Spotfire vs. QlikView. What can one do which the other cannot?

Yes, I have been through the software selection with QlikView. One of the features that worked well with us, is it could have any type of back end... including Excel Spreadsheets, this was valuable to us, since some of the calculations were being made on some"Excel tools" and this would all the supply chain to report off this data.

I liked the tool, gives some really intuitive access to data. That being said, we did not look at Spotfire, so I am not aware of how they stack up.

Yes, I have worked on QlikView. The interface is very friendly and helps CIO/CTO's or Departments to make decisions. Qlikview is aggressive in terms of the sales follow-up and customer support.

I'm more comfortable with more enterprise class solutions such as Microsoft, Oracle and IBM cognos.
However, I can share with you three points about these products :

- Both are very good on the restitution side and both are very weak on the
back office side (you can use Microsoft BI infrastructure or Oracle BI
infrastructure)
- The security system of QlikView relies on the file system (it is
very disappointing for me but it doesn't seem to be disappointing for
QlikView customers)
- I asked a Spotfire pre-sales consultant about one thing that makes
Spotfire unique: his answer was that it is the best real time BI solution
in the market. I agree as TIBCO is one of the best SOA actor in the market
and I'm sure they are bringing this to Spotfire, for sure they are better
than QlikView on this point. But real time capabilities are not a customers top request.

I would advise you to compare QlikView with Tableau software and BOARD. They are in the same category: SMB+ BI solution.

I would agree with what's been stated above. Spotfire definitely has an edge in statistical analysis/data mining. If this is where the bulk of your requirements lay, then it's likely a better choice. But Qlikview is a more flexible dashboard tool overall. I recently completed an evaluation of both of them, along with a few other vendors, using the same data set to build a proof of concept dashboard, running on the same hardware, and also found Qlikview peformed better. Ultimately, for our needs Qlikview edged out, Spotfire. And as mentioned the support model and support community for Spotfire is not exceptional. I personally found Qlikview to be much stronger in this area. The qlikview architecture is also a little simpler than Spotfire. Less moving parts spread out across multiple servers (if you follow Spotfire's recommendations).

You are right. QlikView is very aggressive and very good.

Unfortunately I don't have an opinion about TIBCO, but we are very satisfied
with QlikView.

Due to in memory data and strong compression it can react very quickly. The user friendly interface supporting self service of our users allows us to reduce a number of prepared reports. You can trace your calculations from result to sources.

The new version supports HTML 5. It looks amazing.

I am evaluating BI vendors who built integrated platforms form the ground up or extended best-of-breedcapabilities through acquisitions. In many instances, their platforms provide end-user tools to perform their own analytics on their desktop, laptop or mobile devices. Their software application(s) empowers the user. It does not depend upon SQL knowledge, a data warehouse, DB administrators or other IT requirements to build and retrieve data from an IBM, Oracle, SAP or Microsoft solution. Visual data discovery tools have brought a greater degree of ease, appeal, and flexibility for creating production reporting, business query, and dashboards. As such, the emerging BI vendors being evaluated enable the company to analyze and visualize large volumes of data, complex data-sets and/or disparate sources on their local and mobile devices.

Attached is a "living" matrix of the BI vendors being evaluated. It is being expanded to include Cloud storage, mobile, tablet, and international capabilities.

Qlikview's evaluation is a work in progress. At the present time, their new releases are several months late and they may not have the capability to support an Enterprise domestic and international company requiring COGNOS, OBIEE and SharePoint interfaces-without IT and DB admin support.

Let me know, if I can be of further assistance.

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See my matrix here:
www.itcentralstation.com/articles/bi-evaluation-criteria-matrix (example 5)

QV dashboards are clearly fancier, normally they're faster too because of in-memory architecture.

In return QV has almost nothing with regard to analytical/data mining capabilities Spotfire has. Another plus for Spotfire: you can dimension your environment linearly. By QV you are limited by memory you have.

If you have a concern like shifting the operational load from IT to business (power users) lean towards Spotfire. It is a cutting edge data-discovery tool.

I have worked with Spotfire but not QlikView. So I can't provide a fair
comparison.

In general, there are three functional areas (from the programmer's view)
that drive the quality of reporting tools: Connectivity to data sources,
presentation of the data and the ability to re-use code and presentation
formats. In the case of Spotfire, it is good in all these but not
excellent. Moreover, TIBCO support and documentation is quite poor.
I hope this helps somewhat as I didn't address QlikView.

Sorry I can't help, I only use Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Talend technologies.