TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

• 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.

It's an analytic tool, similar to Tableau. The features that are most valuable to us are:

• Its ability to consume data from about any type of source such as a CSV, SQL, Excel, and text (*.txt) files. Thus, it can consume and collaborate data from a number of different data sources.
• It has the ability to do very sophisticated analysis on the data.
• It has an extremely good graphic ability, so as to present the data in a way that's very meaningful to the end user.

They have good training programs for it, but the learning curve for Spotfire is probably higher than it might be for Tableau.

All of the functionalities are also higher in this product. Spotfire requires a fairly strong commitment from somebody to become a Spotfire developer.

I have been using this solution for about three years.

There were no stability issues.

There were no scalability issues, as of now.

We didn't use a different solution before. Previously, we have just used Excel, PowerPoint, and other such typical Microsoft Office products.

I'm a good advocate for Spotfire, so I would highly recommend it, with one caution. You have to train developers in it and that will take a fair amount of time and commitment.

We utilize the solution for real-time analytics. We have some IoT devices connected to the dashboard, allowing us to view analytics related to the devices for our clients in the energy sectors.

TIBCO Spotfire can be connected to the cloud or deployed on-premise. TIBCO also offers cloud servers for cloud deployment.

The most valuable feature is the map visuals that help us connect to the geo-specialized data which is more advanced than other solutions.

We encountered difficulties connecting the special data sets, as the post data set did not contain any shared columns, making it difficult to establish a connection between the data sets. It would be beneficial if we had a feature to assist us in connecting to the pages of our special data, thus allowing us to the relationships easily.

I have been using the solution for five months.

TIBCO Spotfire is a stable solution that is able to handle a large data set and continue working efficiently.

The technical support is good. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. We had a few drag-and-drop items and some recommendations. Depending on the data sets the deployment can be completed within two days.

In comparison to other solutions such as IBM Cognos, TIBCO Spotfire is more affordable.

I give the solution an eight out of ten.

I recommend TIBCO Spotfire.

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

I appreciate Spotfire's range of visualization options, advanced analytics features, and seamless integration with other TIBCO products. The flexibility to connect to various data sources and create interactive dashboards has been crucial in gaining valuable insights. What makes Spotfire particularly appealing is its position within the broader TIBCO product family, where it complemented other tools like Live Datamart, providing a comprehensive end-to-end solution.

One aspect where Spotfire could improve is its global recognition, especially in terms of support. I think Spotfire is a robust product with certain advantages over competitors, but it might benefit from increased awareness and support. The acquisition by Cisco may have influenced its market presence, but I believe a more focused marketing strategy could enhance its visibility in the business intelligence and analytics landscape.

I have been working with TIBCO Spotfire since 2016.

Spotfire has been fairly stable and I would rate the stability as an eight out of ten.

Spotfire is highly scalable, and that is one of its significant advantages. It is not just scalable; it is also straightforward to enhance its scalability. When I began working with Spotfire in Turkey, there were only a couple of international users. I worked on four projects, with two focusing on integration for small-sized customers due to the company's scale. I would rate its scalability as a nine out of ten.

Tech support for Spotfire was generally helpful, and there were different levels such as gold and silver support from a maintenance perspective. It worked well even in cases where issues were more about application implementation than the platform itself. Occasionally, there were instances of the support team pointing to it being a customer-specific problem, but overall, the technical support was beneficial in resolving issues. I would rate the support as an eight out of ten.

Positive

Before TIBCO, I worked with various vendors and products, including ClickView, BusinessObjects, and Crystal Reports. I specifically opted for TIBCO because their platform addressed analytical BI needs comprehensively, especially in areas like forecasting and big data. Other products like ClickView and BusinessObjects lacked solutions for these aspects.

I used to handle maintenance for the Spotfire solution, both individually and with a technical team from the company. When developing, implementing, and conducting quality checks, the product consistently showed no issues.

For new customers, the initial list price might seem high, especially considering the product is priced in dollars or euros. Microsoft's bundled products like SharePoint have made them more competitive in Turkey. Despite Spotfire appearing expensive initially, with patience and negotiation, both customers and partners can find a more reasonable and workable solution over time.

Overall, I would rate TIBCO Spotfire as a nine out of ten.

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.

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.