Tableau vs. Spotfire

Spotfire, a renowned business intelligence product, was bought by TIBCO in 2007. It was developed by Ben Shneiderman and Christopher Ahlberg. It is now headquartered in Palo Alto, USA, and has 10,000 customers across Europe, Africa, Asia, and other continents. It has crossed $ 1 billion in revenues.

Tableau was founded by Christian Chabot, Chris Stolte, and Pat Hanrahan in 2003. It is based in Seattle, Washington. It provides an interactive data visualization product focused on business intelligence and was awarded “Best of 2005 for Data Analysis” by PC Mag.

Ease of Use – Tableau vs. Spotfire

Tableau also has a unique drag-and-drop facility, which is patent to all cloud solutions these days. Users tend to simply connect the data cubes (so no memory eating here), and hence faster reports. Its intuitive design in drag/drop is much faster than other competitors.

Spotfire allows beginners to expert analysts’ to perform simple, yet complex, analyses in real-time. It can drill down to find the root causes of several complex business issues and allow the management to find them real quick.

Reliability – Tableau vs. Spotfire

Tableau, though newer in the market, have also great integration with a parent ERP system, the data cubes have to be extensively and wisely configured, only then the user can have reliable and trustworthy data.

Tableau also provides technical support over chat, web, and email. It also provides classroom training for better usage of Tableau across the organization.

Spotfire provides technical support to its customers. It has a SupportCentral which works round the clock to provide support through chat and email. Users can also access the knowledge base which has tons of information about troubleshooting issues along with submitting feedback for product enhancements and requests for fixing bugs.

Users can also communicate with other Spotfire users with its Spotfire Community Forum.

Speed – Tableau vs. Spotfire

Tableau gives more detail to dashboards and actions and removes detailed level descriptions at each and every row. The keyboard shortcuts also help faster dashboard viewing. It removes many columns from the daily reports which reduce refresh time or custom SQL query time. Users can work upon a sub-set of data, keeping memory intake low.

Spotfire is faster to implement with multiple implementation methodologies suitable to all kinds of end customers. It has in-memory data cube analysis which makes it really fast without overloading your memory.

Users can set the time when the reports are run and can totally depend on it without fail. With its streamlined user interface, data discovery is quite impressive, making things faster.

Features – Tableau vs. Spotfire

To have diverse and virtual insights coupled with data-driven comprehension is what Tableau provides. It has word clouds and data bubbles-like features which catch the visual eye. There is a tree map that provides context to graphics.

They relate multiple proportions which are related to each other in one single place. Users can create and lay dashboards overlapping each other, which saves too much screen space. It is a big win for Tableau. The reports are drilled down to the last level which helps in the microanalysis of data.

You can also seamlessly share dashboards across the organization and let others make a note of their doings. It can instantly connect to about 30 data types and also supports data cubes. The mapping of data within sets (sets ~ subsets) is easy and excellent.

The community-building efforts have taken a front end with Tableau. The Tableau Desktop makes it easy to collect and correlate the data and with the help of the drag and drop facility, highly innovative reports can be made. Another version is the Tableau Server which is a little more advanced version of the Desktop one.

Apart from innovative reporting, users can also make a story out of it; the story behind getting the data in the first place. The mobile version has a native iPhone App and provides geolocation too. Ad hoc reporting and profit analysis are missing though.

Spotfire offers a streamlined user interface for its unique data discovery. A thematic approach to building dashboards and reports is a major upgrade to the mundane report building tools, it makes it look fresh and lively, it has a visualization tool that combines the drag and drop facility and integrates with the tool and churns out amazing dashboards containing pie charts, graphs and many more.

What’s the winner here is ad hoc reporting and analysis. It brings in advanced reporting tools like online analytical processing or OLAP, predictive analysis, and trend indicators. This is the next-gen of visual reporting.

Moreover, users need not worry about delays in report generation even in the wee hours, as Spotfire allows pre-scheduled report generation, just the way users want it. It has a recommendations intelligence wizard which can guide users to use best practices in analytics. This is the next-gen of visual reporting.

Moreover, users need not worry about delays in report generation even in the wee hours, as Spotfire allows pre-scheduled report generation, just the way users want it. It has a recommendations intelligence wizard which can guide users to use best practices in analytics.

Security – Tableau vs. Spotfire

The TIBCO Spotfire servers are highly defragmented to improve speed and performance. They use high-level FTP and HTTPS to access and load their pages.

The latest version comes in with an SDK version which has firewalls and authentications in place to secure embedded data. Users got have verified credentials to log in to the system and access sensitive data.

Tableau authenticates access through Windows NT. It comes with an embedded password and credentials are thoroughly checked for the user. You can create a connection vide OAuth 2.0 industry standard. Enabling Kerberos Delegation can allow additional protection at the data and document level.

Summary – Tableau vs. Spotfire

Tableau provides effective insight with its intuitive techniques and enables faster decision-making. You can drill down to the minutest details and get the most out of it. Tableau still has to integrate well with other parent compatriots who have data stored in them.

In this way, it can have a larger market base and expand to other domains as well. Spotfire has no visualization tool and also has reports which are not downloadable in PDFs or the like. It is relatively newer in the market but still provides effective solutions to visual analytics.

A little bit of tweaking here and there will help Spotfire surface on the global market as a virtual data leader.

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