Spotfire vs Infor Birst

Last Updated:

Our analysts compared Spotfire vs Infor Birst based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Business Intelligence Tools, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Infor Birst 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.

read more...
Infor Birst is a cloud-based analytics software tool that aims to help users discover insights without the need for analyst input. It unifies IT-managed enterprise data with user-owned data, supporting the blending of both in a top-down and bottom-up manner. It uses consistent business metrics to structure raw data into organized sets and visualizations. It helps users identify patterns and better understand their organization’s KPIs.

It offers a seamless, integrated UI that allows users to perform every step of the data analysis process in a single interface, enabling a smooth experience. It can be deployed either from the cloud or self-hosted on-premise.

Users can purchase it in three available formats: per-user fee, by department or business unit or by end-customer in embedded scenarios.

To explore other popular solutions that Infor offers, visit our Infor company page.
read more...
$0.99 Monthly, quote-based
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
$2,500 Monthly, Quote-based
Get a free price quote
Tailored to your specific needs
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Small 
i
Medium 
i
Large 
i
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Windows
Mac
Linux
Android
Chromebook
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
Cloud
On-Premise
Mobile
we're gathering data
Amex
Citrix
DVF
Pilot Flying J
Sunny D

Product Assistance

Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Documentation
In Person
Live Online
Videos
Webinars
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support
Email
Phone
Chat
FAQ
Forum
Knowledge Base
24/7 Live Support

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.
read more...
  • Scalability on Demand: Prevents data bottlenecks caused by data loads that exceed capacity as business grows by scaling as needed through a multi-tenant architecture across a multi-node environment.
  • Faster Results: Delivers faster analytics across the entire organization by utilizing automated data analysis technology, cloud architecture and reusable metadata.
  • Data Clarity: Promote data clarity and reduce ambiguity by offering unique views into data to help everyone, regardless of technical expertise. Better understand the meaning of individual KPIs via the semantic layer, a set of shared business definitions.
  • Self-Service: Gives employees at all levels of technical skill self-service tools, such as drag-and-drop, to explore, analyze and visualize data through the user-oriented UX.
  • Informed Decisions: Make more data-driven business decisions by better understanding operations. Identify trends in business data by collecting, organizing, exploring and visualizing data.
  • Predict Future Outcomes: Generate actionable insights by leveraging AI to analyze historical data and improve business moving forward.
  • Intuitive Visualizations: Easily interpret trends by cleaning data and building understandable visualizations through machine learning.
  • Networked BI: Builds collective intelligence. Combines IT-managed enterprise data with user-generated data and eliminates data silos, unifying data from every part of an organization.
  • Certified Security: Secures data at every degree of detail, down to the row and column level. Employs strict data security protocols and procedures to protect data in  processes and data centers, which are certified for ISO27001 and SOC II, TYPE II standards and compliant with EU Safe Harbor laws.
  • Free Trial: Try it hands-on via a free trial.
read more...
  • 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.
read more...
  • Automated Data Refinement: Automatically merge data from different sources into one user-ready data storage and optimize it for analysis. 
  • Semantic Layer: Boosts trustworthiness of data and reduces data anarchy by adding an agile semantic layer between the user and data. Work with data privately while staying connected to the network via a virtual tenant space.">
  • Real-time Access: Directly query on-premise data sources in real-time, eliminating the need to first extract and then upload data to the cloud.
  • Adaptive UX: Create reports and dashboards without coding knowledge via intuitive drag-and-drop tools. Supports different analytic styles, such as visual discovery, and mobile, and third-party tools such as Excel, R and Tableau. 
  • Reusable Rules: Automatically generates a common architecture based on a reusable set of business definitions without manual intervention.
  • Interactive Dashboards: Explore data even further via interactive dashboards that have drill-down capabilities such as lasso filters.
  • Multi-Tenant Cloud Architecture: Scales vertically and horizontally with a multi-tenant architecture built on a multi-node environment. Speeds insight generation by reducing the overall time spent on repetitive on-premise tasks. 
  • One-Click Data Connectivity: Access existing data with one click via its extensive library of pre-built connectors.
  • Embedded Analytics: Scale with clients’ businesses via flexible deployment options including embedding, APIs and localization capabilities.
  • Machine Learning: Recognizes patterns in data via Smart Analytics and automatically builds visualizations based on predictive analytics. Learns over time, and remembers previous search queries, past visualizations and more.
  • Deployment Options: Deploy as a SaaS through the cloud or go hybrid, keeping data in-house but running analytics through cloud-based servers. Or, deploy through a virtual appliance that delivers all the benefits of a traditional cloud-hosted SaaS while being locally hosted on-premise or in a private-cloud.
  • Mobile App: Access reports and dashboards via its native mobile application for iOS and Android.
read more...

Product Ranking

#9

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

#22

among all
Business Intelligence Tools

Find out who the leaders are

Analyst Rating Summary

83
we're gathering data
80
we're gathering data
45
we're gathering data
100
we're gathering data
Show More Show More

Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

Spotfire
Infor Birst
+ Add Product + Add Product
Advanced Analytics Augmented Analytics Data Management Data Pre-processing Data Transformation Data Visualization Embedded Analytics Capabilities Geospatial Visualizations And Analysis Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Reporting 80 45 100 90 90 90 75 100 84 83 100 0 25 50 75 100
62%
23%
15%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
38%
8%
54%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
100%
0%
0%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
75%
25%
0%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
90%
0%
10%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
85%
0%
15%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
71%
0%
29%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
100%
0%
0%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
86%
0%
14%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
78%
0%
22%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
100%
0%
0%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A

Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

100%
0%
0%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
100%
0%
0%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
86%
0%
14%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
88%
13%
-1%
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A
we're gathering data
N/A

User Sentiment Summary

Great User Sentiment 1749 reviews
Great User Sentiment 560 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

Infor Birst has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 82% when considering 560 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.

4.3 (14)
4.3 (7)
4.2 (315)
3.9 (92)
n/a
4.08 (49)
4.4 (60)
4.1 (50)
4.4 (539)
4.1 (176)
4.3 (821)
4.2 (186)

Awards

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

Geospatial Visualizations and Analysis 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.
Show more
Data Integration: About 80% of users who mentioned its data integration capabilities said that the platform, powered by built-in connectivity tools, connected well to many types of data sources.
Data Visualization: Approximately 81% of users who reviewed visualization said that the tool provided attractive and intuitive data presentation options for at-a-glance data analysis and trend charting.
Ease of Use: The platform was user-friendly and intuitive, according to around 77% of users who reviewed the interface.
Functionality: Approximately 68% of users who reviewed functionality said that the platform provided strong capabilities to streamline preparation and consumption of data for developers and end users alike.
Data Management: Automated data warehouse creation made data modeling a breeze, around 65% of users who reviewed the platform’s data management system said.
Setup: Around 69% of users who mentioned implementation said that the solution being cloud-based, coupled with excellent onboarding support from the vendor, made deployment easy.
Show more
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.
Show more
Performance: Approximately 87% of users who reviewed the platform’s performance said that it was slow and inconsistent in data processing and data refresh.
Learning Curve: About 81% of users who mentioned the learning curve said that documentation was often insufficient and incorrect, and that the platform’s use of proprietary language made the learning curve quite steep.
Service and Support: About 46% of users who reviewed this feature said that support was poor and turnaround times were painfully long, extending up to several months.
Show more

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.

Show more

Infor Birst is an integrated cloud-based end-to-end solution for sourcing raw data, and extracting, warehousing and reporting for enterprise data analysis. With built-in tools for data integration and strong embedded analytics capabilities, users leverage its data visualization capabilities to create and share metric-specific dashboards and reports. Users who reviewed data management said that automated data warehouse creation was a strong feature of the platform, as well as its user-friendly interface. Many users who reviewed its functionality said that, equipped with a powerful ETL and efficient ODBC drivers for integration, the platform was flexible and scalable with a multitude of features for data discovery and analysis. Around 69% of users who reviewed ease of implementation said that deployment was easy with the integrated cloud platform, though some users said that the setup processes were unclear and they required in-house IT support for onboarding. On the flip side, users who mentioned performance said that the speed of data processing and data refresh was slow and this impacted report generation capabilities. Documentation was inconsistent and often incorrect, and the use of proprietary query language made the learning curve quite steep, many users who reviewed this feature said. Support turnaround times were woefully long, even extending up to several months as reported by a number of users. Some users who reviewed functionality said that the code was buggy and the platform stalled often when processing data for ad-hoc reporting. Many users complained that these bugs were not addressed for years, and new releases often impacted pre-existing features. Possibly because of its performance issues with large amounts of data, quite a few users rate it as a good BI tool for small and midsize companies that require less complex data analysis, rather than larger enterprises. In summary, Infor Birst is a BI ecosystem with a networked approach to data visualization and predictive analytics that eliminates data silos and serves as a single source of truth for enterprise data.

Show more

Screenshots

Top Alternatives in Business Intelligence Tools


Cognos Analytics

Domo

GoodData

Grow

Logi Symphony

Looker Studio

MicroStrategy

Oracle Analytics Cloud

Power BI

Qlik Sense

QuickSight

SAP Analytics Cloud

SAS Visual Analytics

Sisense

Tableau

Related Categories

Head-to-Head Comparison

WE DISTILL IT INTO REAL REQUIREMENTS, COMPARISON REPORTS, PRICE GUIDES and more...

Compare products
Comparison Report
Just drag this link to the bookmark bar.
?
Table settings