Spotfire

Pros

This can be used across multiple data platform

Cons

Complicated administration takes time to understand infrastructure

Alternatives Considered

Reasons for Choosing Spotfire

Switched From

Pros

Flexibility, Data prep and data wrangling abilities within the platform. Spotfire will allow any end user to enhance their data discovery which will allow for faster decision making.

Cons

More customers should be using Spotfire. More capabilities than the two leading BI platforms on the market but they unfortunately own the market share. I've never met anyone that has used Spotfire that hasn't agreed Spotfire is a better tool. Spotfire's marketing strategy could use some work.

Pros

The range of different data analysis paths and visualisations available for use. Useful with large amounts of data.

Cons

Learning curve is very steep and sometimes the written help isn't as accessible. Very confusing interface and sometimes can crash.

Pros

It is extremely customizable so we have been able to create efficient templates that fit many of our process development engineering workflows. It links well with other systems to aggregate the data, and then using the tools we have created, we are able to easily line by/color by/trellis by a number of different experimental parameters to understand complex studies and DOEs with ease. It is a huge step up from our old workflow of graphing using Excel.

Cons

It can be difficult to learn how to customize complex templates with our giant data sets, so we had to specialize a small team of admins to create templates and troubleshoot issues. However, as an end user, it is very straightforward.

Pros

There are lots of different features available and lots of customizations you can make to your reports. I like that I can apply transformations to the data in there without having to modify my queries. I like how much I can do with my charts, and I really love the feature that highlights the rows of my data table that went into a particular part of my chart when I click on it.

Cons

It isn't as user friendly as what I'm used to (I'm used to Microsoft programs like Excel or Word, where everything is very straightforward). There was a longer learning period with this software before I was able to feel comfortable with it. The help guide here is kind of general. It doesn't have explicit instructions for everything, so I'm just experimenting a lot of the time to figure out how to do what I want to my report or chart. Also, it doesn't seem to have a feature that can automatically email you excel files. You have to log in and export the report yourself.