TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

• Easy data transformations before loading data into Spotfire e.g., pivoting, unpivoting, etc.
• Simplicity of customizing data expressions

Better UX/UI design to make the product look “sexier”. It’s somewhat difficult to add formatting to Spotfire dashboards to make them look nice (e.g. coloring backgrounds of charts, adding floating texts, etc.). This is a bit easier and more customizable in Tableau, and even more customizable in MicroStrategy.

I have been using it for two years.

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

Personally, I have never had to use technical support.

I was not involved in the evaluation.

Compared to Tableau, it is much more powerful in terms of statistics and analytics, but Tableau is more popular, so there is more support for it online. Spotfire is easier to use for an advanced user, while Tableau is easier to use for a beginner user.

The feature most valuable to me is the incorporation of analytical techniques such as K-Means and ETL.

Reporting and dashboarding became quite easy. It is much faster and more robust than other BI or visualisation tools.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• Multiple Interactive Layers
• More Built-In Visualisations.
• Dropdown and Hierarchy Filtering

I have used the solution for two years.

We did not encounter any issues with deployment, stability, or scalability.

Customer service and technical support are good.

I have used Tableau for the same amount of time. Spotfire has its own advantages in transforming data and analytical functions.

The initial setup is complex when you use Spotfire Server.

A vendor team implemented the solution.

It provides a great ROI.

Pricing is just fine.

Interactive Visualizations, allowing us to write scripts to change the outlook of the tool and statistics are the key to this product.

This has allowed us to see real time operational analytics helping us to take timely decisions in correcting the defects and repositioning them in correct mode.

Story Telling features aren't intuitive as much as Tableau and some of the features are segregated

2+ years.

Deployment issues were very minimal.

So far, not any noticed issue on stability.

Few times when the data size got increased , it shuts automatically and restarts in the thick client environment.

It’s good, at least the Tibco Community is active and very helpful.

9/10

I haven’t used any other reporting tool as my present organization using Spotfire exclusively for it.

It was implemented in-house.

I know that other products were evaluated but I don't know what they were.

Know the complete tool by going through all the help files available. Feel free to play with this product with no limitations to the imagination. It makes it possible to give us factual insights, helps us to take a right decisions transforming our business.

The best features are its malleability; it can be manipulated using IronPython, JavaScript, HTML/CSS & jQuery, etc.

It is being used in a number of ways within the organisation, from internal financial analysis to products and services we sell to our clients.

I have used it for ~18 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

I have not had to use technical support that much, save for when I first started learning the software. The service I got then was very good/positive.

We have used a number of solutions (as the product is used in many areas of the company). In my previous role, we replaced Cognos with Spotfire and the benefits were plentiful, including but not limited to:

• Improved types of reporting/visualisations
• Significantly more malleable than Cognos
• Advanced analysis features

I believe the admin/installation was not as straightforward as other software. However, I wasn’t directly involved in that.

Many other software products were reviewed; the decision to proceed with Spotfire was made at executive level.

Find experts in Spotfire; perhaps get some consultancy to fast-track your knowledge. We are lucky enough to have internal expertise to fulfill that requirement.

• 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.

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.

• 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.

• Being able to open multiple data sources
• Ease of creating visualizations

It did not improve the way my organization functions. We have implemented a different solution to meet our need.

I’d like to see a more easily embedded version because that’s our need.

I used it for five years (different versions).

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

Technical support is excellent.

Initial setup with version 3.5 was very difficult, partly because we were embedding the Spotfire Web Player API and using custom authentication.

Implementation was done in-house.

We don’t charge for the Spotfire reports individually. It is difficult to calculate ROI, but the product is considered to be expensive.

We originally chose this product as a tool for our SaaS offering, but its embedding features and level of complexity for a multi-tenant situation were prohibitive.

It is great for enterprise use.