the IT department's problem generally speaking: Is the product installed? Is someone doing something with it? Is there the necessary skillset around it? Are your engineering and technical personnel able to operate it on their own? That seems to be the least of their worries, but this is why you pay for the software. 

I would say that in terms of a deployment strategy, everyone will do the ITPs. If you have an IT person in your company that knows half of what they're doing, there's no problem. You manage. 

Nevertheless, putting a correct strategy around the use of business intelligence tools in the organization, it's relevant to ask: What will we use it for? What kind of training will we provide? What kind of algorithm will we develop on top of that? I told you that as an integration with the RNG, for example,which is extremely powerful, I think these are big questions that people often forget.

They think that just by a data science or dashboarding tool, results will come out of it miraculously, but no results come out of the software. Results come out of people using the software, so I would say the challenge in terms of a deployment strategy and the time it takes is a complete function of the ambition level that you have. We can deploy it in one night, but then it has no impact on the company and if you really want to make an impact on the company, then I believe that you are looking at deployment activities, which are much longer. Particularly after the deployment, you should probably do something to maintain the life cycle of the product. So I would say an ideal deployment is deployment that never ends.

To summarize, I would say from a technical point of view, deployment should be the least of your problems. It can be easy. Nevertheless, using a quick strategy around the use of business intelligence, that's something different. I believe that all decision makers should really focus their attention on this and not on something as silly as whether the solution is easy to install.

I would rate this solution an eight or nine out of ten.

It's one of the best products I've worked with in my career. Especially in the engineering, oil and gas, or chemistry fields. A long time ago, you found a lot of niche software players, which were terrible software. Being able to introduce something modern like Spotfire was really fresh air for us. It's an excellent product. The ability to customize as well is really good. 

Particularly for us, because as a service company, we tend do things that are a bit more advanced than what the production people do and therefore, I was very pleased with it. 

My daily tasks are related to data mining and TBICO Spotfire is one of the products that I use. We are a small group of geologists operating in a niche area who are analyzing geochemical data. Our backend database is MySQL and we use products such as Power BI, Tableau, and Spotfire to display data for the geochemists.

If we get dirty data in, we might use Spotfire to see what it is we actually have. This might include how many files we have and the file types, in the case where we have this massive data purchase or something similar.

We use Spotfire to slice and dice and see what we're looking at. But then at the end of the day, we end up just taking the data and loading it into Oracle tables. After we have figured out what we have, we might connect Spotfire to those data tables, to better display the different analyses that a geochemist needs.

The out-of-the-box features are simple and easy to use across the board. Some of the features that we use are bar charts, pie graphs, and cross tables. They are simple dashboards to show the different metrics on the data, and sometimes data quality, as well.

Personalising Spotfire, as a whole, is painful and is something that could be made easier. As a result, I'm not doing much coding.

The background process is something that I find difficult to work with, although that may be more related to company policy and procedures than it is to Spotfire. Specifically, having it on the servers for development and then moving to acceptance in production is not user-friendly. I understand why it's got to be done, so you don't mess up anything that's in production, but to me, it's a little bit antiquated. I think it could be more robust in how you pull in your data, from a database level. Using data in spreadsheets is very simple but when you start connecting to databases, it can be clunky and difficult to do.

I have been working with TIBCO Spotfire for approximately six years. My company has had a license for much longer than that.

Spotfire is stable, although sometimes it is slow. That may be related to the company and how the data is being rendered, and where our servers sit for the databases. I don't think that its' a fault of Spotfire because I've seen it work with real-time data really fast. It seems, however, the implementation can cause it to lag a little bit.

This is a scalable solution if you're not trying to customize it too much. If you can use what it comes with out of the box, I think it's very scalable and very simple to use. It's when you start having to make custom coding adjustments and whatnot, that it could be a pain because then only one person can fix it typically, and that's the person who initially worked on the coding.

We don't connect directly with TIBCO because we have our own technical support in the company. 

We also use Microsoft Power BI and Tableau to create views of the data.

As of last year, my company has been starting to move away from using Spotfire and focus on Power BI, only because it is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. This means that it's easier to integrate. However, for now, we are still using both products.

Spotfire X was a big improvement from the previous versions. They now have an export option to PowerPoint, which was a large pain point in the past. Generally, this is not something I use personally. I create a web service and I give the links out for people to access it directly.

The initial setup is pretty simple. All we have to do is request a license, download it, and start using it. You can start bringing spreadsheets in, for example.

We are a small group within the company and we have dedicated groups within our organization for Spotfire support. We just tell them that we need a place on a server and they set it up. For the most part, deployment is straightforward.

We have an in-house team for deployment and maintenance, and they provide technical support to the rest of the company. It used to be a large team and they are very helpful. My understanding is that there was a reorganization and we now have only two people who are contacts for Spotfire support. At least in the past, if we needed help then it was easy and they were great.

Additional people have been brought in to assist us with Power BI, although I have not yet been using it regularly.

The cost is a few hundred dollars per user per year.

As a data analyst, I am not in operations and don't have a say in which products we use.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Spotfire is to first speak with TIBCO to make sure that your data model and everything that operates in the background is implemented correctly. If it is done improperly then it may render slowly.

Don't assume that you know everything, the way we do in my company. There are times when we get something new and because it has to be done our way, we end up breaking it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We have two primary use cases. One is for the data exploration and the second is for deploying the dashboards for the specific business use cases.

There are two features that I have found most valuable. One is its ability to customize the dashboards when it comes to the evaluation. If you have to deploy visualizations you can actually do it based on the business needs and even customize them for the business prep centers. Other tools are not as flexible as Spotfire's ability to integrate HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

The second feature is its ability to handle a large amount of data, which is also something very unique about it.

In terms of what could be improved, when it comes to data manipulation there are features which are good, but one of the features which has really been missing in Spotfire is an offline ability for data manipulation. In Qlik you are able to simply manipulate the member's data, manage it, and build data through SQL queries. This means you can actually do your data modeling offline. If we had this type of capability in Spotfire that would make it a very superior product with respect to the others in the market. Now it is hard to manage offline.

You really have to rely on the external sources to do the entire data modeling for the exploration or for the visualization development. But what Qlik has also started offering is that they have a wider capability where you can actually have offline data and do your data modeling through the SQL. This means you can actually manipulate a member's data before you utilize it in a visualization. So you really don't have to rely a lot on the enterprise source, and you can manage data in your own source and then deploy the dashboard supporting this.

Additionally, support could be improved. Lastly, the third feature which I would really recommend improving is the diagnosing and monitoring tools, which are really missing in the overall portfolio of Spotfire.

I have been using TIBCO Spotfire for five, six years.

It is pretty stable.

TIBCO Spotfire is a scalable product. 

We have more than 3,000 people using it.

We do plan to use it more in the future. We really recommend the new capabilities and really try to simplify it as we go.

We have access to the technical support, though from a technical support perspective, I do feel this is one of the areas which can be improved. There is not a lot of self-service available in the technical admin support. That means that for almost every single issue you may have to rely on the technical support because the online materials are not enough.

Before using TIBCO Spotfire we were using Power BI. However, we were really not able to find a good scalable solution with Power BI.

The initial setup was easy. It took roughly a couple of days.

There was a team for the initial setup. A couple of engineers.

TIBCO Spotfire is an expensive product.

I would totally recommend this product. 

On a scale of one to ten I would rate TIBCO Spotfire an eight.