TIBCO Spotfire Reviews

Map charts are very powerful and work better than most other in-memory analytical tools.

It offers easy development, easy-to-provide user training, and it even allows power users to do ad-hoc analysis.

I have used Spotfire at several client locations to develop solutions to help their organization make better and more informed business decisions.

My biggest gripe with Spotfire is the lack of customization. Dashboards look stale and boring. No floating objects, floating text, etc. and the way panes resize based on resolution is annoying. Most complaints I have are related to the look and feel of a finished dashboard.

I have used this solution on and off for several years.

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

I use the product which my client is using. I personally would choose another tool over Spotfire if it was my choice.

Take other tools into consideration as well. There are a lot of analytical tools and different ones have different strengths.

Spotfire is better than some competitors, but limited in many aspects.

• In-memory analytics
• Integration with SAS, Matlab, R

It has helped our organization become more agile.

• More visualization
• More cross-visualization functionality

I have been using it for seven years.

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

Technical support is 8/10.

I previously used MicroStrategy, which is a real BI tool.

Initial setup was complex: report creation, installation, automation, report changes...

An in-house team implemented it.

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.

It allows users to quickly analyze data from a variety of sources and visualize it with powerful, interactive graphs, and charts. This leads to faster and better decision making, as well as identifying areas to save costs, increase revenue, optimize, etc.

• Intuitive interface: Easy to get started and use features.
• Filtering: Quickly filters to a level of detail that you are interested in.
• Marking: Drills into data, seeing the same data in other charts.
• Data connections: Having the ability to quickly connect to just about any data source.

The Text Area feature needs to be more user-friendly. It is a little clunky to use, and it is difficult to consistently format text. Here are a few suggestions:

• Don't make it pop out when editing the text area.
• Add a feature to easily add tables (without HTML).
• Overall, make it more user-friendly.

It is prone to crashing every now and then for seemingly arbitrary reasons.

Initial setup is straightforward: Just downloaded it from their website (not applicable for large organizations).

The ROI is nearly impossible to calculate. 

The pricing seems competitive and reasonable. The value delivered by the product far exceeds the cost.

I have tried Tableau, but haven't spent much time working with it because my previous organization and current clients use Spotfire. Excel is also a competitor, but Spotfire is significantly better than Excel for data visualization.

I recommend watching some Spotfire demo videos on YouTube, and also downloading the free trial to get a feel for the software.

• Ease of accessing, aggregating and visualizing data sources
• The amount of data that the product can manage in memory

Spotfire provides connectors and data driver support for about 40 unique data sources including all of the common structured ones like Oracle, SQL Server, DB2, etc., plus non-structured sources like HTML, RSS feeds, data warehouses and fast data platforms. All of the different data sources can be merged or mashed up in one “viz”. The size limit of data is the 64-bit address space or 16 terabytes, basically unlimited. I ran one POC on a dataset over 100 GB and Spotfire performed as well as it does with small datasets. Note, the data load time is roughly proportional to the size of the dataset, but the access to the data once it is loaded in memory in Spotfire is just about the same on any size dataset.

Use of Spotfire has almost eliminated people doing cumbersome, manual ETL efforts in files and other products from transactional source systems and the corporate data warehouse.

Administration functionality can be improved more by moving the rest of the command-line effort to a web-based UI. Otherwise, just keep adding more functions that otherwise most customers have to create as custom functions. Add a Shut Down and Exit option in the event of an unresponsive session, usually due to data connectivity issues.

I have been using it for eight years(starting with version 4.0).

There is very little instability until the memory of the host reaches 0% availability.

No issues with scalability.

Almost perfect support, 9. The only issue I had was understanding some of the techs verbally due to “English not their primary language”. WebEx and chatting was the workaround.

I did not have any experience with a similar solution before Spotfire.

Initial setup is very simple and works as documented.

Negotiate, plan for three years out and triple whatever your best forecast is for growth. Spotfire usage typically will grow like a wildfire in high winds and dry forest.

I did not do the evaluations but a comparison of Tableau was evaluated and failed to meet data size requirements and in-memory capacity.

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.

• Being able to open multiple data sources
• Ease of creating visualizations

It did not improve the way my organization functions. We have implemented a different solution to meet our need.

I’d like to see a more easily embedded version because that’s our need.

I used it for five years (different versions).

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

Technical support is excellent.

Initial setup with version 3.5 was very difficult, partly because we were embedding the Spotfire Web Player API and using custom authentication.

Implementation was done in-house.

We don’t charge for the Spotfire reports individually. It is difficult to calculate ROI, but the product is considered to be expensive.

We originally chose this product as a tool for our SaaS offering, but its embedding features and level of complexity for a multi-tenant situation were prohibitive.

It is great for enterprise use.

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.