SAS vs. Tibco Spotfire

Business intelligence (BI) software helps businesses gain productivity by collecting, analyzing, and transforming data into useful business insights. Thanks to data warehousing, visualization, reporting, and dashboards, organizations can make informed choices based on evidence. Business intelligence systems pull data information that businesses produce instead of from outside sources. Users can make sense of market trends and purchasing patterns from mountains of data produced by businesses and customers.

BI software aggregates, standardizes, and analyzes data to better understand customers, protect businesses from pitfalls, forecast revenue growth, and tailor products and services to customer needs.

We look at two popular business intelligence software: SAS vs. Tibco Spotfire. We’ll compare their features, integrations, and pricing plans to determine the better software for your business. Use our free Product Selection Tool to receive five recommendations from our experienced Technology Advisors. It’s free and easy to use.

SAS vs. Tibco Spotfire: An overview

SAS Visual Analytics, or SAS, is designed for mid-sized and enterprise businesses to create interactive dashboards and reports based on data from multiple sources. The results help identify clusters, outliers, trends, key relationships, and insights that inspire action. It’s suitable for accounting firms, manufacturing companies, banking institutions, and technology companies. Users have access to interactive data discovery, reporting, and dashboards for visualizing trends.

Tibco Spotfire is a powerful analytical platform designed to derive valuable business insights. It is secure, smart, and scalable with wrangling, descriptive, and predictive analytic capabilities. Integrate the software with existing business intelligence tools and use built-in dashboards and analytics tools. Teams can collaborate on mobile devices and receive alerts from the software. Anyone can use Tibco Spotfire for performing simple analyses in real time without relying on IT. Users can dig deep into the root causes of business issues.

Read also: Tableau vs. Spotfire: Business Intelligence for the Non-IT Guru

A comparison of features

SAS comes with features that help businesses understand internal data:

• Interactive reporting and dashboards: Use dashboard and reporting tools to retrieve reports, explore and analyze data, and share information through various channels in one interface.
• Smart visualization: SAS presents data and results in a compelling way using advanced data visualization techniques and guided analysis. It interacts with data quickly through graphs and charts to understand key relationships.
• Text analysis: Integrate the software with social media platforms to get insights and other text data. It collects both negative and positive sentiments.
• Location analytics: SAS combines traditional data sources with location data to analyze in a geographical context.

Tibco Spotfire has five main features for analyzing business insights:

• Visual analytics: Analyze data using different visualization types such as heat maps, charts, and tables. Make and export reports in PowerPoint and PDF and add annotations and conversation to data. Members can access visualizations through smartphones and desktop or by embedding on company websites.
• Data wrangling: Use Spotfire to clean, blend, and make adjustments to data within the software. Connect and blend data from various sources such as Hadoop, OLAP, relational databases, and cloud applications.
• Predictive analytics: Spotfire has machine learning functionality for detecting complex data trends and making accurate predictions. The TIBCO Data Science Platform or the Spotfire Data Functions can further calculate dashboard and report data.
• Location analytics: Spotfire automatically recognizes city, state, or country as locations through an interactive map. Users can create multiple layers by adding more data to the map. The software can make route calculations and handle step-by-step directions and address-level geocoding.
• Streaming analytics: Real-time streaming is available for spotting issues and opportunities quickly. Spotfire continuously processes streaming data from more than 50 sources including the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Users can receive alerts for major changes in data and combine current and historical data.

Comparison of Prices

SAS doesn’t publicly provide pricing details but has quote-based plans and a free trial. Interested parties can contact the vendor directly for SMB and enterprise pricing. Sales representatives are ready to provide customized quotations.

Tibco Spotfire has a 4-tiered pricing plan: Analyst, Business Author, Consumer, and Library Storage. The Analyst Plan has 250-GB of data storage for every analyst, while the Business Author Plan has 100-GB of data storage for every Business Author seat. The Consumer Plan is available only when a user purchases one Business Author or Analyst plan. It is intended for users who require view-only access to the software. The Library Storage Plan provides additional storage sold in 25-GB increments.

Spotfire offers the first two months free as an annual discount and a 30-day free trial with 250-GB of storage for the team.

Comparison of Integrations

Third-party application integrations with SAS and Spotfire are not publicly available. Interested users can contact the vendors directly to request information.

Takeaways: SAS vs. Tibco Spotfire

With growing business needs, organizations can rely on business intelligence software to make evidence-based decisions. Both SAS and Tibco Spotfire provide features and tools for this. They both have free versions for interested parties, but Spotfire’s annual discount is a good deal for users who sign up for a year’s subscription.

Tibco Spotfire’s predictive analytics detects complex data trends to make accurate decisions. This is advantageous over SAS because the software has its own Data Science Platform for calculating report data.

There is much information that is not publicly available for both software. It is advised that interested users contact the vendors for detailed information. 

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