Logi Info vs. Spotfire

The pricing of Logi (per server core) is highly attractive for internal-facing use as we can control/predict how many visits we will get to our internal Logi webserver. The fact that the only license required is on the server means that all of our staff can use Logi Info-presented content without restrictions. The option of OEM licensing is also attractive and presents many future options, but will require much more licensing as the webserver will require more cores to handle the level of traffic demanded by OEM usage.

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.

Incentivized

• Flexibility and easy standup. Users can choose to create their own Logi application or do a "quick standup" by using design straight out of the box. Due to varied customer requirements, Logi allows the developer to address all needs.
• Great design studio. The studio provided with Logi to create and maintain your Logi app gives a lot of detail and examples to guide you along the way. The tool even includes some additional tools for the layman to assist with deployment or wizards to help you create more complex type reports that otherwise would require more detailed technical knowledge to create. Of course, you can still do anything you want by hand if that is what you prefer!
• Documentation. Logi's developer portal provides plenty of documentation and examples to get users going. Need to create a custom template that builds from a table rather than being hard-coded? Search the documentation and you will find examples to piece together to form your solution!

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Support. Logi used to provide EXCELLENT support. However, they've changed their support model and no longer provide excellent help. I used to get problems resolved within 15-30 minutes. Now, it has gone down to 48 hour response time just to answer a simple question. In-depth questions can go on for days or weeks.
• Based upon the change in support, and the fact that we pay for 'unlimited phone support' in our annual contract, we are moving away from using LOGI as a tool for the future.
• Learning CSS and Javascript would make you a better LOGI developer.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Logi Info is a very outdated, archaic product that tries to build .NET / Java web apps using an obscure XML-based markup language to implement BI widgets, with a lot of extra CSS/JavaScript needed on your own to make it do the best things. There are many other better tools. It is not a BI tool, and as a web development tool it's not great either. I'd recommend getting some good third-party .NET BI library if you want your web devs to make the reports, otherwise use a proper BI tool like Power BI or Tableau, or even Logi Composer (formerly ZoomData before Logi acquired it.)

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I am giving 9 rating because the Logi Info still needs to improve on the tutorials part and make it easy for the beginners. Otherwise, it's a very good analytics tool which offers more than 20 types of visualization. It's predictive analysis feature and easy to embed with technologies make it stand out in the market.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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.

The support process is bit slow and has a good scope improvement but overall it's good as team is very supportive. They generally take 1-2 days time to respond emails sent to them but some times a delay is also expected. Overall, I did not face any major issues using the service.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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).

Incentivized

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.)

Incentivized

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.

We test drove a lot of the big hitters, Pentaho, Sisense, Tableau, Jasper, Spago, Birt, Knime, Power BI and while most of them did a lot of things very well, but none did exactly what we were looking for without a lot of downsides (more developers, bolting on extra modules etc). Logi also was ultra competitive on pricing structure and they truly wanted to partner with us as much as we want to partner with them.

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

Incentivized

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,

Incentivized

• By embedding Logi in our solution and using the Logi Self-Service Module we can provide this flexibility to our users without requiring custom development work for each new request.
• We succeeded in developing embedded self-service analytics at scale with a combination of Logi analytics as front-end and a Cassandra data lake with Spark aggregation algorithms as back-end.
• We analyze the insurance industry and need to replicate different data formats across hundreds of databases to support multi-tenant (customer) BI reports and "ad hoc" data review on millions or hundreds of millions of records per customer.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized