Infor Birst vs. Spotfire

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Infor Birst
Score 5.3 out of 10
N/A
Infor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.N/A
Spotfire
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Spotfire, formerly known as TIBCO Spotfire, is a visual data science platform that combines visual analytics, data science, and data wrangling, so users can analyze data at-rest and at-scale to solve complex industry-specific problems.N/A
Pricing
Infor BirstSpotfire
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Infor BirstSpotfire
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsFor Enterprise engagements, contact Spotfire directly for a custom price quote.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Infor BirstSpotfire
Considered Both Products
Infor Birst
Chose Infor Birst
We were using Birst OEM and now moved to Looker, because it was too old-fashioned and tool capability was limited. It is a different tool - Birst OEM has some more in depth capability and customizations options while Looker is more modern and easy to use, in my opinion.
Chose Infor Birst
Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics have low-code no-code features which are easy to deploy and with easy instances creation with a dev-quality-production environment. Good capability on data mapping features from source to intermediate to target with impressive metadata …
Chose Infor Birst
No comparison. The speed if info is next-level.
Chose Infor Birst
Birst is the best all in one tool that we found, especially at a good price point and already using Infor
Chose Infor Birst
There are a few items I evaluate when looking at different tools.
  1. Price per user
  2. License price
Chose Infor Birst
  • Ease of use
  • Ability to easily connect to multiple and varying data sources
Chose Infor Birst
Birst was better than Domo for our needs because we could get in and tinker with it. Our impression of Domo was that it had a lot of connectors and ready to go reports, but it made too many assumptions about applications we use. We customize too much to use a "ready to go" …
Chose Infor Birst
During the vetting process, we looked at 14 different products (one of them internal) to see if they would fit our needs and whittled it down to this one over a three month period. We did not contact sales for all of them (sales sites were enough to rule out some), but did have …
Chose Infor Birst

Easy to import data and build relationship.

Easy to create ad hoc analysis.

Chose Infor Birst
The primary differentiator with Birst is its scalability. Every other system we have developed or reviewed is either very strong in a single focus or requires a large team to manage to deploy over multiple, diverse customers. We have been able to accomplish more successfully …
Chose Infor Birst
We compared Birst vs Tableau and Lumirra and there's no question that Birst is the best option from a cost perspective. Additionally, the ease of use complemented with our support team has allowed us to innovate on the platform quickly
Chose Infor Birst
Key evaluation criteria:
- Is how quickly the query runs
- The code and metadata for the database
Chose Infor Birst
Birst was the only tool that did the following:
  • robust enough ETL for our data warehouse team
  • data would remain within our data warehouse and not within the tool's proprietary store, in case the company went out of business.
Chose Infor Birst
Cognos - this tool is also more difficult to set up, takes more time to develop dashboards, harder for the business user to navigate
MicroStrategy - this tool is also more difficult to set up, takes more time to develop dashboards, harder for the business user to navigate
MS …
Chose Infor Birst
Birst was the right size for our company. The other vendors were to large and scope was to much.
Chose Infor Birst
We evaluated and compared Birst, OBIEE 12c, and Tableau based on several criteria such as "Data Analysis & Discovery", "Data Integration", "Security model", "Data Visualization", "User Experience" or "Infrastructure & Architecture".
The only point where Birst was rated higher …
Chose Infor Birst
The standard in our company is SAP Business objects. For the international part of the company we are using Birst because of its accesibility, ease of maintenance and ease of use. Compared to SAP BO dashboarding and easy to medium complex reports are easier to create and …
Chose Infor Birst
We originally selected Birst because they are a Partner of our ERP system provider. We re-evaluated and reconfirmed that decision after our new investment through a one week prototyping exercise that proved how quickly something that delivers real content and value can be built …
Chose Infor Birst
We selected Birst over all other options due to the one-stop-shop nature of their offering - it allows us to rapidly develop and deploy a complete product quickly within a single tool.
Chose Infor Birst
So much easier to be able to pull data using a query at times, which should be supported alongside drag and drop options. I can actually left join two tables when needed to provide data frequently requested by customers.
Chose Infor Birst
Birst provide a much better web UI and end user experience and distribution mechanism than both Tableau and SSRS. Power BI simply did not have the full complement of features that we needed at the time of our selection to be competitive and Pentaho was too custom and would have …
Chose Infor Birst
We chose Birst as birst Appliance and cloud versions has same set of features available. Power BI hosted on Azure cloud has competitive pricing, but Power BI report server has very limited features available and is also very expensive. Due to PHI data regulations in different …
Chose Infor Birst
Birst's ETL is better suited to our purposes than Alooma's stream-based processing.
Birst's designer is more mature and meets or needs better than Periscope's reporting functionality, at the time I investigated it.
Spotfire
Chose Spotfire
No experience with the tools in the list above other than Spotfire.
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire has an extremely large and dynamic range of visual analysis tools that can be catered for most issues or projects to create a custom analytics dashboard when compared to other tools I've used. It's multitude of available database connections allow for most …
Chose Spotfire
No, the spotfire is being selected by dev team and architecture team.
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire is stronger than other tools to built complex metrics within the tool, without needs of etl updates and query changing. It has lots of useful visualizations to deep dive data and give interesting analysis to business users. Moreover, with some studies and tests, you …
Chose Spotfire
Although Spotfire has a longer learning curve, it has proven to be more practical and impactful than Tableau. We had only evaluated other tools at a high level initially, and were surprised to hear the success stories of companies moving from Tableau to Spotfire. We have found …
Chose Spotfire
Because of Spotfire's robust features and capabilities, I chose it as my preferred software. Spotfire's greater overall performance and scalability set it apart from other software solutions. It can handle
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire is appropriate for every organization of any size because it can be a recipient of data for better decision-making. Being a robust development platform for creating reports and dashboards, creating a new Spotfire dashboard is relatively simple. Developers can create …
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire is more suited for manufacturing industries with regards the huge data to process to make relevant decision that use big data for making decisions, besides this Spotfire supports more and excels at Availability & Scalability, Data Sources Connectivity and Deployment …
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire is better for geo mapping and easier to maniuplate the data. i am not very good at Tableau anyways but that is what i have used in the past
Chose Spotfire
I prefer Spotfire greatly. While is may seem like a "one trick pony", it does that one trick really well.
Chose Spotfire
We select Spotfire because of its connectors, Big data capabilities, Drill down and inmersive analytics and capacita to manage miliseconds information
Chose Spotfire
Quick analysis and create reports
Chose Spotfire
I choose Spotfire because of the following - custom visual using JavaScript - on the fly chart property update using iron python - easy report Deployment and update -easy to manage user access via so or ldap - best report data Extraction -mix data sources -custom data load …
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire is significantly ahead of both products from an ETL and data ingestion capability. Spotfire also has substantially better visualizations than Power BI, and although the native visualizations aren't as flexible in Tableau, Spotfire enables users to create completely …
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire's key strength les in extent of customization possible and it's inherent Data Analytics capabilities. With in-memory and in-database analysis capabilities, it comes out as a high performance and high efficiency BI solution.
Adding to it, Spotfire integrates the …
Chose Spotfire
Easy to use and is a very flexible tool. Great to have multiple services. Find it to be a trusted platform. The ability to add Iron Python scripts and include code snippets is very useful. Like the style of the created views.
Chose Spotfire
I find both Microsoft Power BI and Spotfire very easy to use. I would rate them on par with each other. There isn’t much to differentiate them. Maybe the learning curve on Spotfire is a bit steeper than Microsoft Power BI.
Chose Spotfire
Augmented AI with Spotfire is very useful for data virtualization. Since data visualization is a quick and very easy way to convey our information. This software makes it easier with its interactive way of presenting data in charts, graphs, and 3D forms.
Chose Spotfire
It provides all tools along with in-built apps for analysis and generating reports, metrics, charts, and graphs. Comes with appropriate costing model at least for an average size organization
Chose Spotfire
We ultimately switched to Tableau desktop as we realized it was able to do all of the things we required of Spotfire.
Chose Spotfire
I haven’t tried any other tools by TIBCO. The only tool we use in our company is Spotfire, so my analysis is limited to Spotfire.
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire stacks well in comparison to other BI products and provides a simplified way to manage reporting and visualization requirements.
Chose Spotfire
Spotfire is the best application for power users by virtue of its wide variety of visualizations, incorporated analytics, superior data canvas, and ability to integrate code such as R or Python. The learning curve is steeper and the menus are Windows 7 once you are past some …
Chose Spotfire
The only other tool we use in my course is Tableau. Tableau is very popular regionally (Omaha, NE), runs locally on Mac and PC, is free for students and faculty, and has a web outlet for sharing. It also plays well with AWS. For these reasons, we use it as the primary …
Features
Infor BirstSpotfire
BI Standard Reporting
Comparison of BI Standard Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
7.4
Ratings
10% below category average
Spotfire
-
Ratings
Pixel Perfect reports7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizable dashboards8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Formatting Templates7.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Ad-hoc Reporting
Comparison of Ad-hoc Reporting features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
7.0
Ratings
14% below category average
Spotfire
-
Ratings
Drill-down analysis8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Formatting capabilities7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with R or other statistical packages6.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Report sharing and collaboration7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Output and Scheduling
Comparison of Report Output and Scheduling features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
8.0
Ratings
4% below category average
Spotfire
-
Ratings
Publish to Web8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Publish to PDF8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Versioning7.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Report Delivery Scheduling9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Discovery and Visualization
Comparison of Data Discovery and Visualization features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
6.9
Ratings
14% below category average
Spotfire
-
Ratings
Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Predictive Analytics5.80 Ratings00 Ratings
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
8.3
Ratings
2% below category average
Spotfire
-
Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Role-Based Security Model8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Capabilities
Comparison of Mobile Capabilities features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
5.0
Ratings
44% below category average
Spotfire
-
Ratings
Responsive Design for Web Access7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Mobile Application3.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile3.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform Connectivity
Comparison of Platform Connectivity features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
-
Ratings
Spotfire
7.2
Ratings
15% below category average
Connect to Multiple Data Sources00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Extend Existing Data Sources00 Ratings7.40 Ratings
Automatic Data Format Detection00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
MDM Integration00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
-
Ratings
Spotfire
9.1
Ratings
8% above category average
Visualization00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Interactive Data Analysis00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Data Preparation
Comparison of Data Preparation features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
-
Ratings
Spotfire
7.4
Ratings
10% below category average
Interactive Data Cleaning and Enrichment00 Ratings7.20 Ratings
Data Transformations00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Data Encryption00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Built-in Processors00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Platform Data Modeling
Comparison of Platform Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
-
Ratings
Spotfire
7.6
Ratings
10% below category average
Multiple Model Development Languages and Tools00 Ratings7.50 Ratings
Automated Machine Learning00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
Single platform for multiple model development00 Ratings7.60 Ratings
Self-Service Model Delivery00 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Model Deployment
Comparison of Model Deployment features of Product A and Product B
Infor Birst
-
Ratings
Spotfire
7.4
Ratings
14% below category average
Flexible Model Publishing Options00 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Security, Governance, and Cost Controls00 Ratings7.00 Ratings
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Infor BirstSpotfire
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User Ratings
Infor BirstSpotfire
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.6
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
8.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
4.1
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.5
(0 ratings)
7.1
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
6.0
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
9.1
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Online Training
8.0
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
5.3
(0 ratings)
8.4
(0 ratings)
Configurability
7.0
(0 ratings)
7.1
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
5.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
6.0
(0 ratings)
7.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
5.0
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
7.0
(0 ratings)
5.0
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Infor BirstSpotfire
Likelihood to Recommend
Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.
Read full review
Spotfire was used to look at a large data set of an in process manufacturing step. The data visualization was set up to look at yield as a function of several inputs (chemical / equipment / operator). After only a short analysis it was immediately obvious that there was a 5% yield discrepancy based on the operator using the equipment. The operators were retrained and the yield gap was eliminated.
Read full review
Pros
  • Birst is an platform that provides connectors to some of the applications we use, but also allows us to bring in data from disparate systems to perform ETL and integrate all of the data for analyses. It makes no assumptions about your data, which is good for us, as we have a lot of customizations to many of our systems.
  • Birst is making inroads towards a more modern UI.
Read full review
  • It has the best coding integration (python, R) of any BI product
  • The ability to work with very large datasets (10 mil+) is better than competitors
  • Export options are more complete and have better functionality
  • The data canvas is the best tool to join and transform data vs. competitors
Read full review
Cons
  • Birst prices are fairly expensive. License plus cost of users can add up pretty quickly
  • Depending on the size of data, rendering of reports can take a little bit. Need faster processing of data
  • Takes a little time to understand how to build reports, not the most intuitive UI
Read full review
  • They should have a lower price point for users to access the analyst version who don't require advanced capabilities. For example, a lower price if users just need to do some basic slicing and dicing with their data and not have to the data science functionality (ie. K-means clustering, regression modeling, classification modeling, etc.).
  • Currently, you can't change the font type/color on the axis, which I'm sure will eventually be available in the future as they have a Spotfire Ideas portal that they're fairly responsive to and act on. I guess at the end of the day, it's about the data and what insights you get from it.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
We have been able to overcome any of the drawbacks we've found with Birst easily and it has fulfilled almost all of our analytic needs to date. Having seen their roadmap it would be highly unlikely we would move away from this platform any time soon. You simply can't beat the functionality that Birst provides for the price and the things I see coming out of the company solidify that our decision to choose Birst was the best possible choice. We have never regretted the decision.
Read full review
It's a very powerful tool that allows for a myriad of customizations within the analysis files themselves, particularly with the custom expression functionality. There have been some great strides with the quality of the visualization options (which were not great to begin with) and I hope to see more improvements made as the product gets updated.
Read full review
Usability
Birst is a reliable BI platform that has developed through uploads via the cloud, easy tabular views, quick manual uploads and links to SQL databases. It however does not compete with other BI tools with the data manipulation and connections when your data is uploaded in the platform and the visualisation and customisations available. The automation aspect is very useful and is one of the top features, alongside the user hierarchy and permissions. Birst is an easy and useful tool for finicial reporting, however is not currently the best option on the market for providing easy to understand, edit and present visualisations.
Read full review
Basic tasks like generating meaningful information from large sets of raw data are very easy. The next step of linking to multiple live data sources and linking those tables and performing on the fly analysis of the imported data is understandably more difficult.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
We frequently experience -103 errors due to us using the Live Connect functionality, which does not seem to handle even minor interruptions in connectivity, and treats all future connection attempts or data requests as errors, even if the issue does not exist any longer
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Even though, it's a rather stable and predictable tool that's also fast, it does have some bugs and inconsistencies that shut down the system. Depending on the details, it could happen as often as 2-3 times a week, especially during the development period.
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Performance
In a reporting and analytics package there are two distinct performance times to look at. First is the performance of calculating the report data and metrics. I would rate a 9 for this. However, the interface rendering is slow, rating a 7. Dashboards can take 3-5 seconds to load. This is probably not a problem for normal users, as the dashboard render is performed once. My application integrated the dashboard into a commercial product though, with hundreds of customers - so my demands are higher with a large number of end users.
Read full review
Generally, the Spotfire client runs with very good performance. There are factors that could affect performance, but normally has to do with loading large analysis files from the library if the database is located some distance away and your global network is not optimal. Once you have your data table(s) loaded in the client application, usually the application is quite good performance-wise.
Read full review
Support Rating
  • Poor turnaround time
  • Low response rate when the problem at hand are large
  • Lack of infrastructural knowledge when it comes to scaling solutions
  • Lack of inter team work noticed
  • Most of the tickets are open for a long period of time
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Support has been helpful with issues. Support seems to know their product and its capabilities. It would also seem that they have a good sense of the context of the problem; where we are going with this issue and what we want the end outcome to be.
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In-Person Training
I went to their annual user conference (Birst Forward) and their standard training class (Birst Boot Camp) this year, and both were excellent. Very educational, and I got all of the personal attention I needed to get my questions about my specific answered. I've also reached out to the trainers after those events to ask more questions, and they've been great about getting back to me with answers
Read full review
The instructor was very in depth and provided relevant training to business users on how to create visualizations. They showed us how to alter settings and filter views, and provided resources for future questions. However, the instructor failed to cover data sources, connecting to data, etc. While it was helpful to see how users can use the data to create reports, they failed to properly instruct us on how to get the dataset in to begin with. We are still trying to figure out connections to certain databases (we have multiple different types).
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Online Training
Although I found the online resources helpful, a lack of appropriate examples for certain tasks key to report creation and advanced modeling make the online training/documentation less than perfect. For an inexperienced BI professional, the online training would not enable a streamlined launch of the product.
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The online training is good, provides a good base of knowledge. The video demonstrations were well-done and easy to follow along. Provided exercises are good as well, but I think there could be more challenging exercises. The training has also gone up in price significantly in the last 3 years (in USD, which hurts us even more in Canada), and I'm not sure it is worth the money it now costs (it is worth how much it cost 3 years ago, but not double that.)
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Implementation Rating
Have clean data! Birst flexibility allows - Start small, then introduce functionality and complexity along the way. If you try to present all the functionality [bells and whistles] and wow them, but bad data is uncovered, the end user blames the new application and turns away.
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The original architecture I created for our implementation had only a particular set of internal business units in mind. Over the years, Spotfire gained in popularity in our company and was being utilized across many more business units. Soon, its usage went beyond what the original architectural implementation could provide. We've since learned about how the product is used by the different teams and are currently in the middle of rolling out a new architecture. I suggest:
  • Have clearly defined service level agreements with all the teams that will use Spotfire. Your business intelligence group might only need availability during normal working hours, but your production support group might need 24/7 availability. If these groups share one Spotfire server, maintenance of that server might be a problem.
  • Know the different types of data you will be working with. One group might be working with "public" data while another group might work with sensitive data. Design your Library accordingly and with the proper permissions.
  • Know the roles of the users of Spotfire. Will there only be a small set of report writers or does everyone have write access to the Library?
  • ALWAYS add a timestamp prompt to your reports. You don't want multiple users opening a report that will try and pull down millions of rows of data to their local workstations. Another option, of course, is to just hard code a time range in the backing database view (i.e. where activity_date >= sysdate - 90, etc.), but I'd rather educate/train the user base if possible.
  • This probably goes without saying, but if possible, point to a separate reporting database or a logical standby database. You don't want the company pounding on your primaries and take down your order system.
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Alternatives Considered
Infor Birst OEM and embedded analytics have low-code no-code features which are easy to deploy and with easy instances creation with a dev-quality-production environment. Good capability on data mapping features from source to intermediate to target with impressive metadata management.
Read full review
Spotfire is appropriate for every organization of any size because it can be a recipient of data for better decision-making. Being a robust development platform for creating reports and dashboards, creating a new Spotfire dashboard is relatively simple. Developers can create highly customized dashboards using the tools it provides. I will recommend this software to others
Read full review
Scalability
we can see that loading a lot of data can cause a noticable slow down in performance. Birst support indicated that they don't really consider anything less than 30 seconds to be an issue, but that is not the case for our customers, so we have had to change some of implementation to address this
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In an enterprise architecture, if Spotfire Advanced Data services(Composite Studio),data marts can be managed optimally and scalability in a data perspective is great. As the web player/consumer is directly proportional to RAM, if the enterprise can handle RAM requirement accomodating fail over mechanisms appropraitely, it is definitely scalable,
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Return on Investment
  • Being a manufacturing company we tend to lag behind technologically. But having all the data for different ERP systems in one place has been an eye opener for the executives. It has lessened the need to convert some legacy ERP systems.
  • Having such a simple reporting tool is a great asset to some of our sites that have traditionally had trouble gathering data from AS400 systems.
Read full review
  • Spotfire really helped a lot of people in terms of analysis. It eliminates data analysis in excel. Because even underlying data you can explore it in Spotfire.
  • Spotfire helps data analysts to investigate data and also help analysts solve inconsistency of data.
  • Spotfire helps data analysts in building great dashboard that provide insights to users to make decisions to drive revenue and manage the churn.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Infor Birst Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

Spotfire Screenshots

Screenshot of Smart Visual AnalyticsScreenshot of Geospatial AnalyticsScreenshot of Intelligent Data WranglingScreenshot of Point-and-click Data ScienceScreenshot of Real-time Streaming Analytics