Tableau Vs Spotfire
Introduction:
Today, businesses in almost every industry are under tremendous pressure to mine their own data, look for trends and patterns. Based on this, they are even required to predict the future for their own organizations. The tools that can achieve these classified as Business Intelligence (BI) tools, which can pull in all the raw data from various sources and have the caliber are to turn them into actionable insights. These tools come with advanced reporting and visualizations to analyze further in order to make better decisions.
Getting the ideal Business Intelligence (BI) software for your organization plays a key factor in increasing your organization’s efficiency. In a quest to achieve that, we are bringing this article, and here, we would be discussing about two giant names in the industry of Business Intelligence (BI). These are none other than Tableau Desktop and Tibco Spotfire. We would be conducting a lot of analysis from various perspectives to understand what the best usage is for two in specific. This will be in specific related to the features that each of these tools bring to the table and also at the same time, how would it behave when they are actually put to test.
Now, let’s have a look at the topics that we are going to explore in this article.
What is Tableau Desktop?
Tableau is a software company that’s headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. Tableau is dedicated to produce interactive data visualization products focused on Business Intelligence (BI). Tableau Desktop is a leading new generation Business Intelligence (BI) application that is also acclaimed as a ‘self-service’ data discovery tool which can be used to achieve your goals without any IT support. This is your tool to cater all your graphical or visualization needs than any other tool which would rather take longer durations to provide just the pie charts or bar graphs.
What is Tibco Spotfire?
It is a Business Intelligence (BI) company based in Somerville, Massachusetts, United States. Spotfire was available from the 90’s but didn’t really take off until 2007 when it was acquired by the big brand, Tibco. An exact count of available customers is unavailable at the moment, but it is safe to say that Tibco has a larger product portfolio and also a larger market share. Spotfire, an offering from the Tibco suite of products, is a smart, flexible tool which provides data visualization and predictive analysis of business data. It also supports many other tools in conjunction to simplify your analyticcs journey providing simple dashboards, but yet with deeper insights.
Overview of Tableau Desktop and Tibco Spotfire:
Now that we have a better understanding about the product and the company that owns these products, we will try to get a deeper look at each of these products to understand their strengths and weaknesses. We would be trying to cover the maximum ground taking on almost all the possible keys for comparisons between these two products.
Based on your need, you could refer to the section that interests you the more. Though there are lots of efforts put up to bring in the best of the details available, we would still encourage the readers to go through the Official documentations before a purchase decision is made. This will ensure that you are going through an outdated information, if there’s a newer version available from either of the products.
Let us now take a quick look at each of these factors based on which we are going to compare the products:
1. Tableau vs Spotfire: Pricing Comparison
Price is definitely the factor that any organization would be keen in looking at. Considering that, we would be taking up this factor as the very first one to compare between these two products. Though there are different ways that these products deal with pricing and strategies, we will try to give details as accurate as possible.
Tableau Desktop:
There are three ways that the price-scheme has been categorized for Tableau
- One-time payment
- Annual Subscription
- Quote based
Tableau Desktop (Personal Edition) is quoted to be priced at $35 per user per month
Tableau Desktop (Professional Edition) is quoted to be priced at $75 per user per month
Tibco Spotfire:
There is only one way the price-scheme is maintained at Tibco, namely “Quote based”.
It is quoted to be priced at $0.99 per hour
Tibco Spotfire Desktop comes at a price of $650 (annual subscription)
Tibco Spotfire Cloud comes at a price of $200 per month or $2000 per year subscription prices
Tibco Spotfire Platform which comes in subscription, perpetual and term licenses based on needs and requirements from the organizations
2. Feature Comparison Between Tableau and Spotfire:
Let us take a look at the features that are made available with the product itself. Based on these, you might choose the product that best suits your requirement.
Tableau Desktop:
Toggle view and drag drop feature
List of native data connectors
Highlight and filter data
Share dashboards, embed dashboards within, dashboard comments, mobile ready dashboards, interactive dashboards
Data notifications
Tableau Reader for data viewing
Create queries without any code
Translate queries to visualizations
Metadata management
Automatic updates
Server REST API
Tableau Public for data sharing
Tibco Spotfire:
Big Data Analytics
Content Analytics
Predictive Analytics
Location Analytics
Event Analytics
Data discovery and visualization
Dashboards and analytic applications
Advanced collaboration tools
4. Data Analytics: How does Tableau Compare to Spotfire?
It’s a known thing that each of these products have the capabilities to connect to external data sources, but, having said that, Tableau has the capability to connect to more data sources than that of Tibco Spotfire. Spotfire has the ability to integrate data sets of different formats while connecting to an external data source – this isn’t something that Tableau can’t handle. Let us now take a look at the offerings from the products standpoint as well:
Tableau Desktop:
Users can manipulate and visualize on larger data sets
Has the ability to connect to over 40+ data sources ranging from Microsoft Excel to Hadoop clusters, thus putting customers in a comfortable position in creating the reports of their requirement.
Has the ability to visualize trends by picking up on the repeated patterns in the data sets.
Tibco Spotfire:
Has the ability to connect to over 20+ data sources and at the same time has the ability to work with various data formats.
Built-in capability to perform statistical analysis and modelling right from its dashboard
Ability to perform MATLAB, SAS, R or S+ functions from the UI to enable users base predictions on their calculations
5. Difference Between Dashborads of Spotfire and Tableau
Dashboards are the backbone of any Business Intelligence (BI) tool. Dashboards give users the ability to organize data sources, reports and the necessary artifacts at a centralized location so that they stay updated in real time always.
6. Tibco Spotfire VS Tableau: Customer Support
Customer Support is the last important thing after a Customer chooses to make the purchase decision, right from installation to deployment and any cases where issues require handling post deployment. Customer Support team works with all the needed stake-holders to keep up the organization’s image always positive. In such a quest, let us now take a look at how each of these products fare in this category:
Tableau Desktop:
Provides 4 different ways of Customer Support – Complimentary, Technical Support, Elite program and the OEM program
Non-critical and Non-technical issues such as software bugs, configuration related questions etc. come under the Complimentary Support.
Technical Support covers critical issues and comes along with a one year license subscription.
Elite program has a dedicated support manager who prioritizes the requests raised for any required Support.
The OEM program assigns a Partner Support Engineer whoever integrates Tableau into their own existing software suites.
Majority of the customers have all the good things to say about Tableau products. In fact the Gartner’s Magic Quadrant also reveals that Tableau is to that mark, sixth time this year.
Tableau’s customer support has kept pace with its growth and, as a result, customers consistently give it a 100% satisfaction rating.
Tibco Spotfire:
Spotfire users may choose to visit the Tibco Support Central portal in order to submit their requests
There are a good number of knowledge articles available for users to go through any specific scenarios as well.
Provision to connect with other Spotfire users through the Spotfire community or forums.
Tibco provides discounted training offerings in the form of educational passports
7. Tibco Spotfire VS Tableau: Power Users
Some of the Power users for Tableau are SpaceX, Deloitte, Coca-Cola, Dell, Citrix, Pandora
Some of the Power users for Spotfire are Proctor and Gamble, Cisco, NetApp, Shell
Conclusion
In this article, we have gone through the two variants of softwares that cater to similar needs in their own ways – namely Tableau Desktop and Tibco Spotfire. We have also gone through an extensive list of features and comparisons between them. Both of these are robust data analytics and visualization tools providing similar features to their end users, but choosing one from these two completely relies on the end users. Tableau caters to great visualizations whereas Spotfire caters to statistical data analysis with its built-in capabilities.
Hope we were able to present all the details that one would require in the comparison of these two tools. Please do let us know if there are any suggestions to our articles.
