TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

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.

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.

The most valuable features of this product, for me, are:

• Applying transformations to data tables: With these transformations, I can make the structure of the data most suitable for answering the user's questions with the visualisations.
• The visualisations: They look very good, are easy to use and can answer almost any business question.

I would like to see the improvements in the following areas:

• The info designer feature: The user interface could be more graphical, it would make it more user friendly and flexible.
• The transformations and insertions of rows and columns: Tables can be created by using transformations and inserting rows and columns. I would like to have more ability to make changes to these transformation and insertions without having to recreate the complete table from scratch.

I have used this solution for three years.

I did not encounter any issues with deployment.

I rate technical support 9/10 (very quick and good response, good level of knowledge).

I previously used IBM Cognos products also as a consultant. I choose Cognos because I thought (and still think) that Cognos is a good product.

I am no real technical consultant, but I found the initial setup pretty straightforward. After installing the software, no enormous or complex configuration is needed.

We implement for our customers and also for customers of TIBCO.

Start small but think big. When you start using the product - regarding setting up authorisation and setting up the library, for instance - work structured and with a kind of policy that is scalable and flexible regarding maintenance.

Driving details visualizations is the most valuable feature of this product to me. One of the greatest strengths of the tool comes from being able to build high-level projects that can be implemented in many ways. In my industry, we are attempting to consolidate analytical tools to give our engineers a few “one-stop shops" rather than each person doing their own work in a bubble. It allows us to collectively write a procedure for data transformation that can accommodate most if not all of our team’s needs.

We are moving away from a single person exploring data and giving presentations towards team exploration of data in a conference room environment.

From what I understand, some of the issues I’ve had have been addressed in 7.0, but my company has not upgraded yet. Layering multiple levels of aggregation is something I’m constantly asked to provide, which has been difficult to do in the versions I have used so far.

I have used the solution for eight years.

Some of the previous versions have had stability issues, but 6.5 appears very stable.

I have run into issues with large datasets (>2M records), and attempting to build relationships between tables for use in a single visualization.

I’ve never been part of the original setup of Spotfire. I’ve worked for four different companies, all of which already had their own server installed. I can say that there hasn’t been much of an issue moving from company to company, other than general organization methodology.

Start small. Tibco tends to push the higher level subscriptions, and want you to buy their server. I’ve found that the base version is a great introduction at a reasonable cost, and allows teams to evaluate whether they want to continue using the product with minimal effort from the IT department (You can just download the base version from the internet and start using it.)

I still currently use a myriad of solutions – it all depends on if I think there will be followup questions asked of the data. Often times, the engineers I work with are not familiar/comfortable with the data, so requests become iterative as projects evolve. There are certainly times where dumping data to Excel and giving a customized pivot table is a better solution because the engineer finds that less daunting.

Make sure you have people dedicated to data quality/analytics. Spotfire isn’t a software package that you can dabble in and make it worth your while. Once you understand how they organize the tools, it is fairly easy to navigate, but things like syntax for expressions/calculations trip people up in their early stages. The reasons to choose Spotfire over other BI tools are that the other tools are more difficult to implement and they will require a significant time investment.

The following features are the most valuable to me:

• Ability to import data from disparate sources and manipulate/transform that data
• Ability to create visualizations that communicate insight
• Integration with R

This application has reduced the amount of time we spend manipulating data in Excel.

Allow insert columns to be changed after the initial operation. Currently, if an insert columns operation needs to be changed, the user must replace the entire table and this could involve significant rework.

Expand the statistical modeling functions.

Allow lines in line charts to be formatted.

I have used this solution for 3.5 years.

I have found that the manuals for deployment can be lacking in detail and explanation. I frequently open help desk tickets when working on installations.

I rate technical support 7/10 and getting better.

I know that we had a vendor team do the initial installation but have done all upgrades and additional product (Stats Services) installations ourselves. Again, the manuals are often lacking in detail and explanation.

Spotfire seems to be more expensive than other tools and negotiating with the vendor can be difficult. They could make purchasing the product a lot easier by being more transparent on pricing and having the same pricing or pricing tiers for all customers. Customers absolutely hate this negotiation process because it is not transparent, and also because the negotiations seem to take a long time. Be transparent and fair.

I have only used Spotfire. Every oil and gas company I have worked for uses it.

The vendor has historically provided two updates per year, although there can be more. In my opinion, updates twice a year with new features is pretty good given the amount of testing required to rollout an updated version of the product.

Also, if you find defects in the software and report them to their HD, they will notify you when hotfixes have been created, and they are pretty good about pushing out hotfixes for known issues.

The following features are the most valuable to me:

• The ability to analyze your data quickly
• Extensibility: Quintus consultants develop QuintusVisuals and custom extensions using the Spotfire SDK.

In a previous job, I implemented a signaling system for calls coming in from the first line support desk. I placed Spotfire on top of a small live data sheet. It reloaded Spotfire with an external script and exported the analysis to HTML. After that, another script (created by a co-worker) ran to extract the contents and place the items in an automated web page, where tabs were switched every couple of seconds.

This tool was even able to run in the Network Operation Center on a big screen.

I'd like to see the following improvements:

• Configuration options (properties screens are too crowded)
• Licensing system: Make it more clear or get rid of the special groups and their special tick boxes that can only activate on that specific group.
• Enhance multiple scales in line and bar charts to grouped scales (group numerical, percentage etc. columns).

I have used this solution for about seven years.

In the recent version of Spotfire, 7.5 or 7.6, I was able to corrupt my webplayer services deployment with no way to restore it. I had to re-install it. Luckily, this is very quick to do.

Technical support provided very fast response times and helpful people. Excellent.

Initial setup was a straightforward process.

Because we are a Spotfire partner, we have the ability to deploy Spotfire in-house.

I tried to evaluate a version of Tableau but it felt hard to configure and not as easy as I’m used to with Spotfire.

It’s a business tool, but it’s always a good thing to have IT stand behind your decision when implementing it.

In my opinion, TIBCO Spotfire is the best tool that really serves the business analysis needs.

• 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.