TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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.

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.

• Ability to handle large amounts of data from multiple sources and quickly visualize it for users.
• Connectivity to widely used data management (MDM) solutions in place in most organizations
• Easy to train users in how to use the dashboards, visualizations and maximize their performance as users

From a safety standpoint, I have developed visualizations that have highlighted trends in past history. When identified, they helped the business determine where to put more focus and consciousness in operations so that they can reduce injuries.

I would like to see improved mobile capabilities.

I would like more functionality in the formatting of the pages so that they can have more of an application with the look and feel of other custom-developed solutions with the organization.

I have used it for eight years.

I have never had issues with deployment or scalability, TIBCO offers different versions to fit customers’ needs (desktop, web based, etc.).

Technical support is average; however, the user conferences that are held regionally and nationally provide a lot of value.

I previously used Oracle OBIEE. We switched because:

• Development time was too long.
• Overhead of resources required to maintain it was too high.
• Spotfire will offer very fast enterprise data and visualization capabilities in a short amount of time.

Initial setup is straightforward; there are downloads that you perform in order that make it easier than it used to be, but it is not quite plug and play for an enterprise implementation.

I implemented it with an in-house team.

You may not need one, but establish a contact number at TIBCO for extra help should you encounter problems.

ROI depends on the maturity and adoption of the organization. Spotfire can have an exponentially higher ROI than what it costs, if implemented well, adoption programs are in place and users are trained.

Users can license and download directly from the TIBCO website and be active within minutes.

I highly recommend Spotfire.