TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

Three main features:

• Ability to work with many different data sources
• Easy for beginners
• Ability to be extended with R functions

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.

One of my teams uses this for capacity planning. Fairly advanced statistical approaches underlie the analysis, but because Spotfire emphasizes visual approaches, it's easy to communicate out to managers without the stats background.

Setting up data sources: There's a lot of flexibility, but it's easy for users to pick a poor approach and needlessly complicate their sources.

I think most people coming to a tool like Spotfire will be coming from an Excel background. In a standard Excel scenario, you'll have a spreadsheet full of data, and all the manipulation you do on your data will take place within the spreadsheet.

However, Spotfire is built to pull data from sources as needed; basically, with bunches of SQL queries. If a user only knows the standard Excel way, they might try to write one master query to pull all the data in Spotfire, and then do all their manipulation there. In these "Big Data" times, that can result in degraded performance due to memory/processing demands. A better way to use Spotfire is to leverage your database - it can pivot, it can summarize - and using that pre-filtered result joined with subqueries can let Spotfire work with much leaner, faster data.

TIBCO offers training that covers this, and other options as well, but unless the user happens to take that class, or has enough of a database background to already know some of these techniques, they're likely to try the less efficient way, and Spotfire will happily let them go that direction. I would like to see, even without changing the functionality, just adding nudges, maybe more visibility of their extensive help pages, to encourage users to at least consider different ways of pulling data.

I have used it for two years.

I had a deployment issue. There's a component to support automated tasks. Even with TIBCO support, I never was able to get that component to work the way I expected.

Technical support and customer service is 5/10. For technical questions, their support team is responsive and thorough, but their account managers tend to be nonresponsive, and have high turnover.

My organization had already chosen this solution before my involvement.

I didn't see the initial setup, but from administering and upgrading it, it seems a more complicated process than necessary.

TIBCO provides multiple licensing options, but this is an area where their competition is becoming more attractive.

In the process of learning the tool, I did review demos of competing products. The ability to extend Spotfire with R and Python is important to me, and Spotfire was one of the first visual analytics tools to provide that. The competition is narrowing the gap, however.

When evaluating TIBCO Spotfire versus other vendors, or even other Spotfire offerings (e.g., Spotfire Cloud), it's very important to understand what your organization's needs are. Not every tool supports every data source, or visualization technique, and some tools might be more or less appropriate, based on the balance of analysis creators vs analysis consumers.

• R integration using the data function in the Spotfire client
• Bringing data into Spotfire using APIs

It provides a more systematic way of tracking employees and their hours.

• Simple functions like aggregating rows and performing PnL are very complicated
• The limited number of connectors

I have been using it for one year.

We encountered an issue while integrating a Kerberos-secured HBase into Spotfire.

Technical support has good response times; we’re very happy with the support.

Initial setup was complex, as we had to integrate it with a secured Hadoop cluster.

An in-house team implemented it.

Gather the correct requirements and ask for help.

There are many valuable features but Information Designer is one that is more valuable. It gives a data model created, so the user doesn't have to go into the SQL details. There are filters, joins, stored procedure call, parameterized info links, and so on.

It got rid of a static report, there is now no need for multiple reports, and it provides user interaction. A single report serves multiple users, and they can access it via web browser.

Maintenance is greatly reduced.

I would like to see a few more charts and properties, easy integration with HTML design, d3 charts, and custom charts. This would take reporting to new heights in terms of UI and design as report features are plenty. It needs more flexibility in terms of designing a report.

I have been using this solution for five years.

I did not encounter any deployment issues.

They are awesome. Tibco has a support cell and we can raise a ticket that has an SLA for them. Also, there is a large user community and technical information for Spotfire, so there is no issue as such to get assistance.

We used to use SSRS and Excel.

Old versions are static and need a lot of maintenance and repeat work.

Initial setup was straightforward and a guide is available.

I implemented it by myself as I do have implementation knowledge already. My advice is to follow the steps and guidelines. It is all nicely written and proven over a long period of time.

We realize ROI through less maintenance, one-time work, easy accessibility, and less manual work.

Pricing is little on the high side but looking at long-term benefits, the company can bear it.

There are other products in the market but don't go only on sales talk. They will always talk big magical things.

Evaluate first what it has, period.

See the flexibility.

Plan for your needs.

Use the guidelines.

The product’s most valuable feature is its integration with HTML, JavaScript and R, because the integration makes all impossible stuff possible with Spotfire.

Many reports which were tabular in form are now very intuitive after being converted to Spotfire. Also, they are automated, so it saves a lot of effort, time & money.

I would like to have "event-based" automation (without integrating with other tools), e.g., send an email only if some event has occurred.

Even though we can cascade the drop down property control, having a drop down filter would help a lot.

I have been using it for 3.5 years.

Technical support is good.

I have also used Tableau, which is another wonderful tool for creating reports. But Tibco comes with a complete suite of products. Spotfire can be integrated with other tools in the Tibco suite.

I can't say; I’ve never had an opportunity to install & configure the server.

I can't say.

It is worth investing in Spotfire.

I’m not very sure if there is any, but there should be a product with no licensing cost - such as Tableau Reader - that can be used for reading the Spotfire files.

Spotfire is a wonderful product with vast reporting and analytical capability. You must try this solution if you are looking for a tool for developing reports.

Map charts are very powerful and work better than most other in-memory analytical tools.

It offers easy development, easy-to-provide user training, and it even allows power users to do ad-hoc analysis.

I have used Spotfire at several client locations to develop solutions to help their organization make better and more informed business decisions.

My biggest gripe with Spotfire is the lack of customization. Dashboards look stale and boring. No floating objects, floating text, etc. and the way panes resize based on resolution is annoying. Most complaints I have are related to the look and feel of a finished dashboard.

I have used this solution on and off for several years.

I have not encountered any issues with deployment, stability or scalability.

I use the product which my client is using. I personally would choose another tool over Spotfire if it was my choice.

Take other tools into consideration as well. There are a lot of analytical tools and different ones have different strengths.

Spotfire is better than some competitors, but limited in many aspects.

• In-memory analytics
• Integration with SAS, Matlab, R

It has helped our organization become more agile.

• More visualization
• More cross-visualization functionality

I have been using it for seven years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

I previously used MicroStrategy, which is a real BI tool.

Initial setup was complex: report creation, installation, automation, report changes...

An in-house team implemented it.

Data visualization: Spotfire is an incredible, powerful tool capable of creating data analysis "templates" or "dashboards", which can be shared globally and can be used to visualize data to make business decisions.

We have used Spotfire to monitor test equipment utilization worldwide, and are able to respond to testers that have been identified as "down." This type of analysis also reduces costs because, instead of the test facilities purchasing new equipment, we can work on increasing utilization.

Version 7 was recently released, so I am still not familiar with all the features. However, ease of connecting to Oracle databases and parameterizing the database queries would be useful.

I have been using it since June 2011 (five years).

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues.

I can't say; I have not reached out to customer service for Spotfire. However, there is an abundance of knowledge online which I have used to solve problems in the past. The online community is pretty active.

The company I previously worked for used Excel for their data analysis and would not consider paying for Spotfire. But, I highly recommend Spotfire if your data analysis needs are pretty extensive.

It allows users to quickly analyze data from a variety of sources and visualize it with powerful, interactive graphs, and charts. This leads to faster and better decision making, as well as identifying areas to save costs, increase revenue, optimize, etc.

• Intuitive interface: Easy to get started and use features.
• Filtering: Quickly filters to a level of detail that you are interested in.
• Marking: Drills into data, seeing the same data in other charts.
• Data connections: Having the ability to quickly connect to just about any data source.

The Text Area feature needs to be more user-friendly. It is a little clunky to use, and it is difficult to consistently format text. Here are a few suggestions:

• Don't make it pop out when editing the text area.
• Add a feature to easily add tables (without HTML).
• Overall, make it more user-friendly.

It is prone to crashing every now and then for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

Initial setup is straightforward: Just downloaded it from their website (not applicable for large organizations).

The ROI is nearly impossible to calculate. 

The pricing seems competitive and reasonable. The value delivered by the product far exceeds the cost.

I have tried Tableau, but haven't spent much time working with it because my previous organization and current clients use Spotfire. Excel is also a competitor, but Spotfire is significantly better than Excel for data visualization.

I recommend watching some Spotfire demo videos on YouTube, and also downloading the free trial to get a feel for the software.