We would like to see some improvement in the default properties of the solution, so that there is less need for us to spend our time coding.

We would also appreciate proper API and a proper training solution to be developed for this product so that we can quickly implement changes. 

The way TIBCO Spotfire is designed, in my opinion, is the reason why it lags a bit, especially compared to other BI tools like Qlik. The speed of creating reports or dashboards is slower in TIBCO Spotfire than in Qlik.

There's one area I see that specifically needs improvement. That is when you do the data loading. It is slow. For historical data, when you talk about gigabytes of data, terabytes of data, then it becomes prolonged. Loading could be improved. That's one part. That is actually there with every tool.

I would not say that this is a specific problem with Spotfire. However, it is a problem with all the BI tools. That is one area which can be improved. When you are doing analytics, you see that the value has to come perfect.

There was a missing feature of alerting out of the box within Spotfire. However, they have released this in version 12.

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.

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.

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.

We'd like better dashboard integrations. 

The initial setup can be difficult. 

The design of the solution could be updated. 

The data compression has room for improvement.

The usage of SPDF files can be improved.

I would like the ability to loop intellect queries the same way that I can with QVD data.

The UI has room for improvement.

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.

To be completely frank, the main problem of Spotfire is that it's being destroyed by Power BI. That's the only problem. Otherwise, the product is superior from a technical perspective, but they are victim of an extremely aggressive strategy from Microsoft and therefore, become far too expensive because Power BI is free in organizations. That's Spotfire's biggest weakness.

Another thing is the realtime boarding capabilities and the integration with other realtime streaming products should be much easier. The handling of realtime data could be improved.

I would also improve the consumption of realtime data. I'd also probably improve integration with the RNG, and generally speaking, the data science techniques. I think this is where Spotfire can still play a role and be competitive compared to Power BI. Other than that, I love the product, but I don't know how they can survive the offensive of Microsoft commercially.

Compared to competitors, the UI is quite dated.

The administrative component of Spotfire could use some attention. The Information Designer tool is wonderful, but a level beyond that with hotfixes, updates, and security administration, things get complicated quickly. I have heard that other BI tools in the space are easier to administer.

There are basically two types of Spotfire administration, admin(s) who setup access to data and control the Spotfire library/ies, and admin(s) who manage the Spotfire server and component implementation. Usually, these are not the same person. The administration that involves setting up Data Sources, Data Elements, Filters, and Information Links comes very easily utilizing the Information Designer tool in Spotfire. The administration that is a pain is server administration, mainly because transferring Spotfire files/projects from one environment to another (test to prod during an upgrade) involves exporting the Spotfire library to file storage and then importing it into another Spotfire library. This was the approved method during my day. However, we ended up just doing database copy and refreshes to avoid that entire process.

It is unusual for IT to administer a software suite without the normal dev/test/prod processes. However, with Spotfire and some other BI tools, mass amount of end users create content only in the production environment. In many situations, a Spotfire admin would necessarily make library changes directly in the production environment because it is required to support their users. For Spotfire, it is important early on to define change control processes and procedures, to ensure quality control without limiting end user functionality (which is why you bought Spotfire to being with). Any changes to server or database configuration should go through normal test/prod processes but changes to the Spotfire library sometimes should not (because you are supporting a living and breathing thing with users creating and utilizing content).

Room for improvement would be more guidance up front on these real-world administration scenarios. I don't remember any guidance in these areas and ended up learning much of this the hard way. It is information that folks in the community share, but never gets formalized.

This only applies to enterprise implementations using Spotfire server, not stand alone installations not connecting to a Spotfire library.

• Integration with a custom web portal is still challenging.
• Version control should be included to aide development processes.
• Further the out-of-the-box ability to customize visualizations.

There were a couple of issues with Spotfire. But in the new releases, they have they have covered them. We had some challenges with respect to what they will say, compatibility issues for formatting and importing. So but those were fixed and some performance related issues for bladder datasets. But now in the newer releases, it's it is it is working fine.

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.

Some visualizations that were customized did not display well when published to the web server. I suspect it had more to do with the specifications for that particular deliverable than with the solution's capabilities.

• Spotfire is poor at pixel perfect embedding in a website.
• It can be difficult to remove the Spotfire branding for embedded pages as well.
• It is a very expensive license model.
• DBA is still required for optimization of some report queries and their underlying SQL.

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.

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 encourage a seamless integration with Hadoop; a direct connection to Hadoop server from a session in Spotfire. This might exist for the Spotfire server connectivity, but I do not work with the server version.

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.

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.

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'm not a technical expert, but based on my experience from the user/designer point of view, the level of visual customization (e.g., how graphical objects are displayed) needs more flexibility.

Learning to use the scripting language (Python) proved a challenge for me personally due to lack of good documentation, and the scripting editor is not so user-friendly. If you want greater flexibility and more powerful features than what's offered, you may need to hire a Spotfire developer to do the coding.

Room for improvement is in comparison with another tools. I need to see more options that do not require scripting in the tool, and I need more enhancements on the statistical server side. The reason is that for some every-day, simple things that are directly available as options in other tools, we need to script them in Spotfire.

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.

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.

The key thing for me is to see that the product continues to add more types of visualizations. On top of that, I would like more easy-to-implement analytical algorithms. At the moment they include things like forecasts and regressions. They need to add a lot more of these types of things to the product because not everyone is a data scientist.

More appealing in user interface like other tools. Sometimes users complain of only basic visualizations availability compared to other tools. These are available from third party but if those could be added in Spotfire itself then it would be great.

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.

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 would like to see the visualization library in this solution expanded, so that I can increase what I can offer to our clients.

I would also like an option for dashboard creation on mobile and tablet to be added to this solution. At present, the mobile functionality is not as well developed as the web functionality.

We would like an easier way to get the product to the cloud. Right now, we have the on-premise version, and we would like to find a way to make it easier to migrate it over to the cloud. We want something that is easier to get over to AWS.

• PDF export
• Print capability and trigger-based events
• Real time reporting

I believe the number one feature that needs improvement is the ability to edit the data table construction/modification steps after the fact, similar to the Microsoft Power Query interface. Although you can prototype quickly in Spotfire, if you’ve made a mistake in building your table, you often times have to start from scratch to fix your error. Being able to modify these steps would greatly enhance the data preparation ability of Spotfire.

Also, further control over the stylization of shapes and shapefiles would be beneficial (e.g., dashed lines in shapefiles, different fill patterns rather than solid, etc.).

I would like to see improved mobile capabilities.

I would like more functionality in the formatting of the pages so that they can have more of an application with the look and feel of other custom-developed solutions with the organization.

I would like to see the improvements in the following areas:

• The info designer feature: The user interface could be more graphical, it would make it more user friendly and flexible.
• The transformations and insertions of rows and columns: Tables can be created by using transformations and inserting rows and columns. I would like to have more ability to make changes to these transformation and insertions without having to recreate the complete table from scratch.

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.

Allow insert columns to be changed after the initial operation. Currently, if an insert columns operation needs to be changed, the user must replace the entire table and this could involve significant rework.

Expand the statistical modeling functions.

Allow lines in line charts to be formatted.

Cloud infrastructure could be improved. The cloud market is rapidly evolving and TIBCO is at the forefront of development here. With Hadoop connectivity, there is also a link to data lake environments. I think that a turnkey offering with a smart data lake and analytics layer on top is where the market is heading.

1. Add more visualization types. The number of charts available out of the box in Spotfire can be enhanced. I know there is a Custom Extension, JSViz, to integrate D3 visualizations. Last year I had a look but I remember there were limitations in using this extension and anyway it requires a Java script knowledge.
2. Provide the capability to trigger a Python script on marking change. It's only possible to trigger an R script on marking change. In my experience, considering customers requests and forum discussions it's a feature requested . Using some tricks can be achieved but it should be out of the box.

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.

Their mobile solution (i.e. to use on mobile devices) and export functions are relatively weak. Spotfire templates are typically designed and mocked up on PC and then got rolled out to users, who in most cases require the capabilities to view them on both PCs and mobile devices. Due to real estate issues, the PC versions wont’ fit well on the latter. Spotfire doesn’t offer easy solutions for the transition yet. Separate templates tailored to smaller screens have to be set up manually by users.

Exporting to Excel, PDF, and PowerPoint should be easier.

The developing and runtime environment are very stable. The TIBCO Spotfire architecture environment is not complex. However, not all the runtime components are multiplatform. To be exact, the component whose purpose is to render the data in a web browser can be installed only on Microsoft machines. This is a very big limitation from this point of view.

From what I understand, some of the issues I’ve had have been addressed in 7.0, but my company has not upgraded yet. Layering multiple levels of aggregation is something I’m constantly asked to provide, which has been difficult to do in the versions I have used so far.

Backend administration of the application can be difficult. There are constant upgrades, but it would be better to do just releases for smaller changes.

I'd like to see the following improvements:

• Configuration options (properties screens are too crowded)
• Licensing system: Make it more clear or get rid of the special groups and their special tick boxes that can only activate on that specific group.
• Enhance multiple scales in line and bar charts to grouped scales (group numerical, percentage etc. columns).

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 would like to have "event-based" automation (without integrating with other tools), e.g., send an email only if some event has occurred.

Even though we can cascade the drop down property control, having a drop down filter would help a lot.

Better UX/UI design to make the product look “sexier”. It’s somewhat difficult to add formatting to Spotfire dashboards to make them look nice (e.g. coloring backgrounds of charts, adding floating texts, etc.). This is a bit easier and more customizable in Tableau, and even more customizable in MicroStrategy.

I would like to see the following improvements:

• Multiple Interactive Layers
• More Built-In Visualisations.
• Dropdown and Hierarchy Filtering

Story Telling features aren't intuitive as much as Tableau and some of the features are segregated

• Simple functions like aggregating rows and performing PnL are very complicated
• The limited number of connectors

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.

• More visualization
• More cross-visualization functionality

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

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.