TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

At my previous company, I was both a developer and a software administrator. It was an upstream oil and gas company — exploration, drilling, and completion. Due to some financial issues (not being able to compete well in the market), they shut down their Houston office and laid off quite a few people. 

Spotfire started putting a lot of high-quality, online videos out there that are specifically geared toward things that clients are looking for. This is great because no one wants to sign up for a $2,000 training class or watch three hours of videos just to figure out something that can be explained in 10 minutes. I think that's a great thing.

When Spotfire released version 10.0, they came out with a brand new UI and made some pretty drastic changes to the user interface. With the first release of anything, there's always a lot of criticism and room for improvement. Still, the design of the UI could be improved. There are small issues like file name extensions that are hard to read, for example. They really improved their database connectivity. In version 10.0, they added a lot of great improvements that consumers have wanted for a long time. Regardless, some basic design changes in the UI would make it a little more intuitive for users.

In terms of the next release, from a data analytics standpoint, I think that it's a pretty strong product. I know they just made some recent improvements — now they have a Python programming interface in Spotfire. That was one of the things that I had wanted for a long time.

Some minor changes to the user interface to make navigation a little more intuitive would be nice. Other than that, the solution is really good. 

There's an online Spotfire community that is underused. I used to log into it a lot to try and have discussions with other users. I don't know if it's just that the users are working on so many different things that sometimes they're just not interested in talking with other users, but I think the user community should be promoted more. There's a lot of valuable information out there but it's up to the consumers to make use of it. I think that's something that they should promote more.

I also think they should limit the number of releases. I'm not a fan of their release schedule; sometimes they may have two types of releases at the same time. Basically, they have both short-term and long-term releases. They put out a long-term release every year to year-and-a-half. At the same time, they'll have five or six short-term releases in between. Sometimes, the short-term releases will have a critical upgrade that clients may want, but often, the short releases aren't supported as well as the long releases. So, if you're going to upgrade to a short-term release, you have to be willing to upgrade often.

My previous company had over 600 users. By the time I would get one version into production, we literally went right back into putting the next release into development — testing and getting it ready for production. I worked a lot with people in various business groups to help with testing and user acceptance — it got to the point where it was requiring a lot of them. Some of these people were engineers and they would say, "We can't be putting all this time into helping you test." So, we had to work around that. The release schedule is something I would change.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten.

There are other really good products on the market, but I haven't seen anything that is light years ahead of Spotfire as far as capabilities go. It's been around for a long time; It has been a leading product years before many of these other products were even on the market. They have a great history.

I have almost 10 years of experience with Spotfire.

From a scalability standpoint, I would say it's pretty fantastic. Not that Spotfire itself is massively scalable. It's a pretty impressive analytical tool for developing visualizations and sharing them across the enterprise with your organization or business group.

TIBCO has built out an entire analytical platform. You can use Spotfire to connect to data sources, but let's say you wanted to stream data, in real-time; in this case, you may be working with almost a terabyte of data a day. Presently, there's really not any analytical application out there on the market that's going to do that very well, but you can scale with a data stream from TIBCO, which helps you access your data in real-time.

It really doesn't matter how much data you're working with, but they also have the business enterprise and TIBCO data analytics. TIBCO data analytics just opens up the door for any kind of truly advanced analytics that you're working with. You can insert real machine learning code right into your analysis.

Technical support was always very responsive. They were probably more responsive than I was — there were a couple of times when I even had to open up an issue with them. If you don't get back to them within a certain number of days, they'll change the status of your service request. They'll put it on a temporary hold and then they'll close it out eventually. They're very responsive.

I wasn't there when they set it up, but I did perform two upgrades myself while I was there, and it was fairly easy. It's changed a lot over the years and it's actually become quite easy to install and to get up and running. Roughly 10 years ago, when I did the first implementation, it was really difficult. There were five of us sitting around a table with a 300-page PDF that we had printed out — it took us an entire weekend to figure it out. Now, if you wanted to, you could actually install Spotfire in the cloud and actually have it up and running, connecting with data, in an hour or less. To me, that's pretty impressive.

licensing-wise, I didn't really have any involvement.

In my role as a consultant, I would work with clients and, from a software evaluation standpoint, I would say, "Let's take a look at your business requirements. Let's see what's the right tool for you. Should you go with something that's easy-to-use, right out of the box? Or do you want something that's a little more advanced, based on your users and your business requirements?" Quite often, because it is very scalable and it suits many different company sizes and business requirements, Spotfire was the right choice.

I would definitely recommend Spotfire. If you're considering using Spotfire, just be sure to implement and scale it properly. Too often, many companies will buy a fantastic product, but they have very immature users. If you're going to buy a strong product, you need to put a strong emphasis on training and developing your users. As a consultant, I've seen a lot of companies that say, "Spotfire can't do this."  Sure enough, after I'd look into it, the answer was always undertrained users.

We use it for reporting and metrics.

We used it pretty heavily in gathering data, which goes to our VPs. They are able to base their next revenue planning based on this metric. So, it has been invaluable.

It does very well at collecting metrics and giving us concise reports based on what we need.

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. We want something that is easier to get over to AWS.

Its stability has been good. We experienced crashes a few versions back, but the current version that we're on has been stable.

We are heavily into AWS; the company is about 75% into AWS. 

We have over 10,000 employees with about 5000 active users of the product.

I would recommend evaluating it against other products. When I got onto the team, we didn't evaluate it against any other products. It was the one that was already in-house, so we went with it. If somebody wants to evaluate it for use, I would recommend that they have two or three other products that they could compare it against.

We use it a lot with TIBCO EMS. It works relatively well with that. It is able to gather performance metrics on it.

We are using the non-AWS version.

Very generally it's used for meshing together many data sources and doing data visualization.

Using Spotfire, it's very quick to see insights in your data.

The ability to connect to many different data sources is one of the key features. The other would then be the different ways in which that data can be visualized.

The key thing for me is to see that the product continues to add more types of visualizations. On top of that, I would like more easy-to-implement analytical algorithms. At the moment they include things like forecasts and regressions. They need to add a lot more of these types of things to the product because not everyone is a data scientist.

It's extremely stable. There may be some criticism, as a client, about it not being made available on a Mac, as opposed to just Windows. But on the Windows platform, it is fairly stable.

Some of the biggest customers have 40,000 users, so it is extremely scalable.

Technical support is exceptional. I think it has extremely good coverage with multiple levels, Bronze, Silver, and Gold, ranging from standard support through to 24/7 mission-critical.

As a reseller, the typical vendors would always be Tableau, QlikView, Spotfire, and maybe in that mix would be Microsoft Power BI.

When looking into a product like this, you really need to think not just about what your requirements are today, but to think about it from a requirements point of view for 18 months or two years down the track.

Also, think about whether or not you just want to do BI dashboards or real analytics. If it's the latter, then Spotfire's the tool for you. If not, if your company isn't ready for analytics, then you're probably better off getting a cheaper visualization tool.

When selecting a vendor the most important criteria are 

• credibility
• time in the marketplace
• service support
• geographical footprint.

I would rate Spotfire at eight out of 10. I still think there is work to done on the visualization side of things. And there is also work to be done on the statistical algorithms.

Creating reports and dashboards for end users to get insights of business fetching data from multiple data sources. 

It is one of the best BI tools that gives deep insights into our data along with analytical exposure and statistical services.

Data Connections, Information Links, WMS and TMS layer in Map Chart, In-Memory Analysis, Scheduled Updates, Support to IronPython, R-Script, S+, MATLAB for analytical capabilities.

With every new release of Spotfire comes up with new features which help the user experience like theme based visualizations, recommendations engine for visualizations, waterfall and KPI chart, annotations, comments on the charts, combining data for categorical values is very useful, nested aggregations and ODATA connectors are very important features which would edge to the dashboards.

More appealing in user interface like other tools. Sometimes users complain of only basic visualizations availability compared to other tools. These are available from third party but if those could be added in Spotfire itself then it would be great.

Nothing significant.

Easy to scale

Customer Service:

Good

Technical Support:

It's good but need improvement.

It was straightforward to setup the Spotfire environment provided you have some knowledge how the thing works in system but few things need lot of time and expertise.

In house team

Pricing and licensing are high compared to other tools, but ROI is great.

One of the best data visualization and analytical tools I have worked with and would definitely suggest others to evaluate and go for Spotfire to get the best ROI.

• Text areas
• R and automation services
• Schedule updates

We were able to automate manual reports, which we then email a report copy to the user's mailbox instead of someone manually creating the report and sharing it in bigger user groups.

• PDF export
• Print capability and trigger-based events
• Real time reporting

Five years.

Data refresh got stuck few times.

No, we have 700GB of Web Player Nodes. We have never consumed more than 10% of the available memory.

Excellent.

Yes, we had challenges with the firewall, but those were internal. Expect the rest of the setup to be quite straightforward.

Scale the servers based on need and follow standards in developing reports. Reuse information links, columns, filters, etc.

One of the main features is integrated statistical analysis. At time of first purchase, presentation of tree maps was important, but competitors have closed that gap.

The same way any visualization product has improved things.

Compared to competitors, the UI is quite dated.

Personally, I have used it for six years. In this organization, I have used it for three years.

The server product can have stability issues for certain use cases. The desktop product is fine.

There were no scalability issues.

We did not try technical support.

We are a large organization, and so have Tibco and most of its competitors deployed in one place or another. So there hasn’t been a “switch” as much as an addition.

The desktop product installation is straightforward. Don’t know about the server.

Negotiating large/enterprise licenses has been a trial. The Tibco sales teams have been very difficult to work with - ignoring requests, misrepresenting level of demand, etc. Careful due diligence is required with any (and I do mean any) representation made during the sales/contracting experience.

We evaluated all of them.

Keep an eye on competitors - the usual suspects like Tableau and Qlik as well as tools like Alteryx. There are still use cases for teams/applications where Tibco is a clear choice based on features and price, but the gaps are narrowing quickly. Add to this that your teams and processes are maturing, and may be maturing more quickly than the product suite deployed for them. It’s a mistake to just renew current products as, in many cases, the cost to change is coming down as well.

Data discovery is very simple.

Improved data wrangling (7.8)

Building a dashboard is very fast, even if you have limited IT skills.

You can retrieve data from a database without using SQL and integrate data from different sources (Excel, CSV, database, and so on).

Predictive Models incorporated in the dashboard(TERR-R-S-Matlab)

Integration with Tibbr

1. Add more visualization types. The number of charts available out of the box in Spotfire can be enhanced. I know there is a Custom Extension, JSViz, to integrate D3 visualizations. Last year I had a look but I remember there were limitations in using this extension and anyway it requires a Java script knowledge.
2. Provide the capability to trigger a Python script on marking change. It's only possible to trigger an R script on marking change. In my experience, considering customers requests and forum discussions it's a feature requested . Using some tricks can be achieved but it should be out of the box.

I used it for 2 years.

Deployment is very simple.

Sometimes the Spotfire client crashes when you test a Python script.

There is an issue with the web player exhibiting the same behavior in all browsers. Sometimes, the property control in the test area is resized or not well displayed.

Scalability improved in the new sw versions (7.5 and higher).

With the new architecture (7.5 and higher) load balancing for the web player is out of the box. Easy setup of spotfire server cluster for fault tolerance.

I had a few issues with the product, and they were quickly solved by the support team.

It is simple in my opinion. If you find any issue: Read the installation manual!!

It's an analytic tool, similar to Tableau. The features that are most valuable to us are:

• Its ability to consume data from about any type of source such as a CSV, SQL, Excel, and text (*.txt) files. Thus, it can consume and collaborate data from a number of different data sources.
• It has the ability to do very sophisticated analysis on the data.
• It has an extremely good graphic ability, so as to present the data in a way that's very meaningful to the end user.

They have good training programs for it, but the learning curve for Spotfire is probably higher than it might be for Tableau.

All of the functionalities are also higher in this product. Spotfire requires a fairly strong commitment from somebody to become a Spotfire developer.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues, as of now.

We didn't use a different solution before. Previously, we have just used Excel, PowerPoint, and other such typical Microsoft Office products.

I'm a good advocate for Spotfire, so I would highly recommend it, with one caution. You have to train developers in it and that will take a fair amount of time and commitment.