TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

I work with a big bank in Azerbaijan. We have created a data warehouse and use TIBCO Spotfire. I have implemented this application in three banks.

We primarily use it for processing. I have experience and I understand the technical requirements so that we can design any report or we can use SQL links, or Postgres, et cetera.

It's a dynamic solution. There's dynamic reporting in TIBCO. It's very easy to add Power BI. With Power BI, if you want to create dynamic reporting, and dynamic dashboards, in Power BI you must create a lot of code files, however. It's very useful or it's very easy to create the dynamic dashboard in TIBCO Spotfire.

The solution is stable. 

The pricing is good.

It's scalable. 

We'd like better dashboard integrations. 

The initial setup can be difficult. 

The design of the solution could be updated. 

I've worked with the solution for seven or eight years. I have a rather large background with the solution. 

It's quite stable and reliable. The performance is great. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. After working with the solution for seven years, I've never had any emergencies to contend with.

The scalability is good. It's not a problem to expand it. You can do all kinds of reporting, and as often as you want. It's very fast.

We have about 50 planned users on the product right now. 

At the present time, we don't have any plans to upgrade this system, however, we have a plan after the new year, or 2023, to look at everything. We might look at usage then.

The solution does not have good documentation or a strong community to help you.

That said, I' e never had issues that required me to directly reach out to technical support. We do have a partner in the region, and if we needed help, we would reach out to them to get assistance. We might need to reach out maybe once a year. It is never very often.

I also have experience with and am certified in Power BI. However, I've never used it in a banking environment. 

If we use Power BI, there are very good colors or a lot of dashboards and there are machine learning opportunities, et cetera. However, it is not easy to create dynamic dashboards. With TIBCO Spotfire, there are not very good color systems or nice UX designs. However, the reporting is very good. We only need reporting, which is why we choose to use TIBCO.

There were problems with the initial setup. There is not a lot of documentation for implementation. If you have any problems, you cannot easily find documentation for issues either. The community is okay, however, there is not enough information for solving problems. There are not really any tutorials to help you.

It's not user-friendly and pretty hard to deal with system settings. 

We do pay a yearly licensing fee. Three years ago, we paid for four years upfront. It's not overly expensive. 

We looked at Tableau, which is very good. I know Oracle BI is also a very strong system as well, as is QlikView.

I'm an end-user of the product. 

We are using both on-premises and cloud deployment of the product. We have a server, a TIBCO server, which we implemented. We have implemented several reports and have used the Spotfire design. 

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten.

At my previous company, I was both a developer and a software administrator. It was an upstream oil and gas company — exploration, drilling, and completion. Due to some financial issues (not being able to compete well in the market), they shut down their Houston office and laid off quite a few people. 

Spotfire started putting a lot of high-quality, online videos out there that are specifically geared toward things that clients are looking for. This is great because no one wants to sign up for a $2,000 training class or watch three hours of videos just to figure out something that can be explained in 10 minutes. I think that's a great thing.

When Spotfire released version 10.0, they came out with a brand new UI and made some pretty drastic changes to the user interface. With the first release of anything, there's always a lot of criticism and room for improvement. Still, the design of the UI could be improved. There are small issues like file name extensions that are hard to read, for example. They really improved their database connectivity. In version 10.0, they added a lot of great improvements that consumers have wanted for a long time. Regardless, some basic design changes in the UI would make it a little more intuitive for users.

In terms of the next release, from a data analytics standpoint, I think that it's a pretty strong product. I know they just made some recent improvements — now they have a Python programming interface in Spotfire. That was one of the things that I had wanted for a long time.

Some minor changes to the user interface to make navigation a little more intuitive would be nice. Other than that, the solution is really good. 

There's an online Spotfire community that is underused. I used to log into it a lot to try and have discussions with other users. I don't know if it's just that the users are working on so many different things that sometimes they're just not interested in talking with other users, but I think the user community should be promoted more. There's a lot of valuable information out there but it's up to the consumers to make use of it. I think that's something that they should promote more.

I also think they should limit the number of releases. I'm not a fan of their release schedule; sometimes they may have two types of releases at the same time. Basically, they have both short-term and long-term releases. They put out a long-term release every year to year-and-a-half. At the same time, they'll have five or six short-term releases in between. Sometimes, the short-term releases will have a critical upgrade that clients may want, but often, the short releases aren't supported as well as the long releases. So, if you're going to upgrade to a short-term release, you have to be willing to upgrade often.

My previous company had over 600 users. By the time I would get one version into production, we literally went right back into putting the next release into development — testing and getting it ready for production. I worked a lot with people in various business groups to help with testing and user acceptance — it got to the point where it was requiring a lot of them. Some of these people were engineers and they would say, "We can't be putting all this time into helping you test." So, we had to work around that. The release schedule is something I would change.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of ten.

There are other really good products on the market, but I haven't seen anything that is light years ahead of Spotfire as far as capabilities go. It's been around for a long time; It has been a leading product years before many of these other products were even on the market. They have a great history.

I have almost 10 years of experience with Spotfire.

From a scalability standpoint, I would say it's pretty fantastic. Not that Spotfire itself is massively scalable. It's a pretty impressive analytical tool for developing visualizations and sharing them across the enterprise with your organization or business group.

TIBCO has built out an entire analytical platform. You can use Spotfire to connect to data sources, but let's say you wanted to stream data, in real-time; in this case, you may be working with almost a terabyte of data a day. Presently, there's really not any analytical application out there on the market that's going to do that very well, but you can scale with a data stream from TIBCO, which helps you access your data in real-time.

It really doesn't matter how much data you're working with, but they also have the business enterprise and TIBCO data analytics. TIBCO data analytics just opens up the door for any kind of truly advanced analytics that you're working with. You can insert real machine learning code right into your analysis.

Technical support was always very responsive. They were probably more responsive than I was — there were a couple of times when I even had to open up an issue with them. If you don't get back to them within a certain number of days, they'll change the status of your service request. They'll put it on a temporary hold and then they'll close it out eventually. They're very responsive.

I wasn't there when they set it up, but I did perform two upgrades myself while I was there, and it was fairly easy. It's changed a lot over the years and it's actually become quite easy to install and to get up and running. Roughly 10 years ago, when I did the first implementation, it was really difficult. There were five of us sitting around a table with a 300-page PDF that we had printed out — it took us an entire weekend to figure it out. Now, if you wanted to, you could actually install Spotfire in the cloud and actually have it up and running, connecting with data, in an hour or less. To me, that's pretty impressive.

licensing-wise, I didn't really have any involvement.

In my role as a consultant, I would work with clients and, from a software evaluation standpoint, I would say, "Let's take a look at your business requirements. Let's see what's the right tool for you. Should you go with something that's easy-to-use, right out of the box? Or do you want something that's a little more advanced, based on your users and your business requirements?" Quite often, because it is very scalable and it suits many different company sizes and business requirements, Spotfire was the right choice.

I would definitely recommend Spotfire. If you're considering using Spotfire, just be sure to implement and scale it properly. Too often, many companies will buy a fantastic product, but they have very immature users. If you're going to buy a strong product, you need to put a strong emphasis on training and developing your users. As a consultant, I've seen a lot of companies that say, "Spotfire can't do this."  Sure enough, after I'd look into it, the answer was always undertrained users.

My daily tasks are related to data mining and TBICO Spotfire is one of the products that I use. We are a small group of geologists operating in a niche area who are analyzing geochemical data. Our backend database is MySQL and we use products such as Power BI, Tableau, and Spotfire to display data for the geochemists.

If we get dirty data in, we might use Spotfire to see what it is we actually have. This might include how many files we have and the file types, in the case where we have this massive data purchase or something similar.

We use Spotfire to slice and dice and see what we're looking at. But then at the end of the day, we end up just taking the data and loading it into Oracle tables. After we have figured out what we have, we might connect Spotfire to those data tables, to better display the different analyses that a geochemist needs.

The out-of-the-box features are simple and easy to use across the board. Some of the features that we use are bar charts, pie graphs, and cross tables. They are simple dashboards to show the different metrics on the data, and sometimes data quality, as well.

Personalising Spotfire, as a whole, is painful and is something that could be made easier. As a result, I'm not doing much coding.

The background process is something that I find difficult to work with, although that may be more related to company policy and procedures than it is to Spotfire. Specifically, having it on the servers for development and then moving to acceptance in production is not user-friendly. I understand why it's got to be done, so you don't mess up anything that's in production, but to me, it's a little bit antiquated. I think it could be more robust in how you pull in your data, from a database level. Using data in spreadsheets is very simple but when you start connecting to databases, it can be clunky and difficult to do.

I have been working with TIBCO Spotfire for approximately six years. My company has had a license for much longer than that.

Spotfire is stable, although sometimes it is slow. That may be related to the company and how the data is being rendered, and where our servers sit for the databases. I don't think that its' a fault of Spotfire because I've seen it work with real-time data really fast. It seems, however, the implementation can cause it to lag a little bit.

This is a scalable solution if you're not trying to customize it too much. If you can use what it comes with out of the box, I think it's very scalable and very simple to use. It's when you start having to make custom coding adjustments and whatnot, that it could be a pain because then only one person can fix it typically, and that's the person who initially worked on the coding.

We don't connect directly with TIBCO because we have our own technical support in the company. 

We also use Microsoft Power BI and Tableau to create views of the data.

As of last year, my company has been starting to move away from using Spotfire and focus on Power BI, only because it is part of the Microsoft Office Suite. This means that it's easier to integrate. However, for now, we are still using both products.

Spotfire X was a big improvement from the previous versions. They now have an export option to PowerPoint, which was a large pain point in the past. Generally, this is not something I use personally. I create a web service and I give the links out for people to access it directly.

The initial setup is pretty simple. All we have to do is request a license, download it, and start using it. You can start bringing spreadsheets in, for example.

We are a small group within the company and we have dedicated groups within our organization for Spotfire support. We just tell them that we need a place on a server and they set it up. For the most part, deployment is straightforward.

We have an in-house team for deployment and maintenance, and they provide technical support to the rest of the company. It used to be a large team and they are very helpful. My understanding is that there was a reorganization and we now have only two people who are contacts for Spotfire support. At least in the past, if we needed help then it was easy and they were great.

Additional people have been brought in to assist us with Power BI, although I have not yet been using it regularly.

The cost is a few hundred dollars per user per year.

As a data analyst, I am not in operations and don't have a say in which products we use.

My advice for anybody who is implementing Spotfire is to first speak with TIBCO to make sure that your data model and everything that operates in the background is implemented correctly. If it is done improperly then it may render slowly.

Don't assume that you know everything, the way we do in my company. There are times when we get something new and because it has to be done our way, we end up breaking it.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

One of the main features is integrated statistical analysis. At time of first purchase, presentation of tree maps was important, but competitors have closed that gap.

The same way any visualization product has improved things.

Compared to competitors, the UI is quite dated.

Personally, I have used it for six years. In this organization, I have used it for three years.

The server product can have stability issues for certain use cases. The desktop product is fine.

There were no scalability issues.

We did not try technical support.

We are a large organization, and so have Tibco and most of its competitors deployed in one place or another. So there hasn’t been a “switch” as much as an addition.

The desktop product installation is straightforward. Don’t know about the server.

Negotiating large/enterprise licenses has been a trial. The Tibco sales teams have been very difficult to work with - ignoring requests, misrepresenting level of demand, etc. Careful due diligence is required with any (and I do mean any) representation made during the sales/contracting experience.

We evaluated all of them.

Keep an eye on competitors - the usual suspects like Tableau and Qlik as well as tools like Alteryx. There are still use cases for teams/applications where Tibco is a clear choice based on features and price, but the gaps are narrowing quickly. Add to this that your teams and processes are maturing, and may be maturing more quickly than the product suite deployed for them. It’s a mistake to just renew current products as, in many cases, the cost to change is coming down as well.

Self-service analytics and easy visualisation are the most valuable features of this product to me. It shows where you are fetching data from, in the same way that you like to have a data model for a database. If you made a mistake in building a table, you need to start all over, there is no way to change it. That takes a lot of time.

This saves time in the analysis of the data structure and in fixing issues in the data structure of data tables.

It gives us better insight into data, taking things out of Excel and sharing solutions. We save many millions of dollars.

I would like it to be easier to see how data is combined and when a user changes. It would help when creating complex Spotfire files.

I have used this solution for 15 years.

Deployment is easy and stable.

Scaling was harder with prior versions, but better since 7.5.

I rate customer service 8/10.

I rate technical support 9/10.

The initial setup was simple, but that was 15 years ago. We are now at >10,000 users.

Implementation was performed by an in-house team with specialized contractors.

We looked at PowerBI, Tableau and Lumira. On features and on deployment in large organisations, Spotfire scores very well.

It can be made chemically aware. This is a must-have in pharmaceutical R&D

The in-memory architecture allows the software to be very responsive to user inputs even with large data sets. (This does require that we provide users with appropriate hardware to handle the workload.)

Spotfire is feature rich but not so complicated that users can't be trained to generate their own content. This takes some of the content management burden off of my group and it also, more importantly, gives our scientists a platform to explore their ideas around our data repositories.

In the past five or six years, we've moved away from multiple one-size-fits-all solutions attached to the various data warehouses to using Spotfire as a single point of entry to explore all (well... most) of our data repositories. We now have a team that works with the data stakeholders to make sure the data is federated and presented to the users appropriately. Operating under this model allows us to aggregate data at the project level and takes that burden from the users which allows them to do more science.

In the past few years, web-based analytics has come a long way. I would like to see Spotfire evolve into a product that handles the data volume with in-memory architecture (or some equivalent technology) server-side, but lets us feed the results into any web-based visualization that we can get our hands on.

We brought Spotfire in-house in the pre-Tibco era of Spotfire DecisionSite. I'm guessing I have been using it about 10 years.

Our environment is two application servers and one web player server. Getting all the pieces operating inside of our corporate IT infrastructure was challenging, but the end result does serve well over 1000 thick-client and web-based users.

Being a life sciences company, our support comes from Perkin Elmer rather than Tibco. They have provided us with very good support.

We are running Spotfire with Perkin Elmer's Lead Discovery extension to handle chemical structures.

We have implemented our last couple of major upgrades with an in-house team with remote vendor support. I would recommend this if you are building a large Spotfire environment. Both Tibco and Perkin Elmer can provide that type of support.

My rating for Spotfire is relative to similar software. In my opinion, no other product handles both the large volumes of data and has an easily managed extension to handle chemical structures along with the data.

Rating the software on its own relative to the capabilities I would like to see in a data analysis suite, I would put it at 6/10. It is not trivial to use the API to expand the capabilities of the software and it is cumbersome to manage the content/servers/feature licenses.

We use this solution to provide our customers with a data analytics platform.

We particularly like the data angling feature of this solution. This gives us the ability to work on data transformations, join files, and carry out other data preparation tasks all in a single tool.

We also appreciate the data science function, which lets us evaluate our Python functions within the solutions interface and create your visualizations.

We would like to see some development in the visualization aspect of this solution, as they can currently only be configured in the cloud, which limits us to one endpoint. It would be helpful if this could be integrated with other tools.

We would also like the level of environment control that is possible with on-premises installations, to be available with cloud-based variants.

We have been working with this solution for nearly four years.

We have found this solution to be stable. However, for optimal stability the hardware requirements need to be identified by evaluating peak load scenarios, and then put in place.

This solution is easily scalable by adding extra machines to the cluster as needed, as long as you have the appropriate hardware requirement available.

There is excellent support available for this solution, as well as a lot of case studies available for use in the online community area. We have found that most of the problems that we face can be solved by consulting the community.

Positive

The initial setup of this solution is simple, and uniform, regardless of whether it is installed on-premises or via the cloud.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated Power BI, Tableau, and Qlik.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have two primary use cases. One is for the data exploration and the second is for deploying the dashboards for the specific business use cases.

There are two features that I have found most valuable. One is its ability to customize the dashboards when it comes to the evaluation. If you have to deploy visualizations you can actually do it based on the business needs and even customize them for the business prep centers. Other tools are not as flexible as Spotfire's ability to integrate HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

The second feature is its ability to handle a large amount of data, which is also something very unique about it.

In terms of what could be improved, when it comes to data manipulation there are features which are good, but one of the features which has really been missing in Spotfire is an offline ability for data manipulation. In Qlik you are able to simply manipulate the member's data, manage it, and build data through SQL queries. This means you can actually do your data modeling offline. If we had this type of capability in Spotfire that would make it a very superior product with respect to the others in the market. Now it is hard to manage offline.

You really have to rely on the external sources to do the entire data modeling for the exploration or for the visualization development. But what Qlik has also started offering is that they have a wider capability where you can actually have offline data and do your data modeling through the SQL. This means you can actually manipulate a member's data before you utilize it in a visualization. So you really don't have to rely a lot on the enterprise source, and you can manage data in your own source and then deploy the dashboard supporting this.

Additionally, support could be improved. Lastly, the third feature which I would really recommend improving is the diagnosing and monitoring tools, which are really missing in the overall portfolio of Spotfire.

I have been using TIBCO Spotfire for five, six years.

It is pretty stable.

TIBCO Spotfire is a scalable product. 

We have more than 3,000 people using it.

We do plan to use it more in the future. We really recommend the new capabilities and really try to simplify it as we go.

We have access to the technical support, though from a technical support perspective, I do feel this is one of the areas which can be improved. There is not a lot of self-service available in the technical admin support. That means that for almost every single issue you may have to rely on the technical support because the online materials are not enough.

Before using TIBCO Spotfire we were using Power BI. However, we were really not able to find a good scalable solution with Power BI.

The initial setup was easy. It took roughly a couple of days.

There was a team for the initial setup. A couple of engineers.

TIBCO Spotfire is an expensive product.

I would totally recommend this product. 

On a scale of one to ten I would rate TIBCO Spotfire an eight.