Spotfire vs QlikView

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Our analysts compared Spotfire vs QlikView based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Big Data Analytics Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

QlikView Software Tool

Product Basics

Spotfire is a software solution for business reporting and analytics. Ranked third on our product directory, it shines for data science and streaming analytics. Dashboards are customizable and interactive. Automation services help create and deliver reports on schedule. You can download it on Windows and access it through other operating systems via workarounds.

Organizations across the board find Spotfire helpful, be it pharma companies or oil and gas suppliers. Manufacturing and supply chain businesses also opt for it on account of its functions and formulas. Techniques like regression and what-if analysis support predictions. Reporting on inventory levels can help you anticipate and plan when to place the next order.

With a data tool, you expect to have data management built in, and Spotfire does an excellent job. It enables cleaning data from the user interface — inline data cleansing — and flags anomalies.

Geomapping is sometimes an afterthought in BI tools. Spotfire scores with excellent location analytics and companies with field machinery find it helpful. Plan maintenance by keeping tabs on machine performance and aging trends using Spotfire dashboards.

Spotfire has data management with anomaly detection and inline data cleansing. Geomapping is sometimes an afterthought in BI tools. Spotfire scores with excellent location analytics, which is why many companies with field machinery find it helpful.

Spotfire's robust calculations are due to TIBCO's runtime engine. Report templates are available, and you can create your own. Its Automation Services help manage routine reporting.

Users praise Spotfire for its connections with an active community that contributes additional connectors. They appreciate its visualizations and the freedom to customize data displays. The vendor provides exceptional support for mobile insights.

The latest edition, Spotfire X, has NLQ-powered searches, AI recommendations and model-based processing. A 30-day trial with 250 GB of storage is available. At $1,250 per year, a Spotfire Analyst license costs more than Tableau and Power BI, and users agree that pricing is steep.

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QlikView is a data discovery and customer insight platform from Qlik, a leader in the insight and intelligence space. However, it is not available for purchase any longer. Qlik Sense, Qlik’s next-generation offering, is available for new customers. It offers self-service data that can help drive decisions and generate significant ROI for technical skill level users.

It’s built from the ground up to be affordable, scalable and adaptable. It can ingest data from diverse sources like big data streams, file-based data, and on-premise or cloud data. It is well-known for its data associations and relationship functionality, keeping data in context automatically. It delivers results quickly via its patented in-memory data processing module, processing data down to as little as 10% of its original size.

Pros
  • Intuitive interface
  • Fast data visualization
  • Easy data exploration
  • User-friendly for non-technical users
  • Strong community and support
Cons
  • Limited data modeling capabilities
  • Licensing costs can be high
  • Customization can be challenging
  • Version control can be a concern
  • Performance can slow with large datasets
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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Make Informed Decisions: Ensure you don't miss any data when performing analysis. Spotfire connects to over 50 sources out of the box and provides many more, thanks to its active community. When a connector isn't available, you can rely on TIBCO’s data virtualization capabilities. Users appreciate its expertise in capturing streaming data, which many data tools have yet to catch up with. Our analysts awarded it top honors for source connectivity.
  • Gain Accurate Insight: Make decisions with confidence, knowing you have quality data in your corner. Organize data using metadata management and build workflows in a dedicated wizard. Or use freeform SQL query building with autocomplete. Spotfire scores a perfect 100 in our analyst rankings for seamless data preparation and management. It’s mainly due to inline data correction, which not many platforms support.
  • Visualize Insight: Achieve your weekly, monthly and yearly goals. Put your data to work with interactive dashboards and visualizations that come alive thanks to animations. Get suggestions on how datasets relate and visualizations that fit your analysis. And don't worry about it going stale — you can set it up to refresh on cue. Our analysts give Spotfire the top award for dashboarding and visualization.
  • Stay Mobile: Spotfire wins our analyst recommendation for responsive mobile insights on iOS and Android. You can favorite views and search for them later and swipe left and right between pages on your phone. Share your findings via email, SMS or other communication channels. Map visualizations are available on mobile — Spotfire will show you relevant data based on your location. QR code scanning is available. Spotfire gets a 100 score in our assessment.
  • Add Location Data: If your data includes location coordinates, Spotfire can directly plot these points on a map. If it contains city, state, or country names, Spotfire can convert them into locations on the map. Geographic searches, functions and calculations are available. Our analysts give Spotfire a 100 for its mapping features.
  • Automate Reports: Its automation services earn Spotfire another perfect 100 for reporting. Report scheduling and alerts are no longer optional; every organization that wants its teams to own their tasks wants automation. And Spotfire wins hands down with another perfect 100 in our analysis. Readymade reports templates are available, and you can build your own. Apply filters, drill down or perform calculations with ease. Report exports are possible in standard file formats, such as PDF, Excel and CSV.
  • Stay Competitive: Spotfire supports cohort analysis and decision trees. ML algorithms can extract features from text data for model training. Built for data science, it has capabilities for neural networks and deep learning. Spotfire gets 99 in our machine learning rankings.
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  • Optimize Connections: Spot connections in data even when working with large data sets. Take a granular look at data through drill-down and view high-level trends in customer/employee behavior.
  • Increase Data Security and Control: Ensure total control over sensitive data. Prevent unauthorized access to crucial data sets through user-control, filtered views and permissions. AES-256 GCM provides data integrity and keeps information secured. Grant access to view data using user-specific access.
  • Enhance Functionality: Build the product in alignment with user needs and specifications. Extend functionality with QlikView Workbench to customize the app with custom scripting.
  • Increase Insight: Gain unparalleled insights into business operations, as well as the market at large. Track KPIs like sales, budgets, employee performance, and hundreds of other pre-built or custom data points.
  • Flexible Deployment: Choose from a cloud analytics solution, an on-premise installation, or a combined solution to get desired scalability and flexibility.
  • Intuitive Interface: Obtain data results via the self-service and code-free visual tool. Its accessible interface provides updated information instantly.
  • Empower Company Culture: Foster a data-driven culture by empowering employees to share data and insights directly or outside the platform.
  • Increase Competition: Monitor and track employee performance using KPI dashboards across organizations. Analyze changes in empirical data and make decisions to capitalize the profits.
  • Automated Recommendation: Receive and recommend automated context-aware suggestions using machine learning (ML). Prioritize recommendations on visualization type for easy access.
  • Accelerate Business Growth: Scale the businesses by deploying self-service and predictable BI. Test business performance using free tools available on the webpage.
  • Enhance Accessibility: Access all features from anywhere and on any device using an HTML5 client. Provides mobile push notifications to ensure unrestricted and consistent access.
  • Worldwide Support: Support fifteen languages and native currency conversions while detecting which language to use according to the browser or operating system.
  • Optimize Deployment and Configuration: Deploy quickly and allow for even quicker configuration because data is not required to be stored in any silos or cubes.
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  • Spotfire Actions: Decide what to do with and act instantly — no need to switch to your procurement application to pause new orders. This powerful feature allows you to run scripts within analytics workflows. You can also trigger actions in your external system through visualization. Spotfire can set up over 200 commercial connections and has 1800 community connectors.
  • Mods: Build reusable workflows and visualization components, much like apps in Power BI and Qlik Sense. They allow your users to tailor their analytical processes so they don’t have to start from scratch every time. Based on code, they run in a sandbox with limited access to system resources for security. Users can share them through the Spotfire library. Mods improve efficiency and collaboration.
  • Batch Edits: Make similar changes to multiple files in one go. Write custom scripts to call the Spotfire API that’ll make changes to the files. Update the IronPython version to the latest one or embed the Spotfire JQueryUI library instead of its references.
  • Recurring Jobs: Simplify event scheduling to better manage your time and tasks. Improve efficiency and deliver reports at the same time on the same day of the week or month. The latest Spotfire version allows you to set recurring automation jobs to occur every X hours, days, weeks or months.
  • Web Player REST API: Share insight with clients and partners without them needing to sign up for a paid Spotfire account. Engage them via data visualizations on the web browser, thanks to Spotfire Web Player. Update analyses on the web with real-time data in the latest Spotfire version.
  • Roles: Invest wisely — opt for licenses that align with user roles. Choose Spotfire Analyst for data analysts, scientists and power users who need deep-dive analysis. Get the Business Author license for enterprise users, analysts and power users to create and consume insights without deep expertise. Choose consumer licenses for users who’ll interact with and consume data. They include the C-suite and non-technical users within the organization.
  • Information Designer: Prepare fully governed data sources for business users in a dedicated wizard. Set up their preferred data sources and define in advance how Spotfire will query and import data into storage. Specify which columns to load and which filters, joins and aggregations to apply.
  • Audio and Image Processing: Add user feedback from customer calls and videos. Interpret public sentiment about your product by analyzing social media pictures and videos. Spotfire enables writing code to extract text from audio and image files. You can then import the data into the platform for analysis.
  • IoT Analytics: Gain insight at lightning speed; build microservices and deploy them at the edge. With Spotfire, you can add IoT data to your regular data for the complete picture.
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  • Direct Data Source Connection: Connect to almost any data source, including cloud, big data, file-based and on-premise data. Pull information from many services (Salesforce, Hive, Teradata) and combine intel seamlessly into unique and intuitive dashboards.
  • Intelligent Visualization: Offer interactive displays and represent data in multiple ways for better data analysis. Flexible visualizations allow users to change and adjust graphics according to screen size.
  • Enterprise Collaboration: Facilitate collaboration for users to share the same dashboard, look at the same view or track one another as they navigate the application.
  • Strong Associations: Leverage the strength of the platform’s built-in association engine to conduct direct and indirect searches across data or within a single field. Identify data that is related and not associated.
  • Self-Service App Building: Build apps and files via the drag-and-drop function. Create individual lists with their visualization while managing and sharing across organizations.
  • Associative Indexing: Combine, transform and ingest data from multiple sources. Gathers data and indexes it to find logical associations. Explore and search big data repositories freely while keeping data intact.
  • Interactive Dashboards: Provide visualization capabilities and improve interaction using tooltip, lasso selection, filtering and drill-down functions. Encourage viewers to explore data by creating smart dashboards and distributing them using interactive elements.
  • In-Memory Application: House the software in memory, so conversions, queries and searches happen quicker and more efficiently. Eliminate problems that traditionally plague slow, on-disk applications. Locate all data in RAM.
  • Web Connectors: Extract data from multiple social networking sites and web-based sources using web APIs. Built-in connectors easily connect to any URL and fetch data.
  • Robust Data Controls: Enable meaningful data manipulation within the application by leveraging unique dashboards, reports and filter views.
  • Data Alerts: Spot anomalies and outliers by requesting context-aware alerts. Monitor and manage data without limitations.
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Product Ranking

#9

among all
Big Data Analytics Tools

#32

among all
Big Data Analytics Tools

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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QlikView
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Augmented Analytics Computer Vision And Internet Of Things (IoT) Dashboarding And Data Visualization Data Management Data Preparation Geospatial Visualizations And Analysis Machine Learning Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting 77 79 100 100 100 99 94 100 0 25 50 75 100
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User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1749 reviews
Great User Sentiment 1859 reviews
86%
of users recommend this product

Spotfire has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 86% when considering 1749 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

82%
of users recommend this product

QlikView has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 1859 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.

4.3 (14)
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4.2 (315)
4.1 (239)
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4.3 (163)
4.4 (60)
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4.4 (539)
4.2 (725)
4.3 (821)
3.9 (732)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated Spotfire and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Geospatial Visualizations and Analysis, Mobile Capabilities and Reporting.

Geospatial Visualizations and Analysis Award
Mobile Capabilities Award
Reporting Award

we're gathering data

Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

Data Visualization: About 86% of reviewers were satisfied with the available options when designing dashboards.
Support: Around 74% of users praised vendor support for their timely response and helpful attitude.
Integration: Almost 72% of users were satisfied that it integrates with their preferred systems.
Friendly Interface: Around 68% of reviewers said the platform was easy to use.
Functionality: About 64% of users said it had a rich feature set.
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Data Visualization: Approximately 80% of users who review its data visualization capabilities are satisfied with its intuitive drag-and-drop feature, rich libraries and its range of aesthetically appealing data representation options.
Data Preparation: Of users who mention data processing, 83% appreciate the platform’s seemingly limitless data transformation capabilities that help them deep-dive into all possible data relationships to glean actionable insights.
Functionality: Among users who share their views on this platform, around 68% say that they are satisfied with the power of its associative query engine that enables faster on-the-fly calculations and analytics aggregation at the speed of thought.
Sharing and Collaboration: About 83% of users who comment on sharing capabilities appreciate its multi-tier permissions capabilities and easy sharing of reports with clients via external sharing options.
Setup: Around 66% of users who mention ease of setup say that QlikView has a fast implementation cycle.
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Cost: Around 96% of the user reviews said it the price was high and licensing complex.
Adoption: 90% of reviewers said there was a significant learning curve and users would need specialized knowledge of data science and statistics.
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Cost: Pricing plans are inflexible and can be cost-prohibitive for small organizations and startups, though large organizations may find that it offers high value, as stated by 93% of users who mention its cost.
Performance: Approximately 42% of users say that performance-wise, this platform is resource-hungry and liable to slow down when crunching large amounts of data on local machines.
User Interface and Graphics: Of users who mention user interface, around 44% say that it needs improvement in deep-dive capabilities, as well as its quality of graphics.
Reporting: Of users who mention reporting, approximately 46% say that it lacks ad-hoc reporting and built-in reporting capabilities, requiring paid plugins to enhance the graphics quality of reports.
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In online reviews, Spotfire emerges as a user-friendly big data platform. Most users found data exploration easy with a drag-and-drop interface. Some users said the UI was dated, though, and said it could use a revamp. Most users praised its interactive visualizations and dashboards, saying they helped them interpret data better. But, a few said they would love to have more visuals to choose from.A user mentioned they did the calculations in Excel and imported them into Spotfire for visualization. It's a common scenario when a steep learning curve slows down adoption, and teams fall back on Excel. Most users said Spotfire takes time to learn. You might have to opt for a balance of multiple platforms to balance your departmental and enterprise needs.Spotfire surpasses Excel in data management, especially data prep. Customizable visualizations and custom Mods give you enough freedom to work within the platform.Though 72% of reviewers were happy with the integrations, Spotfire lacks some standard connectors, such as for Apache Kafka, forcing users to rely on workarounds.A majority of users found its pricing structure complex, especially as users increased. In such cases, organizations often tend to opt for a cheaper alternative for less advanced use cases while using the pricier platform for the critical ones. We advise doing a deep dive into the vendor's pricing plans to avoid making your tech stack top-heavy.Ultimately, Spotfire's appeal lies in its balance. It's visually captivating and user-friendly for casual users while offering enough depth for seasoned analysts. However, its pricing and learning curve might deter organizations on a tight budget.

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QlikView is one of the foremost BI solutions in the market today, mainly due to the power of its associative query engine to link data from multiple sources that drives its visually impressive dashboards. With its strong data visualization capabilities, users can perform search and filter through data on-the-fly and conduct deep-dives to glean insights that matter to them. With a fast setup, users can have their first data model up and running in very little time. The software resides in-memory and houses data in RAM for quicker retrieval. With multi-tier access permissions for in-organization users, it enables users to view executive summaries at a glance, while allowing them to drill-down into data to find out more. Sadly, Qlik is now scaling back on improvements and updates for QlikView and focusing on promoting QlikSense instead, a possible reason why its filter and search functions, ad-hoc reporting and graphics are lagging in terms of quality, as mentioned in many user reviews. Also, this platform can prove to be resource-heavy for databases housed on local machines, especially when performing batch update jobs. In addition to inflexible pricing plans and the cost of licensing, quite a few necessary add-ons are paid. In summary, QlikView is one of the leading in-memory BI tools available in the market today and rates excellently with users in terms of data aggregation and visualization capabilities; however, buyers should factor in its pricing plans and other limitations when searching for the perfect BI solution for their enterprise.

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Screenshots

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