TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

The quick data mash-up and manipulation and the visualization of large amounts of data.

Spotfire allows me to combine data from disparate data sources quickly and to investigate if my joins are appropriate visually. Additionally, the data transformations available when bringing in the data allow for quick changes such as pivoting and unpivoting, data type change, and renaming of columns. I am also able to load in large amounts of data within Spotfire and slice and dice this data as desired. I’ve had over 50 million rows of data in a single file and was able to create drillable visualizations with the entire data set.

Due to the creation of information links directly against our ArcGIS database feature classes, we are able to have live updated interactive shapefiles shared across the company.

We are also able to create visualizations in an interactive (investigative) dashboard combining data from multiple databases. These dashboards can serve somewhat as a self-service investigative tool by our team members to answer questions they might have about a particular issue.

I believe the number one feature that needs improvement is the ability to edit the data table construction/modification steps after the fact, similar to the Microsoft Power Query interface. Although you can prototype quickly in Spotfire, if you’ve made a mistake in building your table, you often times have to start from scratch to fix your error. Being able to modify these steps would greatly enhance the data preparation ability of Spotfire.

Also, further control over the stylization of shapes and shapefiles would be beneficial (e.g., dashed lines in shapefiles, different fill patterns rather than solid, etc.).

I have been using it for four years.

As far as deployment, everything I have experienced has been ok. We did have some issues in getting everything set up with Kerberos authentication and had to work with Tibco quite a bit on how to configure everything properly.

The stability is pretty good. However, if you have a decent-sized data set (maybe 100 columns by a few hundred thousand rows) and you create a lot of complex visualizations, sometimes the program will crash on you. As there is no auto-save feature, this can cause an issue sometimes.

I can’t really speak to the scalability issues as I haven’t been involved with that.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d say customer service is a 9. Their customer service representatives are usually extremely responsive and knowledgeable. For more complicated issues, they will schedule WebExes to facilitate a more efficient customer service experience. Furthermore, they are good at adding your requests as enhancement requests if the feature in question doesn’t exist.

I switched from using Excel to Spotfire about four years ago. At that time, I was not part of any other program evaluations. I was just provided with Spotfire.

Currently, I have worked with Power Query, PowerPivot, Power Maps, and Power BI and find them to be useful tools, especially for a reduced cost (sometimes free). However, I would classify these solutions as SpotfireLite. For many users at a company, the Power Suite would probably be suitable for general data investigation. Yet, you will reach a point at which the Power Suite cannot achieve the same functionality in such a controllable way as Spotfire. E.g., trend analysis, box plots, easy drillability, etc.

Being able to create dashboards on the fly while stakeholders give requirements in real-time is extremely valuable in advertising. Creating dashboards with high interactivity and drilling down with record sets of multi-millions of rows is very fast. Stake holders would have experience a very long lag with similar tools on the market.

Spotfire also has a sky-is-the-limit extensibility to it that is very impressive. I can say yes to almost anything a stakeholder asks for and be able to deliver.

There is a bevy of advanced analytics tools included that only SAS can compete with.

Our organization utilizes Spotfire in many ways, we have had major success in using Spotfire for resource utilization and project management as well as with big data in website analytics.

We have demonstrated creating tools using advanced analytics in Spotfire that our analytics team can run and get the information needed to provide insights extremely fast.

Some of the syntax for custom expressions can be complicated and the learning curve for advanced work is steep.

Training is only offered by Tibco and there are not many courses for advanced usage. There are a few internet blogs and community forums I can turn to, but I would like to see more training options available.

The only stability problems we have encountered are due to the anti-virus software running on the servers, but it is very rare and runs 24x7 for months without any intervention.

The product is very scalable. If server resources are running low, we can spin up a virtual server and create a new node to help share the burden.

Technical support can be a slow process involving email threads and scheduling screen share meetings, but they usually solve the problem in the end.

Implemented in house.

We evaluated Tableau and PowerBI

Spotfire is a very impressive solution and I would highly recommend it.

.NET SDK, IronPython and R integration

We are BI Consultants and this tool is by far the most complete software for data analysis. It has helped many organizations to analyze, predict next trends and report findings using interactive dashboards. One of the best features is the capability to export the analysis to make it run in a web browser without loosing the core interactive and filtering functionality making it available to anyone without having to install any software. This characteristic can represent in huge savings in custom web application programming efforts.

The look and feel is not very customizable out of the box, which is the cherry on the cake when it comes to analazing data. If you are looking for a nice looking sexy reporting tool, this is not it but I doubt you will find one with the brains and sophistication Spotfire has.

6+ years in different projects and 2 years doing full time Spotfire consulting

As any other software, deployment has its challenges, but once the server is up and running, it is reliable stable. If you follow the well written Spotfire documentation, you should be good to go.

Issues come and go by the Spotfire development team via the hot fixes and constant version updates. No major issues with stability from my end. If there are any, the issues are addressed quickly.

They have new version releases twice a year, which is hard to keep up with the latest version since it requires migration efforts from the IT admins. If you do not keep up to date, in a few years Spotfire will no longer support your outdated version. Another issue is that once you convert and old version analysis to a new version, you can no longer save it as an old version, but that is rarely the case to be backward compatible.

I am a technical guy, but according to the business, they are very responsive and generous.

They have a strong Spotfire community where they discuss technical issues. My experience with technical support is limited.

I was born with Spotfire so I never "switch" but I tried other tools, however it is hard to compare apples to apples.

With the right technical skills, especially in reading and following instructions, you should not have any issues installing and configuring the Spotfire Server. For the client, it is straightforward.

We are Spotifre consultants, so we are that vendor team that implements Spotfire to our customers.

I do not have that figure

It really depends on the complexity of the client. Each project and client are different hence, each each implementation will have a different setup cost.

No

If you are looking for an analysis tool, this is the one. It has great features. It is also great for interactive dashboards that can save huge web development work. A 3 months web application sashboard project, even with third party controls to consume data from a database can be done in a couple of hours with Spotfire.

Also, I have a technical blog that helps developers extend Spotfire beyond its out of the box features http://spotfired.blogspot.com

• 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.

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.

It is difficult to identify the most valuable features as it typically depends on the project. I would say that the feature that is a ‘must have’ for all projects is the Details on Demand. This feature allows me to immediately identify the details associated with a visualization without having to create query against it.

Most currently, I have been leveraging scatterplots, geographical mapping, and linear regression visualizations.

I have produced numerous models on customer segmentation, leveraging cross-tab; summary tables; scatterplots; k-means clustering; and custom filtering. One such tool has essentially allowed us to create real-time custom segments of customers based on similar customer attributes. Historically, we used P$YCLE codes for segmenting but now we can create 10-13 segments on the fly based on our own customer data.

Spotfire needs to allow for more of a database feel when using multiple data files. In order to use more than one file in a visualization (e.g., customer and customer sales history), the user has to build relationships between the tables on a one-to-one basis. Some visualizations allow the user to pull data from multiple tables while others are limited. Building the relationships between tables also feels somewhat clunky. Much of the power behind the Details on Demand (DOD) feature is adversely impacted by only being able to view details for the source table. This means that data contained within related tables (by way of the previously built relationships) cannot be previewed through the DOD unless the user inserts columns of the related table(s) into the source table. This inserting procedure is also somewhat clunky and leads to manipulating the original source file.

I have been using the Spotfire application for about two years.

I have not encountered any deployment, stability or scalability issues. Spotfire is a robust visual analytics platform capable of crunching a lot of data. Because the processing is in-memory, users are only limited by how much memory that they have on their system.

Technical support is exemplary.

I have used other so-called analytics tools in the past but Spotfire buries most others. Even Microsoft Power BI is unable to compete with the ease of the Details on Demand feature available within Spotfire.

Setup was simple.

We implemented on our own.

Pricing is competitive, as it relates to most other enterprise-wide applications.

The UI is very easy to pick up and learn. I would also say that people considering Spotfire should preview the predictive analytics component. It is really smooth and provides the necessary statistical tools to help build forecasting models.

• It has the best types of visualisations.
• We can do lot of scripting for better analysis.

I am giving an answer that considers one scenario. For example, we have health care client. They need their standards as high as possible all the time. For that reason, they want to know their drug risk level calculation for every time zone throughout the world. I developed one dashboard that can show them their drug risk level and calculate new risks, etc., whenever they required.

Room for improvement is in comparison with another tools. I need to see more options that do not require scripting in the tool, and I need more enhancements on the statistical server side. The reason is that for some every-day, simple things that are directly available as options in other tools, we need to script them in Spotfire.

I have been using this solution for the past two-and-a-half years.

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

Technical support is really good. For every TIBCO product, there is a community where we can post our questions and get answers from experts from throughout the world.

I worked for three months on Cognos. Compared to it, Spotfire is easy to learn and we can develop wonderful visualisations.

In Cognos, it took too much time to run the reports. In Spotfire, it takes a lot less time.

The server setup and all remaining installations are very easy. There are many sources in Google to get solutions for our queries and also many docs exist from TIBCO.

I have implemented everything on my office machine. I would like to suggest that if we are not able to provide the exact solution for a user’s needs, then we have many options in this tool to provide the best solution.

Those who are willing to make analytics easier with better understanding, this is the best tool and it is the easiest tool to learn quickly.

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.