TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

Visualization is the most valuable feature. Visualizations help us dissect data more and spot outliers more easily.

We have a dashboard set up with Spotfire to show risk metrics across the firm for senior management.

Their mobile solution (i.e. to use on mobile devices) and export functions are relatively weak. Spotfire templates are typically designed and mocked up on PC and then got rolled out to users, who in most cases require the capabilities to view them on both PCs and mobile devices. Due to real estate issues, the PC versions wont’ fit well on the latter. Spotfire doesn’t offer easy solutions for the transition yet. Separate templates tailored to smaller screens have to be set up manually by users.

I have been using Tibco Spotfire for about four years.

We have not had any stability issues.

We have not had any scalability issues.

Technical support is medium. They don’t have a user hotline to call. Any technical issue will have to be either directed to consultants or logged in a ticket on the web.

Setup was straightforward. Users can use the product straight out of box.

I was not involved in pricing and licensing.

We evaluated MicroStrategy.

It is a great tool. Compared to other products on the market, Spotfire is designed for enterprise-level solutions. The key, however, to fully utilize the tool is to have an open/transparent data infrastructure to feed into the tool.

The ability to create different types of analyses with ease is the product’s most valuable feature.

It gave business insights by exploring their data.

Exporting to Excel, PDF, and PowerPoint should be easier.

I have used it for five years.

The server can become overloaded and cause it to crash.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Tibco is always helpful with problems.

I did not previously use a different solution.

The inital setup can be complex if you have to install and configure the server.

Spotfire might be expensive, but it brings many tools to the table.

TIBCO Spotfire can connect to many different data sources in order to acquire data, from many vendors such as SAP, Oracle, IBM, or even just local files.

It can work with data using in memory mode, this makes the loading process faster.

It is easy to customize, and extendable with custom functions.

A very useful API is provided in order to integrate it easily with any web application.

The developing and runtime environment are very stable. The TIBCO Spotfire architecture environment is not complex. However, not all the runtime components are multiplatform. To be exact, the component whose purpose is to render the data in a web browser can be installed only on Microsoft machines. This is a very big limitation from this point of view.

The first approach was in 2010. I have used TIBCO Spotfire in four or five different projects as of 2016.

The TIBCO Spotfire product is really stable. No relevant issues have been encountered.

Most of the time the TIBCO Spotfire dashboard is used by business users. It was very common for them to notify us regarding weird behavior in business data patterns that was always ending with a discovery of bugs on the backend applications.

Technical support was always very good and fast. Always leading to a resolution of the problem immediately.

Together with TIBCO, my previous company was a partner of SAS. Recently, SAS provided a BAM and BI solution, but personally I have found it not comparable to Spotfire: huge memory consumption, no API available, not customizable.

The initial setup is quite easy, a few steps to perform before the application is ready.

A little bit more complex is the configuration of SSO, but the documentation is covering all the scenarios in a very clear way.

Implementation with TIBCO Spotfire consists basically of understanding the business requirements, and transforming them into readable dashboards and diagrams. Most of the time, in my case, implementation was made by a one-man team.

TIBCO Spotfire is a new challenge, very different from any typical implementation a developer used to do. Most of the time, it consists of understanding the data. Very often, that requires direct contact with the business department of the customer.

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.

• Information links, though a little complex, really make connecting to data sources reliable.
• The predictive data analytics in Spotfire 7.0 make it super easy to build a report on the fly.

Spotfire is great for data visualization.

Backend administration of the application can be difficult. There are constant upgrades, but it would be better to do just releases for smaller changes.

I have been using it for one year.

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

Technical support is average.

We have a very easy and straightforward way of installing Spotfire at our company. Since it is a self-service tool, it is available for everyone via our IT store.

Spotfire is an easy-to-use yet powerful tool. Though the administration can get tricky and a little difficult, it is worth it for the efficiency and optimization it provides for our users. Overall, it is a stable and powerful application.

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.

• Data on demand
• JSS and HTML customization

It has allowed us to be able to host client and web on same server.

I have used it for three years.

The server crashes at times with plugins.

Technical support is 8/10.

Initial setup was simple.

Use it for all of your analytical reports.

Real time analytics: TIBCO Spotfire links to the database and the dashboard updates automatically, which is great. You don’t have to export a CSV file to get a dashboard.

The client where I have implemented TIBCO Spotfire was using it to understand calls received on their call centre. With the analytics provided, they were able to understand when during the week / day they receive most of the calls to then take action and get the right number of agents.

I would say that the implementation of the product could be much easier that it is at the moment. It is a complex process at the moment to set up TIBCO Spotfire with your database; not always straightforward.

I have been using it for six months.

The initial setup is supposed to be straightforward, but I found that there is often some glitch in the setup that requires thought.

TIBCO Spotfire provides an expert to set up the solution for their clients. This usually takes 2-3 days.

It is an expensive product, but if you have the right data analyst to use it, the ROI can be quite high. This number depends on a lot of factors. How much analytics are you doing at the moment? How good is your data analyst?

I have used Tableau and Alteryx, which are similar solutions. I would say that TIBCO Spotfire is a combination of those two other solutions, although I think Tableau is much more user friendly.

I think you should get a trial and see what are the possibilities and understand who would be using the product. Define your business goals first and then use TIBCO Spotfire in order to measure those.