Power BI vs Spotfire
Last Updated:Our analysts compared Power BI against Spotfire 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.
Product Basics
Request for Free
Product Assistance
Product Insights
- Live 360-Degree View of Data: Stay in the loop about crucial business insights. Power BI's dashboards update in real time from all data sources.
- Visualize Data Trends: Create intuitive visualizations to present data after it is parsed, structured and analyzed. This can be in the form of graphs, charts, maps or other graphic depictions that make interpreting data quicker, easier and more impactful.
- Make Data-Driven Decisions: Put the data visualizations to work — analyze not only what happened, but also why, how and where. Use data to improve business processes and customer interactions, adjust business plans and make forecasts.
- Ease of Use: Encourages user adoption towards a data driven culture. Power BI simplifies self-service BI with built-in features similar to Excel and other Microsoft technologies — feel right at home with functionalities like drag-and-drop design, resizing and copy-and-paste.
- Collaborate Across Organization: Share reports and collaborate on decisions quickly; save time otherwise spent on inefficient meetings or jumping from one platform to another. Integrates seamlessly with many commonly used business tools to promote teamwork throughout departments.
- On-the-Go Access: Access visual analytics on the go with Power BI. Stay connected to and share insights from any device, with mobile-optimized reports and a mobile app.
- Secure Insights: As one of the largest, most well-known names in the software industry, Microsoft backs up their reputation with security and protection for businesses’ sensitive information in Power BI. Visit the Trust Center to learn more about exactly how all of Microsoft’s solutions — including Power BI — meet industry security standards and ensure regulatory compliance. Keeps information secure from the original data source all the way up through the report sharing and collaboration features.
- Free Version: Power BI goes beyond a free trial with a perpetually free Desktop version, suitable for creating reports and data visualizations on an individual basis.
- Scalability and Affordability: Power BI can scale from the individual to the enterprise level as a whole, while only paying for exactly what’s necessary — choose the right option from versions varying in capabilities and pricing.
- Scale for Large (or Small) Enterprises: Suitable for large organizations while also scaling well to small organizations, making the software flexible and keeping users in control of their data.
- Built for the Individual: Built with the individual analyst in mind, Spotfire desktop handles insights and data discovery versus an analyst deriving their insights from intel.
- Maintain Agility: Comes equipped with advanced predictive analytics tools that help enterprises stay agile in a constantly evolving business space.
- Complex Problems: Tailored to non-technical users and lets them combine geographical data, big data and more to solve any problem.
- TIBCO Community: The Tibco Spotfire community churns out e-learning courses, wiki entries and freely distributed dashboards for businesses to utilize.
- Data Source Connectivity: Draw data from hundreds of supported sources both on-premises and cloud-based, including web APIs, Salesforce, Dynamics 365, Excel, Google Analytics, JSON and text/CSV files, Oracle, SQL and more.
- Data Preparation: A self-service Power Query process ingests, transforms, integrates and enriches data while preparing it for analysis in Power BI. Organize unstructured data into interpretable data sets to highlight trends. Approach analysis from different angles with intuitive filters and data manipulation features.
- Data Visualization: Power BI creates a range of visualizations from data that conceptualize trends and patterns. These can be a range of different graphics including bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts, scattergrams, maps, etc. Power BI transforms abstract concepts and hard numbers into easy-to-interpret charts.
- Pre-Built or Custom Dashboards/Reports: Choose from a range of pre-built templates optimized for most industries to generate visualizations of KPIs in seconds. Or, if out-of-the-box reports don’t cut it, design customized data stories with a drag-and-drop canvas and hundreds of interactive visualization options in Power BI.
- Natural Language Processing: Explore data through conversational language with the built-in Q&A tool; find meaningful answers to data-related questions.
- Secure Data Governance: Prevent data loss with role-specific data protection and row-level security. Safeguards data so that Power BI meets industry-level compliance standards and certifications. Allows administrators to centralize data governance, security and management across the organization.
- Collaboration: Power BI fosters collaboration through a data-driven culture of business intelligence with features like team commenting, alerts and content subscriptions. Publish and share permissions-adjustable reports and dashboards, both internally and externally.
- Mobile Compatibility: All reports in Power BI are optimized for mobile and can be published to the cloud or on-premises, or embedded into existing apps or websites. Receive personal data alerts, quickly view and share insights and stay in the know from any mobile device on Android or iOS, or any PC or tablet or phone with access to the Windows Store.
- Embedded Analytics: Brand and customize custom analytics offerings for end-users with white label capabilities and a plethora of visualization options. Develop and test custom modules to embed Power BI's analytics capabilities into other applications.
- Seamless Integration: Power BI seamlessly integrates with everything in the Microsoft Office 365 Suite, as well as a range of other software and BI solutions. This includes third-party data sources like Spark, Google Analytics and more.
- On-Premises or Cloud Server: As part of the Premium plan, Power BI's Report Server provides a hybrid, comprehensive solution by building a BI environment on-premises, keeping it safe behind the intranet firewall. Allows the flexibility to move the server to the cloud as per requirements, protecting the business’ investment and data for the future.
- Location Analytics: Offers robust locational analytics. Utilize geocoding, reverse geocoding and multi-layered maps right out-of-the-box.
- Streaming Analytics: Create interactive dashboards and integrate with the IoT, social messaging and more with real-time and historical data to stay on top of constantly changing data.
- Visual Analytics: With colorful dashboards and an intuitive UI, its visual analytics capabilities make it easy to find data as it becomes relevant and generate insights on the fly.
- Intelligent Data Wrangling: Automatically find data outliers, deficits and discrepancies, and then analyze that data to discover the underlying cost.
Product Ranking
#2
among all
Business Intelligence Tools
#9
among all
Business Intelligence Tools
Analyst Rating Summary
Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data
Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data
User Sentiment Summary
4795 reviews
1516 reviews
Power BI has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 88% when considering 4795 user reviews from 4 recognized software review sites.
Spotfire has a 'great' User Satisfaction Rating of 84% when considering 1516 user reviews from 6 recognized software review sites.
Awards
Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews
Microsoft Power BI is no doubt a powerful business intelligence platform, from one of the leaders in the technology field, with some users even saying that its potential seems to be limitless due to its extensibility and scalability. Power BI has resounding success with its intuitive interface, robust data visualization capabilities and interactive features that make analytics accessible to all users. Power users say that its support for DAX, R, Python and other query languages give them access to even more complex calculations, data querying, data preparation and data modeling, making Power BI a strong solution for technical and non-technical users alike. However, many customers say that while Power BI may have a user-friendly GUI, it’s not necessarily a user-friendly system, with many users saying that they required heavy training or preexisting knowledge to really understand how to work with the system. While many users cite its seamless Microsoft and Windows integration as a pro, especially for those companies that have already invested in Microsoft-based solutions, others say that Power BI’s incompatibility with non-Windows systems and weaker integrations with non-Microsoft solutions are a point of frustration for them. The cloud-based platform offers responsive mobile and web access to dashboards, but several users note that browser functionality is limited. Power BI reviews seemed to be mixed as to Power BI's sharing capabilities, with about 65% of users satisfied that Power BI helps them in making presentations and catering to different audiences, with the other approximately 35% expressing dissatisfaction with its limited display and export options, as well as restrictions on non-subscribers not being able to view dashboards. Another pain point for Power BI seems to be its operating speed, particularly when working with large datasets. In summary, Microsoft Power BI is a strong contender in the business intelligence field, earning mostly positive reviews for its boost to productivity and efficiency, and an especially good choice for customers already using Microsoft technologies like Excel, but may be difficult for new users to adopt.
TIBCO Spotfire is an analytics solution that provides its users with the ability to create powerful interactive data visualizations. Its ease of use and accessible platform makes it convenient to explore data and get valuable insights. However, it lacks an intuitive and straightforward user interface. It offers customizable dashboards and informative reports. It’s an ideal solution for managing large data volumes, but many reviewers have noted that it becomes slow while extracting large datasets. Also, it is not suitable for small data sets and qualitative data analysis.
Screenshots
Top Alternatives in Business Intelligence Tools
Board
ClicData
Cognos Analytics
Domo
Dundas BI
Entrinsik Informer
Halo BI
ibi
Infor Birst
InfoZoom
JReport
Klipfolio
Looker
MicroStrategy
Oracle Analytics Cloud
Orbit Analytics
Pyramid Analytics
Qlik Sense
Reveal BI
SAP Analytics Cloud
Related Categories
Head-to-Head Comparison
WE DISTILL IT INTO REAL REQUIREMENTS, COMPARISON REPORTS, PRICE GUIDES and more...
